
Heart, Be at Peace
A Novel
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By:
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Donal Ryan
About this listen
Winner of the Irish Book of the Year * Shortlisted for the Nero Novel of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them
“I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise. . .”
In a small town in Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the future: The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.
But an insidious menace now creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of the townspeople. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.
A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, Be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to overcome the betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, neighbors, and entire generations.
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Critic reviews
An Post Irish Book of the Year
“Ryan’s sentences gleam, peeling the calloused skin of machismo to expose the vulnerabilities of his men, cutting against our expectations. . .Heart, Be at Peace moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.”―New York Times Book Review
“[T]he structure of Heart, Be at Peace is exactly what makes it compelling. The tension and slow unraveling of the mystery at the heart of this chronicle of small-town and small-city Ireland today, fraught with problems created by drug dealers and scam artists, is brought to brilliant life through the intertwining of voices and the individual stories of protagonists and antagonists, heroes and villains, characters both peripheral and intrinsic.”―New York Journal of Books
“Spellbinding. . .a gripping story that is heartbreaking, funny and occasionally raunchy of a beaten-down but resilient community that embodies the best and worst of humanity.”―Associated Press
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Story
Three men search for some version of home; their lives move inexorably toward a reckoning that will draw them all together. For Farouk, family is all. He has protected his wife and daughter as best he can from the war and hatred that has torn Syria apart. If they stay, they will lose their freedom. Lampy is distracted; he has too much going on in his small town life in Ireland. He has the city girl for a bit of fun, but she's not Chloe. The game was always the lifeblood coursing through John's veins: manipulating people for his enjoyment. But it was never enough.
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Deeply moving and beautifully written.
- By Kindle Customer on 07-18-18
By: Donal Ryan
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The Slip
- By: Lucas Schaefer
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Renata Friedman
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
By: Lucas Schaefer
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All We Shall Know
- A Novel
- By: Donal Ryan
- Narrated by: Sonya Macari
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. At 33 years old, she finds herself pregnant with the child of a 17-year-old Traveler boy, Martin Toppy, and not by her husband, Pat. Melody was teaching Martin to read, but now he's gone, and Pat leaves, too, full of rage. She's trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming, while the past won't let her go. It's a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does.
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Breathtakingly beautiful writing.
- By Vistarina on 07-28-17
By: Donal Ryan
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The Adversary
- A Novel
- By: Michael Crummey
- Narrated by: Mary Lewis
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos. That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world.
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Meandering
- By C GAUDIO on 12-09-24
By: Michael Crummey
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Things in Nature Merely Grow
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
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Beautiful, soft, painful, and enduring
- By Raven on 06-03-25
By: Yiyun Li
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Death on the Island
- A Novel
- By: Eliza Reid
- Narrated by: Denica Fairman
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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A group of international players has gathered in a tiny village off the coast of Iceland for a diplomatic dinner. There’s Kristján, the mayor reeling from a personal tragedy. Graeme, the ambassador with an agenda to push. Jane, his wife, along for the ride on another one of her husband’s many business trips. And several others, from Iceland and from abroad, each with their own reason for being there, their own loyalties and grievances. By the end of the night, one of them will be dead. And it will be up to the ambassador’s wife, Jane, to figure out how—and why.
By: Eliza Reid
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The South
- A Novel
- By: Tash Aw
- Narrated by: Windson Liong
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
By: Tash Aw
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Harmattan Season
- A Novel
- By: Tochi Onyebuchi
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Veteran and private eye Boubacar doesn’t need much—least of all trouble—but trouble always seems to find him. Work has dried up, and he’d rather be left alone to deal with his bills as the Harmattan rolls in to coat the city in dust, but Bouba is a down on his luck deux fois, suspended between two cultures and two worlds.
By: Tochi Onyebuchi
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What Kind of Paradise
- A Novel
- By: Janelle Brown
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim, Helen Laser
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
By: Janelle Brown
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Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar
- By: Katie Yee
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation.
By: Katie Yee
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Fox
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Kirsten Potter, and others
- Length: 25 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.
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Daughters of the Bamboo Grove
- From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Joy Osmanski
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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On a warm day in September 2000, a woman named Zanhua gave birth to twin girls in a small hut behind her brother’s home in China’s Hunan province. The twins, Fangfang and Shuangjie, were welcome additions to her family but also not her first children. Living under the shadow of China’s notorious one-child policy, Zanhua and her husband decided to leave one twin in the care of relatives, hoping each toddler on their own might stay under the radar. But, in 2002, Fangfang was violently snatched away.
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Enlightening and Entertaining
- By Allen Shay on 06-06-25
By: Barbara Demick