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History of the Rain
- Narrated by: Jennifer McGrath
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is a long story....
Bedbound in her attic room beneath the falling rain, Plain Ruth Swain is in search of her father. To find him Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrow faces, and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain, her great-grandfather, to her father, Virgil - via pole-vaulting, leaping salmon, poetry and the 3,958 books piled high beneath the two skylights in her room.
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Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.
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Right Mood At The Right Time
- By Simone on 11-13-12
By: Kate Morton
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Flame Tree Road
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- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
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India, 1870s. In a tiny village where society is ruled by a caste system and women are defined solely by marriage, young Biren Roy dreams of forging a new destiny. When his mother suffers the fate of widowhood - shunned by her loved ones and forced to live in solitary penance - Biren devotes his life to effecting change.
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Riveting Love Story
- By Granny on 01-15-20
By: Shona Patel
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Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
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Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and recraft a world of automatons, ornate clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, and intrepid orphans - decked out in corsets, clockwerk suits, and tall black boots - solve dastardly crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships.
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MMMM, Orca Bacon
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Stories
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
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Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.
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Another Kate Atkinson multi-generational story
- By Satisfied Customer on 11-08-18
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Autumn
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Overall
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Story
Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
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Incredible use of language
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How to Be Both
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Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
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Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
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Performance
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For Gideon Mack, faithless minister, unfaithful husband, and troubled soul, the existence of God, let alone the Devil, is no more credible than that of ghosts or fairies - until the day he falls into a gorge and is rescued by someone who might just be Satan.
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Fantastic
- By Christopher on 07-06-08
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The Walking People
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Greta Cahill never believed she would leave her village in the west of Ireland until she found herself on a ship bound for New York, along with her sister Johanna and a boy named Michael Ward. Labeled a "softheaded goose" by her family, Greta discovers that in America she can fall in love, raise her own family, and earn a living.
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Irish immigratn story
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From the internationally acclaimed best-selling author of Code Name Verity comes a stunning new story of pearls, love and murder. Sixteen-year-old Julie Beaufort-Stuart is returning to her family's ancestral home in Perthshire for one last summer. It is not an idyllic return to childhood. Her grandfather's death has forced the sale of the house and estate, and this will be a summer of good-byes. Not least to the McEwen family - Highland travellers who have been part of the landscape for as long as anyone can remember.
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Freshwater Pearls and Scottish Plaid
- By Cynthia on 08-14-17
By: Elizabeth Wein
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What listeners say about History of the Rain
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lorlips
- 10-02-22
Brilliantly written, in all ways
Beautiful, lyrical, hauntingly sad, but also hopeful. I loved this book, all i want a book to be.
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- Gloria
- 07-22-22
Lyrical wonderful book
This book is absolutely unsentimental but still moving and beautiful. The Irish rural characteristics both tragic and comic are given great treatment and yet it has a modern feel because it is set after the economic boom and bust that happened in Ireland. I highly recommend it
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- Edward W. Campion
- 03-14-24
Thrilling Tale, Fascinating History
Set in post-WW2 Finland, this novel has action, suspense, and a lot of grim history that most don’t know about the complex struggles of Nazis, US, USSR, and Finland.
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- Laura H.
- 07-30-23
Gorgeous prose and narration!
Some writers write books, good books, yet others love words, language, and stories and create beautiful prose that catches our hearts. Niall Williams is the latter. I've listened to two of his books now (The History of Rain and This is Happiness), and I've been left in awe of his storytelling and writing. The narration is gorgeous as well.
The History of Rain is kind of like an ode to literature, or rather literature is another character. Ruthie Swain tells the stories of her family whose grey clouds follow them through several generations.
To understand her father, Ruthie reads his over 3000 books and references them in her narration.
This story is about family, love, struggles, resilience, and self-worth.
Only two quotes out of many to share:
“We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.”
“I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am, I know(...)You either get it or you don't.”
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- Sandra Soson
- 09-05-24
The writing swept me away.
The novel was mesmerizing. Groff seamlessly juggles between past and present. The story of this young, escaped servant girl struggling to survive in the wilderness of the new world is gripping, and encompasses both spiritual and philosophical elements.
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- DFK
- 09-13-24
Magnificent writing
I loved This is Happiness and loved this too (maybe just a tad less). Williams takes the English language and strings together words into beautiful phrases and sentences. Another reviewer wrote down two quotes, but if I wrote every phrase and sentence that wowed me, I’d have a full notebook. His metaphors can be amusing, charming, beautiful. Never mind the story, which is touching and bittersweet, just for the language this is worth listening to. I was a bit less charmed by the narrator. At first I found her long pauses between sentences and her lisp (was it supposed to be part of the affect? - I could not decide) got on my nerves, so that it took me a bit of time to get drawn into the story enough to ignore those flaws in her narration. Her voice and tone were good for the story, though. Niall Williams is a gem of an author.
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- Vasco Almeida
- 09-25-16
The lure of local flavour
If you could sum up History of the Rain in three words, what would they be?
Irish prose poetry
What did you like best about this story?
The deep, unspoken feelings running through family and community
Which character – as performed by Jennifer McGrath – was your favorite?
Ruth
If you could rename History of the Rain, what would you call it?
River Swain
Any additional comments?
The narrator's accent contributes in no small measure to the 'placement' of the story; and the calm tone used in the rendering underlined the intimacy felt throughout the narrative.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Elizabeth S Smith
- 08-29-24
Beautiful ending
This very talented author expertly paints a town you can imagine being a part of and people you would like to know, because of their authenticity. The eccentricities found in both place and people are intriguing. Well worth the credit, as was my first experience with Niall Williams and Faha in This is Happiness. I am looking forward to spending time in another of his wonderful novels.
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- Kirsten
- 09-01-24
Soul touching
Will I ever forget this story so beautifully read and written? No it is etched forever in my heart.
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- C in FL
- 01-03-22
Just Okay
I much preferred This is Happiness which has a far better narrator and as well as a more interesting story.
in places the language was beautiful, but overall the story was too haphazard, too affected by efforts to be literary, and in many areas it was just over written. It really could have benefitted from a good editor.
i wanted to love this as much as I do This is Happiness, but it's just not as well crafted.
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2 people found this helpful