How Beautiful We Were
A Novel
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By:
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Imbolo Mbue
About this listen
A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel from the New York Times best-selling author of Behold the Dreamers.
One of the 10 Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, People • One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Ms. magazine, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews
“Mbue reaches for the moon and, by the novel’s end, has it firmly held in her hand.” (NPR)
We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made - and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
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Critic reviews
"Sweeping and quietly devastating...How Beautiful We Were charts the ways repression, be it at the hands of a government or a corporation or a society, can turn the most basic human needs into radical and radicalizing acts.... Profoundly affecting." (The New York Times Book Review)
"What a stunningly beautiful writer Mbue is, and how lucky we are to have her stories in the world." (USA Today)
“It’s a heartbreaking and relevant story that seeps into your bones, quickly engulfs you and doesn’t let go.” (The Seattle Times)
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- By Paula on 04-28-22
By: Esther Ahmad, and others
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A Suitable Boy (Dramatised)
- By: Vikram Seth
- Narrated by: Ayesha Dharker, Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, full cast
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Story
A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's epic love story set in India. Funny and tragic, with engaging, brilliantly observed characters, it is as close as you can get to Dickens for the twentieth century. The story unfolds through four middle class families: the Mehras, Kappoors, Khans, and Chatterjis. Lata Mehra, a university student, is under pressure from her mother to get married. But not to just anyone she happens to fall in love with.
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would prefer unabridged naration
- By Tamshine on 07-07-11
By: Vikram Seth
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I Am a Bacha Posh
- My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan
- By: Ukmina Manoori, Stephanie Lebrun, Peter E. Chianchiano - translator
- Narrated by: Ariana Delawari
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
"You will be a son, my daughter." With these stunning words Ukmina learned that she was to spend her childhood as a boy. In Afghanistan there is a widespread practice of girls dressing as boys to play the role of a son. These children are called bacha posh: literally "girls dressed as boys." This practice offers families the freedom to allow their child to shop and work - and in some cases, it saves them from the disgrace of not having a male heir. But in adolescence, religion restores the natural law.
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Good story, awful pronunciation
- By Anonymous User on 04-19-21
By: Ukmina Manoori, and others
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Keeping Hope Alive
- One Woman: 90,000 Lives Changed
- By: Hawa Abdi, Sarah J. Robbins
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Dr. Hawa Abdi, "the Mother Teresa of Somalia" and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, is the founder of a massive camp for internally displaced people located a few miles from war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia. Since 1991, when the Somali government collapsed, famine struck, and aid groups fled, she has dedicated herself to providing help for people whose lives have been shattered by violence and poverty.
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How Refreshing
- By Jean Watz on 07-21-14
By: Hawa Abdi, and others
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Infidel
- By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Narrated by: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
This New York Times best-seller is the astonishing life story of award-winning humanitarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A deeply respected advocate for free speech and women's rights, Hirsi Ali also lives under armed protection because of her outspoken criticism of the Islamic faith in which she was raised.
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Tough, Candid Assessment
- By Paul Mullen on 02-18-08
By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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Mother Tongue
- A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women
- By: Tania Romanov
- Narrated by: Becky Parker
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What is your mother tongue? Sometimes the simplest questions take a book to answer. Such is the case with Tania Romanov's story of exile, emigration, and immigration and how native language can be a powerful touchstone for the sense of home. The unrelenting consequences of 100 years of Balkan wars force three generations of Croatian women to flee their homelands multiple times. Eventually, Tania, a successfully integrated American immigrant from Eastern Europe, journeys back to her fractured homeland with her mother to unravel the secrets of their shared past.
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Ljiljana Popovic, born in former Yugoslavia
- By Ljiljana Popovic on 03-18-21
By: Tania Romanov
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What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
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We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
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Virgins of Paradise
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Jasmine and Camelia Rasheed grow to womanhood under the watchful eye of their grandmother inside the walls surrounding a beautiful house on Virgins of Paradise Street in exotic Cairo. They come of age in society in which the subjugation of women is assumed - they must wear veils, are forbidden to leave the house, have no independent rights, and are circumcised to ensure purity and obedience.
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eye opening
- By C Ohana on 11-13-08
By: Barbara Wood
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Cry, the Beloved Country
- By: Alan Paton
- Narrated by: Michael York
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This is the most distinguished novel that has come out of South Africa in the 20th century, and it is one of the most important novels of the modern era. Cry, the Beloved Country is in some ways a sad book; it is an indictment of a social system that drives native races into resentment and crime; it is a story of Fate, as inevitable, as relentless, as anything of Thomas Hardy's. Beautifully wrought with high poetic compassion, Cry, the Beloved Country is more than just a story, it is a profound experience of the human spirit.
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A word painting: gripping, breathtaking & moving
- By Jacobus on 10-04-12
By: Alan Paton
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Who Killed My Father
- By: Édouard Louis
- Narrated by: Edouard Louis
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French - at the minimum - of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely 50 years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
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Powerful. Poetic. Sparse. Piercing.
- By Theophile Jones on 06-01-23
By: Édouard Louis
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Mighty Be Our Powers
- How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War; a Memoir
- By: Leymah Gbowee, Carol Mithers
- Narrated by: Kimberly Scott
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
As a young woman growing up in Africa, 17-year-old Leymah Gbowee was crushed by a savage war when violence reached her native Monrovia, depriving her of the education she yearned for and claiming the lives of relatives and friends. As war continued to ravage Liberia, Gbowee’s bitterness turned to rage-fueled action as she realized that women bear the greatest burden in prolonged conflicts.
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Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and
- By Kathy on 10-07-11
By: Leymah Gbowee, and others
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Fire Road
- The Napalm Girl's Journey Through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness, and Peace
- By: Kim Phuc Phan Thi, Ashley Wiersma
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Get out! Run! We must leave this place! They are going to destroy this whole place! Go, children, run first! Go now! These were the final shouts nine-year-old Kim Phuc heard before her world dissolved into flames - before napalm bombs fell from the sky, burning away her clothing and searing deep into her skin. It's a moment forever captured, an iconic image that has come to define the horror and violence of the Vietnam War. Kim was left for dead in a morgue; no one expected her to survive the attack. Napalm meant fire, and fire meant death.
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The subtitle should warn what the book is
- By Rex Michael Dillon on 01-27-19
By: Kim Phuc Phan Thi, and others
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Two Crosses
- Secrets of the Cross, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth Musser
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The glimmering Huguenot cross she so innocently wears leads her deep into the shadows. When Gabriella Madison arrives in the French village of Castelnau in 1961 to continue her university studies, she doesn’t anticipate being drawn into the secretive world behind the Algerian war for independence from France. And the further she delves into the war efforts, the more her faith is challenged. The people who surround her bring a whirlwind of transforming forces.
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Faith, Romance, Spies, and Fascinating History
- By Amazon Customer on 05-02-19
By: Elizabeth Musser
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Cashelmara
- By: Susan Howatch
- Narrated by: Gary Furlong, Carly Robins
- Length: 27 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Edward de Salis travels to America after the death of his first wife, he is astonished to find himself falling in love with Marguerite, a young woman many years his junior. Full of hope for the future, he returns to his Irish estate, Cashelmara, but in 19th-century Ireland - a country racked by poverty and famine - his family eventually becomes trapped in a sinister spiral of violence that Edward could never have foreseen.
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Wonderful Story
- By Ann Marie Taylor on 07-04-20
By: Susan Howatch
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In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
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It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of General Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship.
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Maybe it's just me but...
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The Girl with the Louding Voice
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A must HEAR!
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How the Word Is Passed
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Sincerely grateful read
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When We Cease to Understand the World
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Overall
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Performance
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When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger - these are some of the luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the listener, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence.
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the true heir w.g. sebald
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What listeners say about How Beautiful We Were
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- Kindle Customer 2017
- 03-18-22
Beautiful story, beautiful narration
Loved hearing the beautiful voices read this moving story. So wonderful to have different people read different parts. Loved it.
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- C23music
- 12-13-24
4.5 stars
4.5 stars. Might have been 5 if it didn't constantly rip my heart out. Mbue did a good job of alternating narrators and informing timeline through them. That's not always pulled off well. I would definitely recommend this book.
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- fcs15
- 03-03-23
Great story, very moving!
The story made me think about the life I take for granted. The performance was excellent and the full cast made it feel like I was hearing the story of a village. A Story that is repeated over and over, in the news just today a wind energy farm disruption the Sami people.
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- OpenlyGray
- 09-28-21
This is a must have for your library
I couldn't stop listening. Understanding stories from the perspective of those who are oppressed is critical to understanding our shared history. I really suggest this title to all...it checks all the boxes.
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- michaelforrest
- 12-20-21
Good but not great.
Good but not memorable. I preferred her first book. This was sort of predictable. I have to go now.
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- Anewme
- 02-20-23
excellent writing and novel! narration whewwww
I know this is fiction about poor Africans and oil contamination and exploitation by wealthy Americas but this is occurring now all across the planet! Oil contamination just occurred in 2023 in USA (Ohio) and other spills in USA recently i.e. Keystone pipeline, Deepwater, Exxon Valdez etc)
The narration whewww!! MEH! if the writing is excellent but the narration suffers, the story suffers! this novel should be narrated by perhaps more African people or just people with non-American accents or Americans with solid acting skills! The narrators are excellent readers but the monotone, pitch, intonation and inflection really impact the audible version of the novel! If you can imagine a professor giving a lecture with no change in inflection, it would be very hard to get though a 2 hr class…that was this audible book.
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- Denver7756
- 08-25-23
A beautiful story, akin to the birth of America, but today
I am a fan of American history, especially our revolution and biographies of the founders, men and women of our country.
I also began a real journey of building and implementing sustainable medical systems in clinics in underserved communities. Most of that work took place in eight countries in Africa, from Benin and Uganda to Mozambique and Lesotho from 2009 to today. This story is fiction, but it is true. The people are fiction but are real. The government stealing a country’s mineral wealth is real.
Not everywhere. I served in many clinics that were military where no one got rich, the people received the best HIV care possible, at little or no cost.
But in The Children; I can only see the seeds of American Revolution. The anger that builds from foreign strength robbing a people of clean water and health.
The ties to issues in America with American Indians are so true. My company’s next target is the Canadien Arctic. To see if we can use what we built in Africa to prevent some of the issue of Kosawa happening to the Inuits and Dene when mining, drilling, and construction opens up. I can only hope. And dream.
But I have better resources than Austin. So in my 70s, yes I still have the strength to have anger, even with losing teeth :). My business partner wants her dream to be Thula’s dream. I hope we win this time. It might not save the globe, but it might save the Arctic peoples.
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- Buffy's Mom
- 03-14-24
Heartbreaking
An all-too-familiar, fictionalised account of man's inhumanity to man. When greedy corporations and corrupt, evil governments -- and the "leaders" they shield -- have finally decimated this planet, I wonder where they think they're going to be able to spend their ill-gotten gains.
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- Najlaa
- 09-05-21
A great novel
Heartbreaking, mizmarizing fantastic and yet so real and true, a must read for sure
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- Christine
- 08-16-22
All the feels
Be prepared it’s gut-wrenching.
Beautifully written and performed. But, terribly upsetting! Humans are disappointing.
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