I Went to See My Father
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Narrated by:
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Megan Affonso
About this listen
“The bus began to pull away before I had a chance to shout goodbye to Father. I think about that moment from time to time. About how long he must’ve stood there after the bus had left. About what he must’ve felt staring down that dark road, long after the bus had disappeared.
About how long he must’ve waited before going back inside the store.”
—From Chapter 1
Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of her father. At first, her father appears withdrawn and fragile, an aging man, awkward but kind around his own daughter.
Then, after stumbling upon a chest of letters, Hon discovers the truth of her father’s past and reconstructs her family history.
Consumed with her own grief, Hon has been blind to her father’s vulnerability and her family’s fragility. Unraveling secret after secret, Hon grows closer to her father, who proves to be more complex than she ever gave him credit for. After living through one of the most tumultuous times in Korean history, her father’s life spiraled after the civil war. Now, after years of emotional isolation, Hon learns the whole truth, from her father’s affair and involvement in a religious sect, to the dynamic lives of her siblings, to her family’s financial hardships.
What Hon uncovers about her father builds toward her understanding of the great scope of his sacrifice and heroism, and of his generation. More than just the portrait of a single man, I Went to See My Father opens a window on humankind, family, loss, and war.
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We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
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My Family's Survival
- The True Story of How the Shwartz Family Escaped the Nazis and Survived the Holocaust
- By: Aviva Gat
- Narrated by: Callie Beaulieu, Neil Hellegers
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1937, the Shwartz family lived a calm life in their small village in Poland. Fifteen-year-old Rachel liked to sing and go out dancing at a local night club, while her older brother David was busy running a farm and raising a family with his wife Hinda. But all that changed when the war reached Butla. First, the Russians came and kicked them out of their house. Then, the Nazis came to cart them off. But the Shwartz family resisted. David decided that no matter what, his family would not be taken captive. Instead, he snuck his family out of their village and into Hungary.
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One of the best!
- By Ian on 08-11-20
By: Aviva Gat
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Summer
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Juliette Burton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
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terrific book, beautifully read.
- By Sasha on 02-07-21
By: Ali Smith
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
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The Library of Legends
- A Novel
- By: Janie Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, 19-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than 100 students, faculty, and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.
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Wonderful and Umique!
- By D. Fields on 02-18-22
By: Janie Chang
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The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna
- A Novel
- By: Juliet Grames
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 16 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For Stella Fortuna, death has always been a part of life. Stella’s childhood is full of strange, life-threatening incidents - moments where ordinary situations like cooking eggplant or feeding the pigs inexplicably take lethal turns. Even Stella’s own mother is convinced that her daughter is cursed or haunted. When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and her sister, Tina, must come of age side by side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them.
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Misogyny at its worst
- By brenda on 01-15-20
By: Juliet Grames
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
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must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
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Last Witnesses
- An Oral History of the Children of World War II
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
- Narrated by: Julia Emelin, Allen Lewis Rickman
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded - a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war.
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And how many years to forget?
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-21
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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What You Have Heard Is True
- A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- By: Carolyn Forché
- Narrated by: Carolyn Forché
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
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Beautiful story
- By Norhilda on 05-09-19
By: Carolyn Forché
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Under the Same Sky
- From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America
- By: Joseph Kim, Stephan Talty
- Narrated by: Raymond Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A searing story of starvation and survival in North Korea, followed by a dramatic escape, rescue by activists and Christian missionaries, and success in the United States thanks to newfound faith and courage.
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Tugs at the heart strings
- By R3v13w3r on 07-15-15
By: Joseph Kim, and others
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My Friend Anne Frank
- The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds
- By: Hannah Pick-Goslar, Dina Kraft
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable pair enjoyed a carefree childhood of games, sleepovers, and treats with the other children in their neighborhood of Rivierenbuurt. But in 1942, Hannah and Anne's lives abruptly changed forever.
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the missing piece to Anne’s story and the complete picture of Hannah’s
- By Wilson on 07-13-23
By: Hannah Pick-Goslar, and others
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Pearl in a Cage
- By: Joy Dettman
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.
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Pearl in a Cage
- By Verita on 06-16-17
By: Joy Dettman
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Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
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