In the Skin of a Lion
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Narrated by:
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Tom McCamus
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By:
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Michael Ondaatje
About this listen
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth.
Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.
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The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals.
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A brilliantly understated classic
- By Jeff Lacy on 10-29-19
By: Daisy Johnson
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
- By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, Stephen King, Peter Straub
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Rebecca Mitchell, Michael Healy, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
- By Jerry on 12-06-14
By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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The Shell Collector
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae Kazim
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The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's acclaimed debut collection take listeners from the African coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties - metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts - and conjures nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power.
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Narrator not appropriate to the book.
- By Janet on 02-18-17
By: Anthony Doerr
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Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories
- By: Kelly Link - editor, Gavin J. Grant - editor
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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
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 09-14-13
By: Kelly Link - editor, and others
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The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
- By: Eudora Welty
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat, Jessica Almasy, Victor Bevine, and others
- Length: 32 hrs and 18 mins
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This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.
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Too Good For Audio
- By Yennta on 06-18-12
By: Eudora Welty
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
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Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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The Stolen Child
- By: Keith Donohue
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- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
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Seven-year-old Henry Day is kidnapped and renamed "Aniday" by changelings, ageless beings who inhabit the woods near his home. The changelings also leave behind one of their own, who flawlessly impersonates Henry except for one noteworthy detail: the new Henry is a prodigiously talented pianist.
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Not Anything Close to the Hype
- By Jon on 06-20-06
By: Keith Donohue
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Shadow Show
- All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
- By: Sam Weller - editor, Mort Castle - editor
- Narrated by: George Takei, Edward Herrmann, Kate Mulgrew, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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THE MAN WHO FORGOT RAY BRADBURY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-27-17
By: Sam Weller - editor, and others
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White Dog Fell from the Sky
- By: Eleanor Morse
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
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Botswana, 1976: Isaac Muthethe thinks he is dead. Smuggled across the border from South Africa in a hearse, he awakens covered in dust, staring at blue sky and the face of White Dog. Far from dead, he is, for the first time, in a country without apartheid. A medical student in South Africa, he was forced to flee after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force.
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Unexpectedly Stunning Work!
- By Kathi on 03-15-13
By: Eleanor Morse
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Elmet
- By: Fiona Mozley
- Narrated by: Gareth Bennett Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
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In this atmospheric and profoundly moving debut, Cathy and Daniel live with their father, John, in the remote woods of Yorkshire, in a house the three of them built themselves. John is a gentle brute of a man, a former enforcer who fights for money when he has to, but who otherwise just wants to be left alone to raise his children. When a local landowner shows up on their doorstep, their precarious existence is threatened, and a series of actions is set in motion that can only end in violence.
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Strains credibility
- By DM on 01-06-18
By: Fiona Mozley
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What listeners say about In the Skin of a Lion
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- KinKmg72
- 09-05-19
Fine story
Very well done. I thoroughly enjoyed the way the author introduced the main characters almost casually and then proceeded to develop them more fully, taking them through turns and twists that I would not have anticipated or expected. I appreciated the continuity over a long span of years. Could not help but respect the protagonist even more as I learned how his character had been formed and infused by his interactions with his father. An interesting array of friends. Imaginative situations.
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- Woo! Woo!
- 06-23-20
A poem to the men and women who built a nation.
Traditional histories celebrate the wealthy industrialists for creating buildings and public works. They forget the day-labor workers that walked the steel and bucked the rivets. The forget the women who cooked and shopped and worked for their laborer families. None of the drawings and plans could have been made real without the nameless thousands that actually built them. Even when they died building the great works their names were never recorded.
This is a poetic love-letter to those nameless men and women. Michael Ondaatje writes their stories and the everyday heroism of living and working with care and lyricism.
Tom McCamus is a perfect narrator for the voices of true heroes who built nations.
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- shauna
- 07-29-18
Perhaps my new favorite book & Narrator
I think that I have just found my new favorite book. I could be bias, the book is set in Toronto, Canada & the Muskoka region (a very beloved area of mine) & I do love Toronto. I spent ten formative College years there & hearing all of the street names and areas was very fun, while learning of the cities infrastructure history quite fascinating, but no, it’s Mr. Ondaaje’s writing: he is a genius with the vernacular. The Narrator absolutely top notch. I think I’ve read every work of Ondaatje’s now, so this Narrator will be my new obsession. 😉
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2 people found this helpful
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- Breakaway Farm
- 09-23-18
Narration Pulled This Book Down
This is a book about the retelling of individual events until they are shaped and cohere into a story. The story is not what is recorded in historical archives but rather an evolving narrative woven from the parts the teller chooses to share. The title, "In the Skin of a Lion" harkens to the promise made by Gilgamesh when his closest friend, Enkidu, has died: to grow his hair like a lion and wander, ostensibly to tell his friend's story to all who will listen.
The style is purposely fragmented in the beginning leaving the reader to find connections and begin to stitch together a narrative. OK. This trophe is used successfully by many novels. It requires additional work on the part of the reader but can lead to great rewards when done well.
Alas, if you are listening to this Kindle edition and have not read the book before, you'll never know how big the reward might be for all the up front work. The reader has chosen to make book's early fragmentation the cornerstone of his delivery. Every sentence is read as a separate data point with a rising or (mostly) lowered intonation to isolate the sentence from the one that follows.
There is no flow in sections that have a legitimate narrative flow. Dialogs are hard to follow since everyone has the identical voice and chopped speech pattern. Instead of being lyrical (which what I think the reader intended) the style inevitably leads to monotony.
In the end, I liked the book. But I'll never know if I would have LOVED it unless I go back to read In the Skin of a Lion on the page where I can experience it with a more natural rhythm and pacing.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Celeste Albers
- 08-08-18
A rare gem of a book
Beautiful, intelligent, mesmerizing
I pity the person who cannot appreciate such a masterpiece
The different threads form a rope that twists and turns, doubles back and then returns to wrap around you
Perfectly performed by Tom McCamus
There are scenes that will never leave me
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6 people found this helpful
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- Joe Kraus
- 02-07-19
Lush but Often Bewildering Prequel
When I think of Ondaatje’s work – and all I’ve read before this is the marvelous The English Patient – I think of internal experience. I think of narrators who are trapped in a bed or confined to an abandoned hospital, or recuperating from amputated thumbs. I think, that is, of characters in the midst of reflection.
As I look at his method of narration, though, it’s actually steeped in the external. As he writes, he pans across landscapes. He gives us lush descriptions that become almost cinematic. In this book in particular, I often found myself lost in the larger story, but I never felt bored. I was always confident I was in the hands of someone who knew how to make words bring scenes (and, implicitly, characters) to life.
It’s a challenging method. Part of the inspiration of The English Patient is that it’s claustrophobic. Characters recall experiences of vast spaces and of epic love, but they don’t get to leave the scene of the hospital for the setting of the story’s present tense. That novel, tangled as is it, has a clear and tight focus. Everything points to the experience of our nurse and patient who, without quite knowing it, sit as the culmination of a number of great emotional arcs.
Skin of a Lion, though even shorter, is expansive in its scenery and in its setting. We go from the wilds of Canada in the days of timber empire, to the building of Toronto’s sewer system, to the birth of a radical workers’ movement in the years before World War I. It doesn’t have the same inspired focus of The English Patient. It’s never boring and always reflective of great passion, but it spins in different directions.
As an elevator pitch, this is an inspired plot: a young man who learns dynamiting from his father goes to Toronto, contributes to the great physical work of building the city, becomes radicalized through a betrayed love and from seeing the greed of the city’s capitalists, and determines to assassinate his arch enemy by swimming through the very sewer tunnels he helped build.
Given Ondaatje’s method, though, I rarely saw that plot as it unfolded. (In fact, I have to acknowledge various on-line sources as helping me sort out how one scene connected to another.) I loved the reading experience of being caught in the lush exterior reflections of the characters, but I was generally confused about how they combined. I respect the ambition behind all this – as a scholar of American multi-ethnic literature, I admire Ondaatje’s seeming goal to celebrate the mix of immigrant labor that made the city, and I recognize the philosophical claim that, when dismantling the master’s house, one cannot use the master’s tools. That is, I think I understand that he’s challenging conventional chronological narrative as a means of critiquing our received history. Still, he’s asking a lot of us. He writes brilliantly but here, in what turns out to be a prequel to The English Patient, he never lets his story cohere.
I’m all in for more Ondaatje, and I do recommend this one, but be prepared for a challenging ride once you begin.
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- Jonathan
- 03-31-19
beautifully told adventure
loved it. these twisted lives grow around each other like vines. The English Patient is the perfect sequel.
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- MJH
- 09-08-18
Surprising!!!
When I started this I wasn't sure I would finish it. I did and very glad I did. I went back several times over some parts to get them right. This was a book I had to pay very close attention to as there are several story lines going on that seem to be unconnected but it all comes together in the end. I seldom read a book twice but this one I will.
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- Joshua
- 02-25-18
superb
it is rare when literature and historical fiction mesh so beautifully. Ondaatje is a master of atmosphere and character, so this small masterpiece does not disappoint.
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133 people found this helpful
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- VCJ
- 10-06-18
You must be engaged
Beautifully written and narrated – – mesmerizing really, but it requires your full attention. If you go with the flow you will be rewarded.
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1 person found this helpful