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By:
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Graham Swift
About this listen
Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 1996
When four men carry out another's final wishes, they are forced to take stock of who they are, who they were, and what lies in between.
"It ain't like your regular sort of day," Ray admits. The Coach and Horses pub in London's East End opened just five minutes ago, and Ray is already having a pint. He's soon joined by Lenny and Vic, who arrives carrying a box. Vic "twists the box round so we can see there's a white card taped to one side. There's a date and a number and name: Jack Arthur Dodds."
The three men, friends since World War II, have gathered to carry out Jack's last orders and deliver his ashes to the sea. A fourth comes, too, and serves as the driver: Jack's adopted son, Vince. As they move together toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Their voices - and Jack's, and that of Jack's widow Amy - combine in a choir of sorrow and resentment, passion and regret. An interwoven series of first-person narratives shifts between times and tenses, memories and revelations.
A testament to a changing England, a stark portrait of its working class, and a morality tale that hides its ambition and expertise under moving naturalism, Last Orders is a stunning achievement by one of England's greatest living writers.
©1996 Grham Swift (P)2003 HighBridge CompanyListeners also enjoyed...
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Amazing Story Teller
- By Dorothy on 09-07-14
By: William Boyd
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The Darkest Secret
- A Novel
- By: Alex Marwood
- Narrated by: Beverley A. Crick
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Real estate mogul Sean Jackson is throwing himself a splashy 50th birthday party, but trouble starts almost immediately: His ex-wife has sent his teenage daughters to the party without telling him; his current wife has fired the nanny; and he's finding it difficult to sneak away to his mistress. Then something truly terrible happens: one of his three-year-old twins goes missing. No trace of her is ever found. The attendees of the party, nicknamed the Jackson Associates by the press, become infamous overnight.
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Wow
- By Christina on 09-14-16
By: Alex Marwood
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Lionel Asbo
- State of England
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love .
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Jēz...us! Just don't buy it for your Grans.
- By Darwin8u on 01-03-13
By: Martin Amis
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The Year of the Runaways
- By: Sunjeev Sahota
- Narrated by: Sartaj Garewal
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar, and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a call.
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Maybe easier to read than to listen to.
- By Eric on 06-15-16
By: Sunjeev Sahota
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Elmet
- By: Fiona Mozley
- Narrated by: Gareth Bennett Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Field of Blood
- By: Denise Mina
- Narrated by: Heather O'Neill
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Abridged
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Little Brian Wilcox's murder is the hottest story in Scotland. Every major newspaper crowds its pages with stories examining the crime from every angle. If only Paddy Meehan could get a scoop on the case. A nationally syndicated story would surely launch her fledgling journalism career out of the free local rag she's been working at.
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Wrong Accent
- By Amazon Customer on 04-01-14
By: Denise Mina
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Our Story Begins
- New and Selected Stories
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.
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Great
- By chris on 04-11-08
By: Tobias Wolff
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The Things We Never Said
- By: Susan Elliot Wright
- Narrated by: Kate Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1964, Maggie wakes to find herself in a mental asylum, with no idea who she is or how she got there. Remnants of memories swirl in her mind - a familiar song, a storm, a moment of violence. Slowly, she begins to piece together the past and the events which brought her to this point.
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Disappointing
- By Anonymous User on 01-18-22
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I'm Still Standing
- By: Colleen Coleman
- Narrated by: Claire McKenna
- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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When Evelyn Dooley married her high school sweetheart James, she thought she was set for life. Now she’s 28, single, and fleeing to Dublin from her hometown to avoid the gossip surrounding their breakup...all because of a test-your-relationship board game. This was not in her five-year plan. Then, a chance encounter with gorgeous musician, Danny, leads to an unlikely friendship, and soon the pair are running music nights together in one of the oldest pubs in Dublin.
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easy listening
- By Shez on 11-20-20
By: Colleen Coleman
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A Change of Climate
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Sandra Duncan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
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Beautifully written
- By Patricia S. on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
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Crooked Heart
- A Novel
- By: Lissa Evans
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When Noel Bostock - aged 10, no family - is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedge - a 36-year-old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it.
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Surviving The Blitz In WWII Great Britain
- By Sara on 04-24-16
By: Lissa Evans
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Lie in Wait
- By: G. J. Minett
- Narrated by: Joe Jameson
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Owen Hall drives into a petrol station to let his passenger use the facilities. She never comes back - and what's more, it seems she never even made it inside. When Owen raises a fuss, the police are called - and soon identify Owen himself as a possible culprit, not least because they already have him in the frame for another more sinister crime. Owen's always been a little different, and before long others in the community are baying for his blood. But this is a case where nothing is as it seems - least of all Owen Hall....
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LIE IN WAIT..
- By ZacharyKindle Customer on 08-06-17
By: G. J. Minett
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Murdoch Amazes
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It's the summer of 1959, and something magical can be witnessed at the end of the pier in beach town Brighton, England. Jack Robbins, Ronnie Deane, and Evie White are performing in a seaside variety show, starring as Jack Robinson, the compere comedian, and The Great Pablo and Eve, a magic act. By the end of the summer, Evie's glinting engagement ring will be flung to the bottom of the ocean, and one of the trifecta will vanish forever.
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Astounding
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The author takes us inside George Webb's -a divorced ex-policeman turned private investigator- mind. For one day, we see what Webb sees and know only what his thoughts reveals. We learn about his childhood and the secret it forced him to carry; the last moments with his ex-wife; his fall as a cop; the ease with which he has turned his police skills to the demands of his new profession. And we learn how those demands have put him in a league with a client, a woman he has come to love.
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A wordsmith no doubt.
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Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written audiobook, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces.
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A book to wade in, submerge into.
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An 'adjectival' masterpiece of 'effing' prose.
- By Darwin8u on 05-21-12
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The Luminaries
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It is 1866 and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
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Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years.
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It's the summer of 1959, and something magical can be witnessed at the end of the pier in beach town Brighton, England. Jack Robbins, Ronnie Deane, and Evie White are performing in a seaside variety show, starring as Jack Robinson, the compere comedian, and The Great Pablo and Eve, a magic act. By the end of the summer, Evie's glinting engagement ring will be flung to the bottom of the ocean, and one of the trifecta will vanish forever.
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Astounding
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A wordsmith no doubt.
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Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour, and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
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Disappointing
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Disgrace
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Written with the austere clarity that has made J. M. Coetzee the winner of two Booker Prizes, Disgrace explores the downfall of one man and dramatizes, with unforgettable, at times almost unbearable, vividness the plight of a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.
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Great book - aptly named
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The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
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OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
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The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.
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Quick and engaging, well-read
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The Night Watch
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Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past - whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise, and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.
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Sarah Waters is my new favorite author
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Tomorrow
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One o'clock A.M. Paula Hook lies awake next to her husband, Mike; her 16-year-old twins, Kate and Nick, are asleep down the hall. When the day begins, she and Mike will share a secret with their children that may change all their lives forever.
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OMG awful!
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The Blind Assassin
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
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Walk the Blue Fields
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Claire Keegan continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland. A writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll's old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder whose ulterior motives emerge as the night progresses. A priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage—and battles his memories of a love affair that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life. And a man seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle as he mourns both his empty life and his lost love.
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Just Superb.
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Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha
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Patrick Clarke is a 10-year-old boy trying to make sense of his world. He is confused. His Ma and Da fight too much. School seems like a joke. And love, though it has a good reputation, seems pretty cruel. Paddy sees everything, but has trouble understanding it all. His story is an exuberant romp through the triumphs, indignities, and troublemaking detours of an Irish childhood.
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wrong order
- By Yuliya Melnyk on 01-31-16
By: Roddy Doyle
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- By: Richard Flanagan
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In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan displays the gifts that have made him one of the most acclaimed writers of contemporary fiction. Moving deftly from a Japanese POW camp to present-day Australia, from the experiences of Dorrigo Evans and his fellow prisoners to that of the Japanese guards, this savagely beautiful novel tells a story of the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
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The vanity and stupidity of the author
- By Off The Grid on 01-12-24
By: Richard Flanagan
What listeners say about Last Orders
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- blkwarmblood
- 04-27-20
Loved it.
The narration brought back so many memories of find times had with friends involved in the Spitalfield market. EastEnders are the bomb!
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Overall
- Robert
- 03-23-06
Don't hesitate
I cannot recommend this selection highly enough. It is a beautifully written, and wonderfully read book. It took a short while to become accustomed to the accents, but what a treat it was coming to know them.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Caroline
- 05-11-18
Not my taste
I had to read this book for class. I especially found the first half difficult with its crass British humor. It was also difficult to keep up with all the characters at first, so I recommend making a character chart to keep them straight as you read. I was grateful for the audio book to get me through! Not a bad read overall.
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- Joe Kraus
- 03-07-19
Confusing, But With Engaging Rhythm
I have to admit, I didn’t give this one the attention it deserves. I gave it a shot because it’s a Booker Prize winner and because it was on sale. I liked the tone, the sense of overhearing the conversations from the “gentleman” farther down the bar who talk as if there’s no one else in the room, but it turns on so much subtlety that I lost track of much of the underlying context.
I couldn’t always tell, for instance, which friend had which frustration over the charge to bury their friend Jack. Some were drawn to Jack’s wife, Amy, and Amy herself was so full of resentment that she didn’t want to be part of the journey to scatter the issues. I never found out why, and I lost track of how Jack and Amy’s son Vince fit into the plot, but in some ways I didn’t care. That’s because, while tedium is a part of the narrative method, it also seems a large part of the context. These are men who haven’t seen their lives turn out as they hoped. Their pleasures are a pint at the pub and pretending the old times were better than they were.
To my surprise, though, I didn’t stop reading (well, listening). The rhythm of the speakers themselves kept me going. Like those too-loud gentlemen at the bar, they entertained me sometimes, often enough, that I could never quite pull the plug on the story. I sensed its general outline – they’re carrying the ashes and getting ever closer to their destination – and that crossed with the rich language of the speakers kept me going.
I wish this one reset itself more often than it does, that it caught us up periodically, but I think that reflects some of its moment. It’s a dated work in some ways, both in its echoes of a Modernist structural ambition and in its unreflective display of the working class as objects, but it seems a strong example of its kind.
From quick digging, I see that this had some notoriety for echoing the plot of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I suppose I see that, but I’d say it has more in common with a favorite of mine, Wallace Markfield’s To an Early Grave, which also tells the story of a group of friends as they venture to their dead friend’s funeral. Or throw in Daniel Fuchs’s wonderfully playful Homage to Blenholt about a young man determined to pay his respects at the funeral of the neighborhood Jewish gangster boss. Or, for that matter, Antigone, who’s determined to see her brother buried despite Creon’s edict otherwise.
So, as a quick retort, I’d say I don’t hold it against this at all that some people saw parallels to Faulkner. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best, right? And remember that Faulkner was stealing as well.
This one falls short of the greatness I’ve come almost to take for granted from more recent Booker prize winners, but it’s a striking experiment in form and tone, so I’m glad I didn’t put it all the way down.
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- rjjasmin
- 11-12-24
Memorable Narrative Style
This is a novel that presents unforgettable characters, primarily through Swift's unique narrative point of view.
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- Johanna Tesch
- 08-18-20
Give it a Chance!
This is one of those books you really have to listen to to understand, its life with regrets, something we all can reflect on.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Mark B. Lasser
- 05-22-15
An interesting piece of writing
The writing by far is better than the story itself. It very slow start. I would've liked a little more narrative upfront, at least a sense of knowing where things were going. But the writing is phenomenal.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Garry
- 12-05-12
Friends forever care even in death.
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I first saw this as a great movie with a great English cast and was eager to see how this audio would compare and it does. This is how London was when I was growing up, friends forever looking after the loved ones, caring for mates.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The care for the widow, the treatment of the ashes with reverence.
Any additional comments?
A true story of friendship in a time when friends really were friends for life.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- James
- 10-27-20
Fully engaging
Fully engaging series of intertwined spoken thoughts about the last rites for a dead friend, each character provided with their own voice.
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Overall
- Dennis
- 04-08-08
Hold the Last Orders
It is difficult to distinguish among the characters because it is not apparent who is speaking, and their accents require a better ear than mine. However, it makes little difference because their dialogue is trite and their characters stereotypical. I had little interest in finishing this one.
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10 people found this helpful