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Last Orders
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble, Gigi Marceau Clarke, Jenny Sterlin, Ian Stewart, Gerard Doyle, Simon Jones, Domonick Hawksley
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's summary
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.
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Since the day her mother died, Jem has known about the numbers. Numbers that pop into her head when she looks into someone’s eyes. They’re dates, the numbers. Dates predicting with brute accuracy each person’s death. Burdened by such grim knowledge, Jem avoids relationships. Until she meets Spider, another outsider, and takes a chance. Maybe they can find happiness together, if only in the brief time that remains before his expiration date.
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Waiting For More!
- By Oregon Coast Gal on 02-26-10
By: Rachel Ward
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The Walking People
- By: Mary Beth Keane
- Narrated by: Sile Bermingham
- Length: 16 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Chrissie on 09-10-13
By: Mary Beth Keane
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Ordinary Thunderstorms
- A Novel
- By: William Boyd
- Narrated by: Gideon Emery
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.
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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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Performance
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Story
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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Overall
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Performance
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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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A wordsmith no doubt.
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An 'adjectival' masterpiece of 'effing' prose.
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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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OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
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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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Not So Luminous
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Disgrace
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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
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
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Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali.
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Absolutely Splendid...
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The Sea, the Sea
- By: Iris Murdoch, Mary Kinzie - introduction
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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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Murdoch Amazes
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What listeners say about Last Orders
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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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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- 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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- 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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2 people found this helpful
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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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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
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Overall
- Dean F.
- 10-30-20
just ok
this is the first book I have really struggled to finish. for me it was hard to follow all the bouncing around with the characters. the British accent wasn't to bad.
for me there were to many "he said- she said" lines that just started standing out.
the end was very good, makes you stop and think about your own life and friends and families.
its hard to actually recommend this book. sorry.
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