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Leaving Home
- Narrated by: Joanna David
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
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Publisher's summary
When cautious Emma Roberts goes to France to carry out research into 17th-century garden design, she finds a reliable diversion from her studies in her unlikely new friend Francoise Desnoyers, in whose beautiful house she is welcomed as a guest. She is not too dazzled to ignore the tensions that exist between Francoise and her formidable mother, or between Mme. Desnoyers and her other guests.
London recedes into the background as life in France becomes more significant in every respect. It is not until the horrifying episode that puts an end to this fascination that Emma is reconciled to her duller but safer life at home and to the compromises that she comes to accept.
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her 24th, Strangers, in 2009. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
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Critic reviews
“Spare and devastating, powerful. Brookner is an unflinching novelist who writes beautifully and fearlessly.” ( Independent) “Elegiac...its magnificent final sentence is among the most moving of Brooknerian conclusions.” ( New Statesman)
“Clever and elegant.” ( Sunday Times)
“Brookner is brilliant...readers will not be disappointed. Her women are very real, more recognizable and more human than any obviously loveable character could hope to be.” ( Sunday Herald)
“So well done - so carefully is the novel wrought - that reading it offers deep and enduring pleasure.” ( Scotsman)
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Like Henry James but more accessible
- By Merlin on 08-19-12
By: Edith Wharton
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The Ambassadors
- By: Henry James
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 18 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Lambert Strether, a mild, middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs. Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure and to bring him home. But Strether finds Chad transformed by the influence of a remarkable woman.
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Henry James can be hard to follow but worth it
- By Patricia on 01-29-13
By: Henry James
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Conundrum
- By: Jan Morris
- Narrated by: Roy McMillan
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.
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Beautiful memoir
- By Gabriel Smith on 07-25-22
By: Jan Morris
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The Remains of the Day
- By: Kazuo Ishiguro
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's "greatness," and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.
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Beautiful and ever relevant
- By bbots on 07-04-20
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
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Jennie Gerhardt
- A Novel
- By: Theodore Dreiser
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Jennie Gerhardt is the tragic story of an innocent, caring, beautiful young girl from an extremely poor family who throughout her life is drawn into affairs with two different men from a much higher social class. How members of her family, the family of one of the wealthy men, and society in general react to her situation is the basis of this classic story.
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Need a pick me up.
- By knvmxi on 05-15-16
By: Theodore Dreiser
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The Good Liar
- A Novel
- By: Nicholas Searle
- Narrated by: Matthew Brenher
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Veteran con artist Roy spots an obvious easy mark when he meets Betty, a wealthy widow, online. In no time at all, he's moved into Betty's lovely cottage and is preparing to accompany her on a romantic trip to Europe. Betty's grandson disapproves of their blossoming relationship, but Roy is sure this scheme will be a success. He knows what he's doing. As this remarkable feat of storytelling weaves together Roy's and Betty's futures, it also unwinds their pasts.
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Hope the movie is better than the book?
- By S. Smith on 10-17-19
By: Nicholas Searle
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How Proust Can Change Your Life
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.
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A nice petite primer on Proust
- By Darwin8u on 02-20-13
By: Alain de Botton
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
What listeners say about Leaving Home
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M. J. Walsh
- 09-09-20
A design fpr living
This short novel about a young woman caught between the dull certainties of her life in London and the, perhaps illusory, prospects offered by living in Paris is not Brookner's best work.
Emma, the narrator of her own story, is writing a book on classical garden design. As she does research in Paris she discovers people and places that seem exotic and so different from sharing a stuffy flat with her mother in London. In place of routine she glimpses the image of freedom.
In telling Emma's story Brookner doesn't endow it with her usual texture and detail. Good enough in its way but a slight work. More sketch than painting.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-10-22
Astute, sensitive, deftly composed and insightful
Leaving Home is abut relationships: families, mothers and daughters, friends both female and male, and being ones self. This is written in first person putting the reader into the thoughts and conflicts described and felt by Emma, the main character. This is one of the best books I have read or listened to
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