
Liars
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Rebecca Lowman
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By:
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Sarah Manguso
About this listen
An “eviscerating” (The New York Times) novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars of us all—from the author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Town & Country, Lit Hub, Chicago Public Library
“Is divorce the new marriage plot? . . . [Liars] pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read. Love stories, it seems, are out. Divorce as liberation? Very much in.”—Vogue
“A tour de force . . . Liars makes an old story fresh.”—NPR
“A bracing story of a woman on the verge.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A nuclear family can destroy a woman artist. I’d always known that. But I’d never suspected how easily I’d fall into one anyway.
When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.
As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter. Throughout the upheavals of family life, Jane tries to hold it all together. That is, until John leaves her.
Liars is a tour de force of wit and rage, telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, and of a woman rising inexorably from its ashes.
©2024 Sarah Manguso (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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“Makes stirring observations about marriage and identity.”—Time
“Is divorce the new marriage plot? . . . [Liars] pulses with a rare kind of anger, making it a compulsive, unforgettable read. Love stories, it seems, are out. Divorce as liberation? Very much in.”—Vogue
“[Manguso] is at the top of her game.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Story
Sam and Elena dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.
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Depressing drudgery
- By Catherine on 08-09-24
By: Julia Phillips
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No Fault
- A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
- By: Haley Mlotek
- Narrated by: Haley Mlotek
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.
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Probably better to read in physical form
- By harrison brinner on 05-08-25
By: Haley Mlotek
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The Book of George
- A Novel
- By: Kate Greathead
- Narrated by: Blair Baker
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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If you haven’t had the misfortune of dating a George, you know someone who has. He’s a young man brimming with potential but incapable of following through; sweet yet noncommittal to his long-suffering girlfriend; distant from but still reliant on his mother; charmingly funny one minute, sullenly brooding the next. Here, Kate Greathead paints one particular, unforgettable George in a series of droll and surprisingly poignant snapshots of his life over two decades.
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Lots of potential, little payoff
- By Chalin Smith on 10-24-24
By: Kate Greathead
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Code Noir
- Fictions
- By: Canisia Lubrin, Christina Sharpe - foreword
- Narrated by: Mia Golden, Marsha Regis, K.C. Collins, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
By: Canisia Lubrin, and others
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The Hypocrite
- A Novel
- By: Jo Hamya
- Narrated by: Claire Kinson
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them.
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Consistently boring
- By lifelong learner on 10-09-24
By: Jo Hamya
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Headshot
- A Novel
- By: Rita Bullwinkel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country.
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Wonderful Narrator
- By love it on 08-09-24
By: Rita Bullwinkel
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Fire Exit
- By: Morgan Talty
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of Roger and Mary raising their only child, Elizabeth from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from this family and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
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Wonderful story about love, family , truth and deception and identity
- By ReallyNelie on 06-23-24
By: Morgan Talty
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
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The Extinction of Irena Rey
- By: Jennifer Croft
- Narrated by: Lanessa Tremblett
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace. The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece.
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Unique plot
- By Kinga on 03-30-24
By: Jennifer Croft
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God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
- A Novel
- By: Joseph Earl Thomas
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother.
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Another Perspective of Urban Life
- By Stephanie W. on 07-23-24
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Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth.
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Horrible Narration, ok storyl
- By bkwrm1 on 05-11-25
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
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Beautifully written
- By Anonymous User on 06-24-24
By: Hisham Matar
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300 Arguments: Essays
- By: Sarah Manguso
- Narrated by: Sarah Manguso
- Length: 1 hr and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A "Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis" ( Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To hear her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms.
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Cool Collection Of Essays, Nice Reading
- By Debra Hartrum on 01-10-18
By: Sarah Manguso
A hard listen
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The love despite the dysfunction
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Truth Mirror
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Incredibly relatable even though totally different
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Excellent book - real and raw
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Resonated with me
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Emotional
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Beautiful
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Searing portrayal of a marriage unraveling
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This book should be required reading for anyone looking to get married
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