
My Friends
A Novel
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $24.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Hisham Matar
-
By:
-
Hisham Matar
About this listen
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “masterly” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice), “riveting” (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return
“A profound celebration of the sustaining power of friendship, of the ways we mold ourselves against the indentations of those few people whom fate presses against us.”—The Washington Post
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHER WEEKLY’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Time, NPR, BookPage
WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION
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.
There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode into tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, unable to leave Britain, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would expose them to danger.
When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face-to-face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Dear Dickhead
- A Novel
- By: Virginie Despentes, Frank Wynne - translator
- Narrated by: Gina Rogers, Patrick Zeller
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.
-
-
Great reads
- By MKAT on 03-04-25
By: Virginie Despentes, and others
-
The Imagined Life
- A Novel
- By: Andrew Porter
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy. As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend.
-
-
Good writing
- By Suzanna on 04-27-25
By: Andrew Porter
-
This Other Eden
- By: Paul Harding
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.
-
-
Painfully overwritten
- By WPH on 02-24-23
By: Paul Harding
-
Playground
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Robin Siegerman, Eunice Wong, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
-
-
What a tremendous story
- By Deb Hatch on 11-08-24
By: Richard Powers
-
This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
-
-
Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Dear Dickhead
- A Novel
- By: Virginie Despentes, Frank Wynne - translator
- Narrated by: Gina Rogers, Patrick Zeller
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oscar is a B-list novelist in his forties. He used to be an alcoholic and a cokehead, but now he keeps himself busy by ranting on social media. When Rebecca, an actress whose looks he insulted, sends him an angry email, they strike up a combative correspondence—at the very moment that Oscar is accused of sexual harassment by his former publicist. What ensues is a no-holds-barred conversation about life under the patriarchy, and above all about addiction—to drugs, to alcohol, to the internet, to rage.
-
-
Great reads
- By MKAT on 03-04-25
By: Virginie Despentes, and others
-
The Imagined Life
- A Novel
- By: Andrew Porter
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy. As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend.
-
-
Good writing
- By Suzanna on 04-27-25
By: Andrew Porter
-
This Other Eden
- By: Paul Harding
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.
-
-
Painfully overwritten
- By WPH on 02-24-23
By: Paul Harding
-
Playground
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Robin Siegerman, Eunice Wong, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
-
-
What a tremendous story
- By Deb Hatch on 11-08-24
By: Richard Powers
-
This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
-
-
Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
-
Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
-
-
Painfully powerful Tale.
- By Tom on 01-30-24
By: Paul Lynch
-
Solenoid
- By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
-
-
Our Universal Phantasmagoria
- By Isaac Linder on 03-11-24
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
-
Lion
- A Novel
- By: Sonya Walger
- Narrated by: Sonya Walger
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lion is about an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter's life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina's greatest earthquake, he is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.
-
-
Heartachingly beautiful
- By awaw on 05-16-25
By: Sonya Walger
-
Enter Ghost
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Nadia Albina
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage.
-
-
Brilliant
- By Tiffany Soule Anderson on 06-22-25
By: Isabella Hammad
-
Time Shelter
- By: Georgi Gospodinov, Angela Rodel - translator
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. “In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.
-
-
Great story about memory & forgetting
- By D. on 05-20-23
By: Georgi Gospodinov, and others
-
Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
-
-
Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
-
Things in Nature Merely Grow
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
-
-
Very Moving thoughtful meditation on tragedy and grief.
- By Zeta on 06-27-25
By: Yiyun Li
-
Leonard and Hungry Paul
- By: Ronan Hession
- Narrated by: John Hopkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leonard and Hungry Paul is the story of two friends who ordinarily would remain uncelebrated. It finds a value and specialness in them that is not immediately apparent and prompts the idea that maybe we could learn from the people that we overlook in life.
-
-
Practically Perfect
- By Dave Sharp on 02-14-23
By: Ronan Hession
-
Cassandra at the Wedding
- By: Dorothy Baker
- Narrated by: Morgan Hallett
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.
-
-
Meh
- By Trinity M. on 01-26-22
By: Dorothy Baker
-
Buddenbrooks
- The Decline of a Family
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
-
-
Where Have You Been All My Life, Thomas Mann?
- By Virginia Waldron on 03-30-17
By: Thomas Mann
-
On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
-
-
Story loses momentum in Book II
- By elebras on 07-02-25
By: Solvej Balle
-
Crooked Plow
- A Novel
- By: Itamar Vieira Junior, Johnny Lorenz - translator
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Deep in Brazil's neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother's bed and momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever. Heralded as a new masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family, spirituality, slavery and its aftermath, and political struggle.
-
-
This recording does not accurately convey this story… buy the book instead
- By M. Kirby on 05-20-25
By: Itamar Vieira Junior, and others

About the Creator and Performer
Critic reviews
“It is impossible to describe the profound depth and beauty of this book. My Friends is a breathtaking novel, every page a miracle and an affirmation.” (Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King)
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
In the Country of Men
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Khalid Abdalla
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman's days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father's constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother's increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses.
-
-
5 Stars!
- By Alex Klop on 09-13-24
By: Hisham Matar
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Wild Houses
- By: Colin Barrett
- Narrated by: Damian Gildea
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The riotous, raucous, and deeply resonant debut novel from “one of the best story writers in the English language today” (Financial Times), Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry.
-
-
Insider look at a small crime
- By Probably did on 03-24-24
By: Colin Barrett
-
Ghostroots
- Stories
- By: Pemi Aguda
- Narrated by: Délé Ogundiran, Ore Apampa-Araba
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.
By: Pemi Aguda
-
This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
-
-
Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
-
A Month in Siena
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 3 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he'd had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.
-
-
An atmospheric ramble (in the best sense!)
- By M. O. on 06-19-21
By: Hisham Matar
-
In the Country of Men
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Khalid Abdalla
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman's days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father's constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother's increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses.
-
-
5 Stars!
- By Alex Klop on 09-13-24
By: Hisham Matar
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Wild Houses
- By: Colin Barrett
- Narrated by: Damian Gildea
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The riotous, raucous, and deeply resonant debut novel from “one of the best story writers in the English language today” (Financial Times), Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry.
-
-
Insider look at a small crime
- By Probably did on 03-24-24
By: Colin Barrett
-
Ghostroots
- Stories
- By: Pemi Aguda
- Narrated by: Délé Ogundiran, Ore Apampa-Araba
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A debut collection of stories set in a hauntingly reimagined Lagos where characters vie for freedom from ancestral ties.
By: Pemi Aguda
-
This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
-
-
Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
-
A Month in Siena
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 3 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the 13th to the 15th centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he'd had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.
-
-
An atmospheric ramble (in the best sense!)
- By M. O. on 06-19-21
By: Hisham Matar
-
Anatomy of a Disappearance
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Khalid Abdalla
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nuri is a young boy when his mother dies. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri’s father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.
-
-
Deeply moving
- By A.M.Rousseau on 09-28-22
By: Hisham Matar
-
The Last White Man
- A Novel
- By: Mohsin Hamid
- Narrated by: Mohsin Hamid
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth—an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew.
-
-
Flat
- By L. Rauch on 08-07-22
By: Mohsin Hamid
-
Small Rain
- A Novel
- By: Garth Greenwell
- Narrated by: Garth Greenwell
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief.
-
-
A Masterpiece
- By Herluf Kanstrup on 09-22-24
By: Garth Greenwell
-
Temple Folk
- By: Aaliyah Bilal
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah, Chanté McCormick, Soneela Nankani, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten “beautiful and vivid” (Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author) stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born.
-
-
Nice read
- By Bonita J. on 11-28-24
By: Aaliyah Bilal
-
The Snow Was Dirty
- By: Georges Simenon, Howard Curtis - Translator
- Narrated by: Joe Jameson
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
'A brilliant new translation of Simenon's critically acclaimed masterpiece.' And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage...unable to cover the filth. Nineteen-year-old Frank - thug, thief, son of a brothel owner - gets by surprisingly well despite living in a city under military occupation, but a warm house and a full stomach are not enough to make him feel truly alive in such a climate of deceit and betrayal.
-
-
An unnecessary story poorly narrated.
- By J-me on 12-30-19
By: Georges Simenon, and others
-
This Other Eden
- By: Paul Harding
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.
-
-
Painfully overwritten
- By WPH on 02-24-23
By: Paul Harding
-
Woodcutters
- By: Thomas Bernhard, David McLintock - translator
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A searing portrayal of Vienna's bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an 'artistic dinner' hosted by a composer and his society wife-a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent but frenzied tirade against these former friends, most of whom have been brought together by Joana, a woman they buried earlier that day.
-
-
Literary fiction with a spectacular narrator
- By Glenn on 03-06-25
By: Thomas Bernhard, and others
-
Held
- A Novel
- By: Anne Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Michaels
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
-
-
Would give six stars if possible
- By love it on 08-31-24
By: Anne Michaels
-
The Wren, the Wren
- By: Anne Enright
- Narrated by: Anne Enright, Aoife Duffin, Owen Roe, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather’s poetry seems to guide her home.
-
-
The different kinds of love, spoken and unspoken in a family.
- By Sheryl L on 05-08-24
By: Anne Enright
-
My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Fredrik Backman
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier.
-
-
How can he keep doing this? Another masterpiece!
- By Blue on 05-08-25
By: Fredrik Backman
-
Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
-
-
Painfully powerful Tale.
- By Tom on 01-30-24
By: Paul Lynch
-
Solenoid
- By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
-
-
Our Universal Phantasmagoria
- By Isaac Linder on 03-11-24
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
I feel that I understand his culture and ethnicity and how it’s more interior and unsaid essence. Private thoughts and beliefs.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Paints a very vivid picture
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Beautiful Writing but A Bit Flat in Storyline/historical context
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Quality of the writing
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Beautifully written
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One of my favorites ever
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Beautifully written
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
story. The narrator does a beautiful job and gives the story just the right feel and soul .It is a touching human story of friendship and having to grow up fast dealing with tremendous life challenges. I was hoping to read more historical facts about the country and how the government was overthrown in 2011 including the involvement of international military forces & how the Libyans felt about it. There is no mention of that in this story. The writer does a wonderful job of giving the reader a sense of how life was in Libya , the beauty of family life and traditions as well as the fear of government both are relayed masterfully.
Well written
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A beautiful book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Interesting and Complex Protagonist
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.