Nutshell
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Narrated by:
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Rory Kinnear
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By:
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Ian McEwan
About this listen
From the best-selling author of Atonement, Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master.
To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour is just a speck in the universe of possible things?
©2016 Ian McEwan (P)2016 Random House AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
- By Darwin8u on 12-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Magdalena Curse
- By: F. G. Cottam
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It only takes a couple of visits to convince Dr Elizabeth Bancroft that Adam Hunter is not just having bad dreams. He's a child possessed.His father is desperate: adamant that his son's affliction is the result of a curse he incurred in the depths of the Amazon, where a badly misguided military operation ended in a terrifying and macabre encounter.
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Good narration of a kind of silly book
- By Dottie B. on 08-09-12
By: F. G. Cottam
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The Blue Guitar
- A Novel
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel - at once trenchant, witty, and shattering - about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught.
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Masterful
- By Amazon customer on 11-25-15
By: John Banville
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The Satanic Verses
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Inextricably linked with the fatwa called against its author in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Satanic Verses is, beyond that, a rich showcase for Salman Rushdie’s comic sensibilities, cultural observations, and unparalleled mastery of language. The book begins with two Indians plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their airliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations.
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Use an audiobook to really enjoy Satanic Verses
- By David Edelberg on 11-24-12
By: Salman Rushdie
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Amsterdam
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Make something, and die.
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
By: Ian McEwan
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Duet
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From the London pop scene, to the opera stages of Europe; from a tiny Greek island, to a stifling manor house full of secrets and deceptions; from the sun-drenched Queensland coast, to the silent outback; Angela and Ellie are two women both looking for something. One in search of her identity and her memory; the other in search of the love that she had and lost; theirs is a duet whose last note will not be sung until the heart-stopping climax, when a shadow from the past returns to claim them both.
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Gosh that was a great story!
- By Anonymous User on 06-10-09
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Putney
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- By: Sofka Zinovieff
- Narrated by: Michelle Ford
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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An American Dream
- By: Norman Mailer
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, author Norman Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the listener by the throat and refuses to let go.
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Mailers Immodest masterpiece
- By W C Woods on 07-02-20
By: Norman Mailer
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One of his best
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Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
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On a sunny afternoon, the middle-aged writer Joe Rose and his wife look up from their picnic in the countryside to see an elderly man desperately trying to anchor his giant helium balloon. Running to help, Joe is joined by other bystanders. But from that fateful day, one of them, Jed Parry, will begin to stalk Joe. Driven by religious zeal and misdirected love, the strange young man will slowly unravel each strand of Joe's life.
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Thriller of the minds and relationships
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An excellent parody on life during Brexit
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Charming and Sweet!!!
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It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come.
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One of the best new novels in recent years
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Gilda, a 20-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.
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Quick and engaging, well-read
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Atonement
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In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.
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An amazing book about complex human perception
- By Amazon Customer on 08-17-04
By: Ian McEwan
What listeners say about Nutshell
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darrell Rohling
- 09-29-16
Superb, as expected...
If you've loved McEwan's work before, you will love this one as well. A masterful and sublime and poignant wordsmith. Enough said.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lacey
- 09-17-16
I just had to find out what happened to the baby!
I work in the postpartum department of the hospital and this book was right up my alley. Interesting for sure!
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- Happy Swimmer
- 03-07-17
excellent narration.
It's quick, even unabridged. the book is about a four plus, but I bumped it up to a five for the narration: It's definitely voice acting, not reading aloud - not too much, not too little, & he even sounds a little like Hugh Grant at times.
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Overall
- Michael &Tulay C
- 09-26-16
First sentence will pull you in.
Was pulled into this book with the first sentence, couldn't put it down. Very different style of writing for me, some parts felt like I was listening one of the Shakespeare novels. Mother Trudy and her brother-in-law, also her lover planning how to kill her husband.
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- Jan
- 05-03-19
So glad I gave this a second chance
At first I was not impressed with
this book and abandoned it for another. So glad I gave it a second chance. Good story told by a novel narrator, it is certainly worth your time.
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- Jonathan Berger
- 04-27-19
Great story, fabulous narration
I loved this one. The "first person from the point of view of a fetus" framing is weird, but effective. The writing is delightful. It's advertised as a take on "Hamlet," and it is, kind of, but it doesn't stick all that closely to the story and it has a very nice independent story of its own. And Rory Kinnear is one of the best narrators on Audible; I could listen to him read the phone book and I'd probably like it. This selection is probably not for everyone, but it's five-star all the way around for me.
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- NG Shopper
- 12-26-16
A very different murder story.
The narrator was fabulous. Not sure I would have gotten through book without listening! A dark story that was told from a most unusual point if view....the unborn child of the protagonist.
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- Cariola
- 09-16-16
McEwan Does It Again
McEwan's latest novel (more a novella, really) is a wickedly funny riff on Hamlet. "So here I am, upside down in a woman," the narrator--a fetus--begins. (He's "bound in a nutshell," so to speak.) If you're going to enjoy this book, you have to be willing to go with this premise; if you keep asking how a fetus could have such an extensive vocabulary and sophisticated thoughts, or how he could know so much about what is going on in the world outside the womb, you'll miss the fun.
Trudy is roughly nine months pregnant. Although she separated from her husband John, a not very successful poet and publisher, she still lives in the dilapidated family home in London that he inherited., while John has moved to a flat in Shoreditch. Trudy initially told him that they needed time apart to make the marriage work--but she is deep into an affair with his younger brother Claude, a real estate developer (who has about the same level of class as the current Republican presidential candidate). Despite her advanced pregnancy, Trudy and Claude engage in regular and vigorous sex, leaving our narrator to worry that he will have his fontanel poked in or will absorb some essence of the deplorable Claude into his being. He does, however, enjoy the finer wines that his mother imbibes and has developed quite the connoisseur's palate.
The trouble begins when John announces that he knows about and accepts Trudy and Claude's relationship, confesses that he has a new lover of his own, and states that he wants to move back into the family home. The plot thickens as Trudy and Claude decide that John must go--permanently. And our narrator is positioned to eavesdrop on their plans to murder his father and give him up for adoption. If Shakespeare's Hamlet was hampered by indecision, well, this protagonist is even more incapacitated by his unborn state. Literally and emotionally attached to his mother (he experiences every hormonal and adrenal shift), he is nonetheless horrified by the plot against his father's life and by the thought of Trudy giving him up to live with the detested Claude.
In addition to the obvious parallels to Hamlet, McEwan weaves well-known lines from the play into Nutshell, although the words are sometimes put into the mouths of unexpected characters and sometimes subtly changed, a word here or there. If you're familiar with the play, the effect is delightful--reminiscent of the way in which famous lines by the Bard keep popping up in Tom Stoppard's screenplay for "Shakespeare in Love." And McEwan brings it all to a climax that, in its own context, rivals the final scene of Hamlet. "The rest is chaos."
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26 people found this helpful
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- Diane Proia
- 03-09-17
If you want to read a thriller that brings to mind an exquisite Bordeaux....
Then Ian McEwan's "Nutshell" is for you. Straying from the typical 3rd person voice - to "first" person with a twist (no spoilers here) Mr. McEwan uses words and prose like a gourmet chef uses premium ingredients and fine presentation in their cooking.
Masaharu Morimoto meet Ian McEwan- both masters of their domain! I devoured this novel as I would lobster with wasabi pepper sauce at Nobu in NYC. Enjoy every word - ps (spoiler alert!!!). Everyone gets their just desserts in the end. A satisfying ending.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Skylark
- 08-23-17
Strange and beautiful
I don't want to color anyone's expectations for this book. I will say it is wonderful, lyrical, and yes, strange and that reading it has made me re-evaluate my taste in reading. It is far past the time that I surrender my juvenile likes and dislikes.
The narrator vanished into the story, which is how I feel it should be. For a different story I might prefer a more theatrically oriented reading but the narrator let the words speak.
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