
Orbital
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

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $13.75
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Sarah Naudi
-
By:
-
Samantha Harvey
About this listen
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024
Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours
"Ravishingly beautiful."—Joshua Ferris, New York Times
A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos, and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.
Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet.
©2023 Samantha Harvey (P)2023 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
- A Novel
- By: Michiko Aoyama
- Narrated by: Hanako Footman, Susan Momoko Hingley, Kenichiro Thomson, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose. In Komachi’s unique book recommendations they will find just what they need to achieve their dreams.
-
-
The power of honesty and an open mind
- By ili pika on 09-10-23
By: Michiko Aoyama
-
Making It So
- A Memoir
- By: Patrick Stewart
- Narrated by: Patrick Stewart
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From his acclaimed stage triumphs to his legendary onscreen work in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, Sir Patrick Stewart has captivated audiences around the world and across multiple generations with his indelible command of stage and screen. Now, he presents his long-awaited memoir, Making It So, a revealing portrait of an artist whose astonishing life—from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire, England, to the heights of Hollywood and worldwide acclaim—proves a story as exuberant, definitive, and enduring as the author himself.
-
-
Incredible! So much more than a memoir
- By Jason on 10-04-23
By: Patrick Stewart
-
North Woods
- A Novel
- By: Daniel Mason
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.
-
-
An American Masterpiece
- By Psumissyh on 09-21-23
By: Daniel Mason
-
Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
-
So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Bee Sting
- A Novel
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, and others
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
-
-
Bone Clocks meets Jonathan Franzen
- By Cranson on 10-26-23
By: Paul Murray
-
Quietly Hostile
- Essays
- By: Samantha Irby
- Narrated by: Samantha Irby
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. Irby got a lot of weird emails about Carrie Bradshaw, and not only is there diarrhea to avoid, but now—anaphylactic shock. She is turned away from restaurants for being inappropriately dressed and looks for the best ways to cope, i.e., reveling in the offerings of QVC and adopting a deranged pandemic dog.
-
-
Extremely disappointed
- By Diana in Michigan on 07-20-23
By: Samantha Irby
-
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
- A Novel
- By: Michiko Aoyama
- Narrated by: Hanako Footman, Susan Momoko Hingley, Kenichiro Thomson, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What are you looking for? So asks Tokyo’s most enigmatic librarian. For Sayuri Komachi is able to sense exactly what each visitor to her library is searching for and provide just the book recommendation to help them find it. A restless retail assistant looks to gain new skills, a mother tries to overcome demotion at work after maternity leave, a conscientious accountant yearns to open an antique store, a recently retired salaryman searches for newfound purpose. In Komachi’s unique book recommendations they will find just what they need to achieve their dreams.
-
-
The power of honesty and an open mind
- By ili pika on 09-10-23
By: Michiko Aoyama
-
Making It So
- A Memoir
- By: Patrick Stewart
- Narrated by: Patrick Stewart
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From his acclaimed stage triumphs to his legendary onscreen work in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, Sir Patrick Stewart has captivated audiences around the world and across multiple generations with his indelible command of stage and screen. Now, he presents his long-awaited memoir, Making It So, a revealing portrait of an artist whose astonishing life—from his humble beginnings in Yorkshire, England, to the heights of Hollywood and worldwide acclaim—proves a story as exuberant, definitive, and enduring as the author himself.
-
-
Incredible! So much more than a memoir
- By Jason on 10-04-23
By: Patrick Stewart
-
North Woods
- A Novel
- By: Daniel Mason
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.
-
-
An American Masterpiece
- By Psumissyh on 09-21-23
By: Daniel Mason
-
Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
-
So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Bee Sting
- A Novel
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, and others
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
-
-
Bone Clocks meets Jonathan Franzen
- By Cranson on 10-26-23
By: Paul Murray
-
Quietly Hostile
- Essays
- By: Samantha Irby
- Narrated by: Samantha Irby
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Samantha Irby’s career has taken her to new heights. She dodges calls from Hollywood and flop sweats on the red carpet at premieres (well, one premiere). But nothing is ever as it seems online, where she can crop out all the ugly parts. Irby got a lot of weird emails about Carrie Bradshaw, and not only is there diarrhea to avoid, but now—anaphylactic shock. She is turned away from restaurants for being inappropriately dressed and looks for the best ways to cope, i.e., reveling in the offerings of QVC and adopting a deranged pandemic dog.
-
-
Extremely disappointed
- By Diana in Michigan on 07-20-23
By: Samantha Irby
-
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
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
-
Great Circle
- A Novel
- By: Maggie Shipstead
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Alex McKenna
- Length: 25 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe.
-
-
So glad I was drawn to this book.
- By timbo on 05-23-21
By: Maggie Shipstead
-
The Island of Missing Trees
- A Novel
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Daphne Kouma, Amira Ghazalla
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish.
-
-
WOW! What a great story and narration!
- By Marcy on 12-02-21
By: Elif Shafak
-
2001
- A Space Odyssey
- By: Arthur C. Clarke
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It has been 40 years since the publication of this classic science-fiction novel that changed the way we look at the stars and ourselves. From the savannas of Africa at the dawn of mankind to the rings of Saturn as man adventures to the outer rim of our solar system, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a journey unlike any other.
-
-
The Movie Makes More Sense Now
- By Douglas on 12-10-08
By: Arthur C. Clarke
-
This Is Happiness
- By: Niall Williams
- Narrated by: Dermot Crowley
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.
-
-
Poetry disguised as Prose
- By bobgreenberger on 09-26-20
By: Niall Williams
-
Bewilderment
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Theo Byrne is a promising young astrobiologist who has found a way to search for life on other planets dozens of light years away. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. His son, Robin, is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, adores animals, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures. He is also on the verge of being expelled from third grade for smashing his friend's face with a metal thermos.
-
-
Not Usually a Richard Powers Fan
- By Billy on 09-28-21
By: Richard Powers
-
Lovecraft's Monsters
- By: Neil Gaiman, Ellen Datlow - editor
- Narrated by: Bernard Clark
- Length: 15 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Prepare to meet the wicked progeny of the master of modern horror. In Lovecraft's Monsters, H. P. Lovecraft's most famous creations--Cthulhu, Shoggoths, Deep Ones, Elder Things, Yog-Sothoth, and more--appear in all their terrifying glory. Each story is a gripping new take on a classic Lovecraftian creature. Contributors include such literary luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Karl Edward Wagner, Elizabeth Bear, and Nick Mamatas.
-
-
PURPLE WARMTH
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 02-04-17
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
-
The Legacy of Heorot
- By: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Best-selling science fiction superstars Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle combine their talents with those of Steven Barnes in an extraordinary adventure of humankind’s first outpost in the farthest reaches of space. Light years from Earth, colonists land on a planet they name Avalon. It seems like a paradise—until native creatures savagely attack. It will take every bit of intelligence, courage, and military-style discipline to survive.
-
-
Great read!
- By Thomas on 12-05-12
By: Larry Niven, and others
-
How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)
- Poetry
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 2 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us.
-
-
A Joy to Read
- By Lee Moderow on 05-20-21
-
World of Ptavvs
- By: Larry Niven
- Narrated by: Bradford Hastings
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing quite prepared telepath Larry Greenberg for mind-to-mind contact with an alien. In the interest of science, Larry tapped the mind of Kzanol - and that was his first mistake. Kzanol was a thrint from a distant galaxy. He had been trapped on Earth in a time-stasis field for two billion years. Now he was on the loose, and Larry knew everything he was thinking. Thrints lived to plunder and enslave lesser planets - and what the planet Kzanol had in mind was Earth!
-
-
How annoying!
- By 1phsteacher on 11-22-20
By: Larry Niven
-
The White Book
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, Deborah Smith
- Narrated by: Jennifer Kim
- Length: 1 hr and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us.
-
-
Nobel deserved
- By tygerd on 05-23-25
By: Han Kang, and others
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
In Ascension
- By: Martin MacInnes
- Narrated by: Freya Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
-
-
Goes everywhere and nowhere
- By Colette DeHarpporte on 05-24-25
By: Martin MacInnes
-
Growth
- A History and a Reckoning
- By: Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: Daniel Susskind
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities, and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
-
-
Looking for a conclusion that will sell books
- By DCS on 10-05-24
By: Daniel Susskind
-
The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.”
-
-
Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
-
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
-
Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Horrible Narration, ok storyl
- By bkwrm1 on 05-11-25
By: Dinaw Mengestu
-
Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
-
-
Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
-
In Ascension
- By: Martin MacInnes
- Narrated by: Freya Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
-
-
Goes everywhere and nowhere
- By Colette DeHarpporte on 05-24-25
By: Martin MacInnes
-
Growth
- A History and a Reckoning
- By: Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: Daniel Susskind
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities, and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
-
-
Looking for a conclusion that will sell books
- By DCS on 10-05-24
By: Daniel Susskind
-
The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.”
-
-
Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
-
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
-
Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Horrible Narration, ok storyl
- By bkwrm1 on 05-11-25
By: Dinaw Mengestu
-
Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
-
-
Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
-
The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.
-
-
This One Should Win
- By K. Bella Bestia on 10-13-24
-
Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
-
-
Time of research
- By ChiChi's Rule on 05-06-25
-
The Shapeless Unease
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Samantha Harvey
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Shapeless Unease is Harvey's darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death, and the will to survive, from "this generation's Virginia Woolf" (Telegraph).
By: Samantha Harvey
-
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
-
Last Summer in the City
- A Novel
- By: Gianfranco Calligarich, Howard Curtis - translator, Andre Aciman - foreword
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a city smothering under the summer sun and an overdose of la dolce vita, Leo Gazarra spends his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between run-down hotels and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends, without whom he would probably starve. At 30, he’s still drifting: between jobs that mean nothing to him, between human relationships both ephemeral and frayed. Everyone he knows wants to graduate, get married, get rich - but not him. He has no ambitions whatsoever.
-
-
must check out
- By Anonymous User on 09-28-22
By: Gianfranco Calligarich, and others
-
Station Breaker
- Station Breaker Series, Book 1
- By: Andrew Mayne
- Narrated by: Kyle McCarley
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Astronaut David Dixon's first mission to space goes horribly awry when a gunfight breaks out on a Russian space station. He finds himself making an emergency landing from orbit and becomes the most wanted man on Earth. Desperate to unravel the plot he's found himself in, he takes his pursuers on a wild chase from space to the backstreets of Rio and beyond. Dixon's survival relies on his skills as a pilot and willingness to do whatever it takes.
-
-
Good story, but frustrating
- By Fred G on 12-21-17
By: Andrew Mayne
-
Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.
-
-
One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
-
The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
-
-
Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
-
Intermezzo
- A Novel
- By: Sally Rooney
- Narrated by: Éanna Hardwicke
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret.
-
-
I felt a lot of empathy towards the excellently developed characters.
- By Hanoverian girl on 09-29-24
By: Sally Rooney
-
Paddy Clarke Ha-Ha-Ha
- By: Roddy Doyle
- Narrated by: Aiden Gillen
- Length: 2 hrs and 50 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Patrick Clarke is a 10-year-old boy trying to make sense of his world. He is confused. His Ma and Da fight too much. School seems like a joke. And love, though it has a good reputation, seems pretty cruel. Paddy sees everything, but has trouble understanding it all. His story is an exuberant romp through the triumphs, indignities, and troublemaking detours of an Irish childhood.
-
-
wrong order
- By Yuliya Melnyk on 01-31-16
By: Roddy Doyle
-
Stone Yard Devotional
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
-
-
A profound inward journey
- By Kathlene barrett on 02-17-25
By: Charlotte Wood
-
Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
-
-
Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
Many passages to really think about, terrible audiobook
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
a meditation more than a novel
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wonderful
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One Day
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
More of a meditation that a story
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Booker winner? Really?
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Perspective of inner and outer space
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The poetry
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Beautiful
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Poetic, lyrical, sublime.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.