
Penance
A Novel
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By:
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Eliza Clark
About this listen
One of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2023
“Eliza Clark’s writing embraces the socially unacceptable and wryly explores themes of gender, power, and violence.”—Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023
“Chilling, clever, and unputdownable.”—Guardian
From the author of the cult hit Boy Parts comes a chilling, brilliantly told story of murder among a group of teenage girls—a powerful and disturbing novel as piercing in its portrait of young women as Emma Cline’s The Girls.
On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.
Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
But how much of the story is true?
Compulsively readable, provocative, and disturbing, Penance is a cleverly nuanced, unflinching exploration of gender, class, and power that raises troubling questions about the media and our obsession with true crime while bringing to light the depraved side of human nature and our darkest proclivities.
©2023 Eliza Clark (P)2023 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience.
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What a fun romp!
- By Barbara S on 10-10-23
By: Mona Awad
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Life Ceremony
- Stories
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi, Nancy Wu, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
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Interesting concept but boring story
- By Roberta Marques on 09-06-24
By: Sayaka Murata
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Paradise Rot
- A Novel
- By: Jenny Hval, Marjam Idriss - translator
- Narrated by: Brie Jackman
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Jo is in a strange new country for university and having a more peculiar time than most. In a house with no walls, shared with a woman who has no boundaries, she finds her strange home coming to life in unimaginable ways. Jo's sensitivity and all her senses become increasingly heightened and fraught, as the lines between bodies and plants, dreaming and wakefulness, blur and mesh.
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Wrong Voice
- By Orville on 08-18-24
By: Jenny Hval, and others
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Ripe
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Rose Etter
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of unhoused people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.
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EG, Sorry to say it doesn't get any better
- By Alexis_Vandew on 08-18-23
By: Sarah Rose Etter
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Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.
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Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
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The Girls
- A Novel
- By: Emma Cline
- Narrated by: Cady McClain
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader.
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I'm not even through the first chapter
- By leelee8888 on 06-14-16
By: Emma Cline
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My Dark Vanessa
- A Novel
- By: Kate Elizabeth Russell
- Narrated by: Grace Gummer
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, 15-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful 42-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: Remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past.
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I apologize
- By Judy George on 03-13-20
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Voice Like a Hyacinth
- A Novel
- By: Mallory Pearson
- Narrated by: Kira Fixx
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Art student Jo Kozak and her fellow classmates and best friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are one another’s muses—so close they have their own language and so devoted to the craft that they’ll do anything to keep their inspiration alive. Even if it means naively resorting to the occult to unlock their creativity and to curse their esteemed, if notoriously creepy, professor. They soon learn the horrible price to be paid for such a transgressive ritual.
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Overly verbose
- By Erin on 03-30-25
By: Mallory Pearson
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All's Well
- By: Mona Awad
- Narrated by: Sophie Amoss
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now, she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised and cost her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.
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Mixed bag but excellent performance
- By stuffbuyer on 09-22-21
By: Mona Awad
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Milk Fed
- By: Melissa Broder
- Narrated by: Melissa Broder
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Rachel is 24, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control through obsessive food rituals while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting - until her therapist encourages her to take a 90-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her.
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Funny and uncomfortable
- By Kayla on 04-01-21
By: Melissa Broder
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In the Dream House
- A Memoir
- By: Carmen Maria Machado
- Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope - the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman....
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Devastatingly Beautiful
- By SeattleBookLover on 02-04-20
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Earthlings
- A Novel
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth.
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Intriguing but disturbing
- By C. Parham on 01-01-21
By: Sayaka Murata
What listeners say about Penance
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- Lflores
- 12-14-23
The characters
Grasped my attention at the beginning of the book, but as the book progressed I began to loose interest in the story in general.
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- Maeve
- 07-28-24
I liked it
What can I say I was a fan I liked this book I like Eliza Clark I liked the performance :) thank you!
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- Anonymous User
- 12-10-23
too much of the r slur and a few indelicate moments
Overall, I thought this was really interesting. However, I did find the fact that the author made the narrator a middle aged guy a bit strange considering the content and the story. Sorta detached from real girlhood in the way Steven King’s “Carrie” is. Also, I know the author was poking fun at gen z cancel culture and online culture, but I found her repeated use of the r slur offensive. I just think it was unnecessary. Overall, I’m not sure the author was truly any more profound than the podcasts she claims to be making fun of, but I did still find value and interest in it, despite its slightly strange insistence on moral high ground.
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- mina
- 10-04-23
she did it again!
left me unsettled and confused as to who the “true” villain(s) really is. lots to think about
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1 person found this helpful
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- Hannah
- 11-03-23
❤️❤️❤️
Nothing but love here! I really felt like I got to know all the ins and outs of each character, even the smaller ones. Kept my interest all the way through. Narration was great. The scenes played out like a movie. I loved Eliza Clark from Boy Parts, but I loved Penance even more. I can’t wait to see what she comes out with next.
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- Cassette collector
- 10-12-24
Could have been good, turned into a dumb person lecture
Started off good, but was a waste of time in the end. This book seems like it’s going to make some interesting points about true crime and girlhood, then just doesn’t. It has too many threads and by the end decides to focus on the least interesting ones when it comes to these themes and the characters we get to know. Instead, the author trots out the bone cold take that maybe true crime entertainment might not always be moral and fans should feel bad about that. Even this would be fine, I guess, if not mixed with unneeded and at times hypocritical details, such as needlessly explaining internet slang, jokes made about nuerodivergent and queer people to “lighten the mood,” and a time wastingly detailed account of a fictional school shooting that has literally nothing to do with the story in the book. It’s disappointing, because the characters are well written, so to have them and their story revealed as fairly shallow felt, as another reviewer said, like a waste of brain cells. But, I guess when an author makes the whole project of her book to finger wag people for not being compassionate, then turns around and makes fun of teenagers on tumblr, you can’t expect something from a mind that thinks that deeply about what’s actually around her
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- Taylor T. Cassidy
- 10-09-23
Thought it would be better.
The premise sounds really interesting, but she gets a bit bogged down by the details. It was slow, and all the juicy stuff takes place at the beginning. Not the worst thing I’ve read lately, but the hype is a little much for what you actually get.
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- zoe
- 08-29-24
Still good!
I liked boy parts better, but I found this to be clever and interesting. The end chapter really made it. I wanted more of the girl’s perspectives and loved when we got those, not even because of how it drives the story, just because they’re well written and fun to listen to
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- Vickie
- 10-27-24
Just okay
I am completely indifferent to this book. There were times when the events in the book stirred my emotions, but mostly, my feelings remained stagnant.
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- brooke
- 10-12-23
waste of time
hands down, the worst book i’ve listened to on audible. there are six or seven story lines to keep straight. agreed with another review that the author gets lost in trying to be detailed or trying so hard to appeal to teenage language and behaviors. way too much time spent on this. totally distracts away from the story line, which seemed exciting and a real story i could read about. you get the whole jist of the book in the paragraph description and spend hours wasting brain cells. the whole book is fluff.
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