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Narrated by:
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Richard Flanagan
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By:
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Richard Flanagan
About this listen
THE WASHINGTON POST'S TOP TEN NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR PRIX FÉMINA ETRANGER • LONGLISTED FOR PRIX MÉDICIS • An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with his life and family, and the role of fiction in our times
"Spectacular. . . A book that will have an overwhelming effect on readers.”—Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island
Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life...
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.
At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
©2024 Richard Flanagan (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A soulful book [that] reverberates long after reading. Richard Flanagan’s writing talent is something almost otherworldly.”—Baillie Gifford Prize judging panel
“The writing exerts an irresistible power.”—Chris Power, New York Times Book Review
“Highly original. . . . Richard Flanagan’s brilliant Question 7 defies categorization.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
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Story
Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write the book. But Ziggy swiftly proves almost impossible to work with, and worse, Kif finds himself being pulled into an odd, hypnotic, and ever-closer orbit of all things Ziggy.
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Best performance ever!
- By Lawrence H. Diller, M.D. on 07-07-18
By: Richard Flanagan
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Sacred Hunger
- By: Barry Unsworth
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 22 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son, who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew, who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny.
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Wise, Perceptive, Heart-breaking
- By S. Coldsmith on 04-16-16
By: Barry Unsworth
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Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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Toxic
- The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: Richard Flanagan
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a triumph of marketing, the Tasmanian salmon industry has for decades succeeded in presenting itself as world's best practice and its product as healthy and clean, grown in environmentally pristine conditions. But what are we eating when we eat Tasmanian salmon? Richard Flanagan's expose of the salmon farming industry in Tasmania is chilling. In the way that Rachel Carson took on the pesticide industry in her groundbreaking book Silent Spring, Flanagan tears open an industry that is as secretive as its practices are destructive and its product disturbing.
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Shocking revelations
- By Mike Lynskey on 09-11-21
By: Richard Flanagan
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Immaculate Conception
- A Novel
- By: Ling Ling Huang
- Narrated by: Carolyn Kang
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her. Mathilde makes art that feels truly original, and Enka—trying hard to prove herself in this fiercely competitive world—pours everything into their friendship. But when Mathilde’s fame and success cause her to begin drifting away, Enka becomes desperate to keep her close.
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Art World Jennifer’s Body Toxic Friendship Sci Fi Thriller
- By Stephanie on 05-22-25
By: Ling Ling Huang
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Milkman
- By: Anna Burns
- Narrated by: Bríd Brennan
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes "interesting" - the last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed, and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is a story of inaction with enormous consequences.
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Like the writing, not the audio issues
- By Criticalthinker on 12-31-18
By: Anna Burns
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Wild Houses
- By: Colin Barrett
- Narrated by: Damian Gildea
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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Insider look at a small crime
- By Probably did on 03-24-24
By: Colin Barrett
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Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
- By: Kylie Lee Baker
- Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. But none of that seems so terrible when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer shouted two words: bat eater. So the bloody messes don’t really bother Cora—she’s more bothered by the germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden viruses in every corner, and the bite marks on her coffee table.
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Heavy, scary & great!
- By KJBonBon on 05-16-25
By: Kylie Lee Baker
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The Retirement Plan
- A Novel
- By: Sue Hincenbergs
- Narrated by: Kiiri Sandy, John Pirhalla
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After thirty years of friendship, Pam dreams of her perfect retirement with Nancy, Shalisa, Marlene, and their husbands—until their husbands pool their funds for an investment that goes terribly wrong. Suddenly, their golden years are looking as dreary as their marriages. But when the women discover their husbands have seven-figure life insurance policies, a new dream forms. And this time, they need a hitman.
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Feel good fun
- By J. Kapcheck on 05-26-25
By: Sue Hincenbergs
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I Heard Her Call My Name
- A Memoir of Transition
- By: Lucy Sante
- Narrated by: Lucy Sante
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.
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I'm so glad I read this book
- By Judy in Salt Lake on 03-09-25
By: Lucy Sante
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Orbital
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Sarah Naudi
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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Dull
- By ELLEZEE on 02-03-24
By: Samantha Harvey
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Death Takes Me
- A Novel
- By: Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers - translator, Sarah Booker - translator
- Narrated by: Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, Ines del Castillo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
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boring, long and tedious.
- By CONNIE WOODUL on 04-27-25
By: Cristina Rivera Garza, and others
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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
Who loves longer?
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Weaving storylines
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The emotional honesty and careful description of events.
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Banality
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