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Salvage the Bones
- A Novel
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
Bloomsbury presents Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, read by January LaVoy.
Winner of the National Book Award
A New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century
An Atlantic Great American Novel of the Last 100 Years
"A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written . . . Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s expectations." —Parul Sehgal, New York Times
The National Book Award-winning novel from the author of Let Us Descend and Men We Reaped—a gritty but tender story of family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family—motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
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- By meanwhile on 09-18-18
By: Taylor Brown
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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
- An African Childhood
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.
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An African Childhood of Harrowing Proportions
- By Sara on 10-12-15
By: Alexandra Fuller
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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
- By: David Wroblewski
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Filled with breathtaking scenes, the elemental north woods, the sweep of seasons, an iconic American barn, a fateful vision rendered in the falling rain. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is a meditation on the limits of language and what lies beyond, a brilliantly inventive retelling of an ancient story, and an epic tale of devotion, betrayal, and courage in the American heartland.
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Devastatingly Dark Story
- By Knitme23 on 02-07-15
By: David Wroblewski
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The Necromancer's House
- By: Christopher Buehlman
- Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.
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Finally - Magic / Fantasy Novel for adults.
- By David on 04-23-14
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Bleeding Violet
- By: Dia Reeves
- Narrated by: Suzy Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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With a head plagued by hallucinations, a medicine cabinet full of pills, and a closet stuffed with frilly, violet dresses, Hanna's tired of being the outcast, the weird girl, the freak. So she runs away to Portero, Texas, in search of a new home. But Portero is a stranger town than Hanna expects. She discovers secrets that would terrify any normal soul. Good thing for Hanna, she's far from normal. As this crazy girl meets an even crazier town, only two things are certain: Anything can happen, and no one is safe.
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Didn't like it. Sorry, not sorry
- By Cii'Em on 02-15-16
By: Dia Reeves
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Ninth Ward
- By: Jewell Parker Rhodes
- Narrated by: Sisi Aisha Johnson
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed novelist Jewell Parker Rhodes is an American Book Award winner. Rhodes’ Ninth Ward is a stunning tale set against the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. Orphaned 12-year-old Lanesha lives with Mama Ya-Ya, the midwife who birthed her, in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Although Lanesha is different—able to see ghosts like that of her dead mother—she never feels unloved, an empowerment that helps her survive the devastating storm.
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The only thing worse than narrator is story itself
- By Erin on 02-13-13
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Blackbirds
- Miriam Black, Book 1
- By: Chuck Wendig
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Miriam Black knows when you will die. Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days he will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. No matter what she does, she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.
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Not for the faint of heart or kids but exciting
- By Steph on 04-07-14
By: Chuck Wendig
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I Will Send Rain
- A Novel
- By: Rae Meadows
- Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Bell can't escape the dust. It's in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and in the corners of her children's dry, cracked lips. It's 1934, and the Bell farm in Mulehead, Oklahoma, is struggling as the earliest storms of the Dust Bowl descend. The wheat harvests are drying out, and people are packing up their belongings as storms lay waste to the Great Plains.
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We've seen pictures of the Dust Bowl
- By Henwhisperer on 10-12-16
By: Rae Meadows
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The New Moon's Arms
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Gin Hammond
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.
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What a joy
- By newmoon on 07-05-19
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Donnybrook
- A Novel
- By: Frank Bill
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The Donnybrook is a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held on a thousand-acre plot out in the sticks of southern Indiana. Twenty fighters. One wire-fence ring. Fight until only one man is left standing while a rowdy festival of onlookers - drunk and high on whatever’s on offer - bet on the fighters. Jarhead is a desperate man who’d do just about anything to feed his children. He’s also the toughest fighter in southeastern Kentucky, and he’s convinced that his ticket to a better life is one last fight with a cash prize so big it’ll solve all his problems.
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Lost Lives in Narcotic Sludge
- By Bob on 03-17-13
By: Frank Bill
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Hour of the Bees
- By: Lindsay Eagar
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina - Carol - is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge.
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Love it!
- By Lucy Manetti on 04-10-17
By: Lindsay Eagar
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Mixed Feelings
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10:04
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
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White Teeth
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
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By: Zadie Smith
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A Brief History of Seven Killings
- By: Marlon James
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Cherise Boothe, Dwight Bacquie, and others
- Length: 26 hrs
- Unabridged
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Winner, The Man Booker Prize, 2015 Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters - assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts - A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s.
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A Tough Read
- By KP on 05-07-16
By: Marlon James
What listeners say about Salvage the Bones
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Stevie W.
- 01-21-23
a beautiful portrait of life, family, and survival
the voice of the reader is superb, just the right amount of southern affectation. the writing has a unique lyricism and rhythm. the story ended and I wanted more, the characters are so rich and so loveable, simple human beings striving under an angry sky. a beautiful harrowing personal intimate look at surviving hurricane Katrina. I love that the Katrina is not the focus of the story but rather the backdrop, in this we get to glimpse into the special, beautiful- ugly of the lives of this family. it evoked a very gentle stubborn ache in my soul. I'm grateful for having read it.
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- Marie Ariel
- 08-21-22
Beautifully written, hard to read
The characters are strong and loving individuals who have a very hard life as very poor people — and that’s before they are assaulted by Hurricane Katrina. Wonderfully written descriptions of some extremely painful scenes.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-13-23
Phenomenal
Here I am two years later, leaving a review. I feel even more compelled to leave a review because of the very harsh and ‘pity party’ comments left here, which are not really reviews, just opinions. I am embarrassed by them. I hope the author never gets to see them.
A strong piece of fiction, based on a real story, is written to make you FEEL! When a black author can make me, a white middle-aged privileged female, weep in compassion and understanding, then her writing is phenomenal. Jasmyn has done a superb job. I loved all the metaphors. I loved the Medea ‘story with the story.’ Genius.
People, If you want happy endings, just read a fairytale. This is based on a real story where there were no happy endings, especially when people live in deep poverty, and are forsaken by their community. The strength, fortitude, and connectedness of the family was very obvious. The fact that she picked the most vulnerable of the whole group, a young pregnant teen, to be the narrator was genius, especially with the connection to China and the fact that their mother had passed away. I did not think the dog scenes were overly graphic. This is a real life, people! If you can’t handle reading a book because it’s too depressing, can you imagine having to have lived through that?? In fact, research shows that reading tough fiction makes a reader more compassionate.
When Big Henry said that the baby does have a father, many fathers, I wept For his kindness.
The narrator was phenomenal too. I am grateful. I will highly recommend it. Our book club was moved and challenged. The news stories never gave the full depth and breadth of the horror and devastation.
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- Stella Vickland Davis
- 03-25-23
Really Great Read
I had to read this for a class in college and it was very well written and narrated. Made me tear up a couple of times and I was very invested in the characters. Would recommend.
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- Cindi Gray
- 12-12-23
Edge of your seat, listening 
You know how it is when you’re listening to an audiobook and it’s so good you know you’ve got other things to do that you need to take care of and not listen but you can’t stop? This is that book. 
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- Nancy E. Michael
- 06-11-22
A literary wonder
The strong storyline and rich characters are elevated by the language and metaphors used to tell the story. This book is not for the squeamish as there is blood and sex, but I was enraptured by it.
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- LAUREN S JEFFERSON
- 01-15-23
Beautiful and Heartbreaking
Narrator January LaVoy read Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones with the depth of a true storyteller. The story was rich, engaging, and heartbreaking.
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- andrea frantz
- 01-10-24
Jesmyn Ward is a lyrical writer.
Ward’s description throughout this heartbreaking story puts the reader in the eye of the storm.
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- ANN BURNS
- 08-15-24
Poetic and poignant
I really enjoyed the visceral imagery of the metaphors and the poignant symbolism. It alludes classical tales to a very real event that people lived through recently, deepening its meaning, and connecting catastrophes and the human lives impacted by them throughout human history.
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- Sarah Russell
- 08-20-21
Harrowing and Tender Tribute to Family
A triumph of a heartbreaking piece, perfectly constructed and told that leaves the reader reeling between celebrating and grieving. the novel follows a long lead up in the days leading up to Katrina about a poor family, basketball, dog breeding and fighting, alcoholism, and growing up without a mom. Then, Katrina strikes and the novel become frightening and intense. the denouement of the storm and the story celebrates the strength of families and mothers.
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