
Scaffolding
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Lauren Elkin
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By:
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Lauren Elkin
About this listen
A novel of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time.
After a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work, obsessing instead over a kitchen renovation and befriending a new neighbor-a younger woman called Clementine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective.
Forty years earlier, in the same apartment, Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology and attending feminist meetings and Jacques Lacan's infamous seminars. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood.
Two couples in two separate but similar times-set against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy-face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes hold communal memories of all their inhabitants and their stories; about the bonds we create, and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways people we've loved live on in us.
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Story
After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.
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Super depressing but extremely well written and narrated
- By Lenny C. Husen on 03-07-24
By: Claudia Piñeiro, and others
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The Coin
- A Novel
- By: Yasmin Zaher
- Narrated by: Sarah Agha
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Coin’s narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory, and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start. In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in an intercontinental scheme reselling Birkin bags.
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Interview of author on podcast piqued interest
- By amybarnard on 08-03-24
By: Yasmin Zaher
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The Book of Love
- A Novel
- By: Kelly Link
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 23 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In the acclaimed first novel from short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle.
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Great book.
- By T on 04-06-25
By: Kelly Link
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Bad Habit
- A Novel
- By: Alana S. Portero, Mara Faye Lethem - translator
- Narrated by: Alexandra Grey
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant narrator, Bad Habit casts a trans woman’s trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, Alana S. Portero’s protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes–the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the '80s and '90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city's night scene– she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, herself.
By: Alana S. Portero, and others
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American Rapture
- By: CJ Leede
- Narrated by: Moniqua Plante
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A virus is spreading across America, transforming the infected and making them feral with lust. Sophie, a good Catholic girl, must traverse the hellscape of the midwest to try to find her family while the world around her burns. Along the way she discovers there are far worse fates than dying a virgin… The end times are coming.
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Lord, let's survive the apocalypse as a horny teen
- By Megan on 11-02-24
By: CJ Leede
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Greek Lessons
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, Deborah Smith - translator, Emily Yae Won - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung, Earl T. Kim
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it's the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.
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Deeply rewarding
- By Pedro on 04-07-25
By: Han Kang, and others
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Eileen
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city.
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Strange, unsettling, but engrossing
- By S. Yates on 01-09-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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Our Evenings
- A Novel
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Prasanna Puwanarajah
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dave Win, the son of a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
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Sublime Collaboration
- By Phip Herrick on 11-20-24
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On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
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The Perfect Book
- By Severian on 02-16-25
By: Solvej Balle
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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves.
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outstanding, his best
- By Dakini on 11-26-24
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Crush
- A Novel
- By: Ada Calhoun
- Narrated by: Robyn Maryke
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
She’s happy and settled and productive and content in her full life—a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of “husband” and “wife” force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose. Using the author’s personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes.
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insufferable main characters
- By Brian on 05-25-25
By: Ada Calhoun
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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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.”
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Can't say it's good
- By Moraz on 12-22-24
By: Aysegül Savas
I love that the book examines relationships without creating a kind of fishbowl effect. The world goes on around the relationships, and in some way they seem vastly significant, and in some way not at all. This is what I’m always hoping for in literature, and it’s been missing from a lot of the recent “dissection”books. It reminds me of Jenny Offill’s work.
Wonderful
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Young woman’s perspective, not for me
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