
Second Place
A Novel
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 $14.99
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Kate Fleetwood
-
By:
-
Rachel Cusk
About this listen
A haunting fable of art, family, and fate from the author of the Outline trilogy.
A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family. Powerfully drawn to his paintings, she believes his vision might penetrate the mystery at the center of her life. But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence itself becomes an enigma - and disrupts the calm of her secluded household.
Second Place, Rachel Cusk’s electrifying new novel, is a study of female fate and male privilege, the geometries of human relationships, and the moral questions that animate our lives. It reminds us of art’s capacity to uplift - and to destroy.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
©2021 Rachel Cusk (P)2021 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
The Last Supper
- A Summer in Italy
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.
-
-
Absolute
- By Veronica on 07-08-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Pure Colour
- A Novel
- By: Sheila Heti
- Narrated by: Sheila Heti
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her.
-
-
Nothing else like it
- By Teri Kline on 03-20-22
By: Sheila Heti
-
The Country Life
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her.
-
-
Excellent, loved this listen
- By Nina Sreshta on 10-10-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
No One Is Talking About This
- A Novel
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void.
-
-
Funny, moving, glad to have read it
- By Terra on 05-26-21
-
Coventry
- Essays
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.
-
-
This review is biased
- By Paul on 05-16-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Copenhagen Trilogy
- Childhood; Youth; Dependency
- By: Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally - translator, Michael Favala Goldman - translator
- Narrated by: Stine Wintlev
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This program contains all three volumes of her memoirs.
-
-
Masterpiece
- By David Batcher on 03-21-21
By: Tove Ditlevsen, and others
-
The Last Supper
- A Summer in Italy
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca Trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.
-
-
Absolute
- By Veronica on 07-08-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Pure Colour
- A Novel
- By: Sheila Heti
- Narrated by: Sheila Heti
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her.
-
-
Nothing else like it
- By Teri Kline on 03-20-22
By: Sheila Heti
-
The Country Life
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stella leaves London for a small village in Sussex, she hopes that the country life will be conducive to her journey toward self-discovery. She'll have no more insipid lover, dead end job, or controlling parents to endure. But, as an au pair for a dispiriting family, she's stalked by bad-tempered people, misfortune from weather and wildlife, and unwelcome suitors. Spunky and resourceful, she manages to keep a stiff upper lip, even when her darkest secret manages to catch up with her.
-
-
Excellent, loved this listen
- By Nina Sreshta on 10-10-24
By: Rachel Cusk
-
No One Is Talking About This
- A Novel
- By: Patricia Lockwood
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void.
-
-
Funny, moving, glad to have read it
- By Terra on 05-26-21
-
Coventry
- Essays
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential listening for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.
-
-
This review is biased
- By Paul on 05-16-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Copenhagen Trilogy
- Childhood; Youth; Dependency
- By: Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally - translator, Michael Favala Goldman - translator
- Narrated by: Stine Wintlev
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This program contains all three volumes of her memoirs.
-
-
Masterpiece
- By David Batcher on 03-21-21
By: Tove Ditlevsen, and others
-
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
-
Our Country Friends
- A Novel
- By: Gary Shteyngart
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist, his Russian-born psychiatrist wife, their precocious child obsessed with K-pop, a struggling Indian American writer, a wildly successful Korean American app developer, a global dandy with three passports.
-
-
Beautifully written, painful, but very, very moving
- By Jim on 11-08-21
By: Gary Shteyngart
-
Lessons
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon McBurney
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
-
-
Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
- By Peggy M on 09-26-22
By: Ian McEwan
-
Crossroads
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.
-
-
How do narrators still do clownish stuff like this in 2021?
- By Hotrodimus on 10-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
-
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
-
Borrowed Time
- By: John Nolte
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Joshua Mason has been alive for thousands of years. He doesn't know how or why it happened, only that he can die like any man, but will always return. When you live forever, everything you love will die, so he decided long ago to not become attached. That all changed when he met Doreen. With her, he found something more than the woman he loves, after thousands of years of wandering, he found his place in the world. Now she's dying of old age. Distraught, Joshua promises to look after Charlie, Doreen's grandson, who is thirty-six, but forever a child due to a terrible brain injury.
-
-
Great story, compelling characters
- By Amazon Customer on 10-23-23
By: John Nolte
-
Lord of the Flies
- By: William Golding
- Narrated by: William Golding
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Marooned on a tropical island, alone in a world of uncharted possibilities, and devoid of adult supervision or rules, a group of British boys begins to forge a society with its own unique rules and rituals.
-
-
Great story - bad narration
- By A Mom on 03-05-08
By: William Golding
-
The Magician
- A Novel
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Gunnar Cauthery
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the 20th century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice.
-
-
Terrific listening experience
- By M. Mead on 09-17-21
By: Colm Toibin
-
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
-
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- A Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Michael Henry Heim - translator
- Narrated by: Richmond Hoxie
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A young woman is in love with a successful surgeon, a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing. His mistress, a free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals—while her other lover, earnest, faithful, and good, stands to lose everything because of his noble qualities. In a world where lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, and everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel “the unbearable lightness of being."
-
-
Love, Politics, and Strange Bedfellows
- By Mel on 07-01-12
By: Milan Kundera, and others
-
Spellbreaker
- Spellbreaker, Book 1
- By: Charlie N. Holmberg
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Knowelden, Joel Froomkin
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The orphaned Elsie Camden learned as a girl that there were two kinds of wizards in the world: those who pay for the power to cast spells and those, like her, born with the ability to break them. But as an unlicensed magic user, her gift is a crime. Commissioned by an underground group known as the Cowls, Elsie uses her spellbreaking to push back against the aristocrats and help the common man. Elite magic user Bacchus Kelsey is one elusive spell away from his mastership when he catches Elsie breaking an enchantment. To protect her secret, Elsie strikes a bargain.
-
-
Interesting read/listen
- By Roderica Ruddle on 12-21-20
-
The Active Side of Infinity
- By: Carlos Castaneda
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this audiobook authored immediately before his death, anthropologist and shaman Carlos Castaneda gives us his most autobiographical and intimately revealing work ever, the fruit of a lifetime of experience and perhaps the most moving volume in his oeuvre.
-
-
abstract gold
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-18
By: Carlos Castaneda
Critic reviews
Chicago Tribune Best Books of the Year, 2021
The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year, 2021
National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, 2021
Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year, 2021
New York Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2021
Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2021
Man Booker Award - Nominee, 2021
Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, 2021
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Outline
- The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Lock
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
-
-
Difficult and Better in Print
- By Nick O. on 07-18-23
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Thirst for Salt
- By: Madelaine Lucas
- Narrated by: Madelaine Lucas
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me. It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life.
-
-
Beautifully written novel ruined by weak story
- By K. Schuster on 05-30-23
By: Madelaine Lucas
-
Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
-
Biography of X
- A Novel
- By: Catherine Lacey
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When X—an iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow CM, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing X's biography. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. In CM's quest to unravel it, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
-
-
Worst book I’ve ever read
- By Rebecca on 11-09-23
By: Catherine Lacey
-
Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
-
-
Incomprehensible biologically-essentialist nonsense
- By Lu Clark on 03-15-25
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Bradshaw Variations
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
-
-
Brilliant but tedious
- By Fred Ovrom on 12-14-21
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Outline
- The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Lock
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
-
-
Difficult and Better in Print
- By Nick O. on 07-18-23
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Thirst for Salt
- By: Madelaine Lucas
- Narrated by: Madelaine Lucas
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me. It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life.
-
-
Beautifully written novel ruined by weak story
- By K. Schuster on 05-30-23
By: Madelaine Lucas
-
Breasts and Eggs
- By: Mieko Kawakami
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Masterful Writing and Performance
- By Noelle on 03-01-21
By: Mieko Kawakami
-
Biography of X
- A Novel
- By: Catherine Lacey
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When X—an iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow CM, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing X's biography. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. In CM's quest to unravel it, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
-
-
Worst book I’ve ever read
- By Rebecca on 11-09-23
By: Catherine Lacey
-
Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
-
-
Incomprehensible biologically-essentialist nonsense
- By Lu Clark on 03-15-25
By: Rachel Cusk
-
The Bradshaw Variations
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann are experiencing the classic symptoms of marriage in its middle years: comfortable house, happy enough daughter, and an eerie sense that life might be happening elsewhere. Then Tonie accepts a big promotion at work and Thomas agrees to become a stay-at-home dad. While Thomas is suddenly faced with the daily silence of an empty house, Tonie finds herself alive to previously unimagined possibilities. And at the head of the family, the aging Bradshaw parents continue their marital dynamic of bickering and petty undermining.
-
-
Brilliant but tedious
- By Fred Ovrom on 12-14-21
By: Rachel Cusk
The philosophizing was annoying at times, insightful occasionally. I recommend it if only for the exquisite writing. Her picture of paras is Impressionism in English words,
It slows down a bit about 3/4 through but is worth preserving to the end. Don’t think it’ll win the Booker, but for a novel written in these troubled times of Brexit, climate crisis and Covid, it hits the mark though these tragedies are not directly alluded to..
Beautifully executed. Impressionism in words, philosophy in motion
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Her best book to date…
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Incredible!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Horrible narrator, boring story
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The problem with Audible
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Before I downloaded I read a couple of reviews that crabbed about the narration. I don’t see what their problem was.
Interestingly the story takes place during the pandemic, but that formed only the most distant backdrop, alluded to by snippets like, "...now that travel had become less of a problem..."
Fans will not be disappointed: there is the obligatory cringy scene where a man, with the greatest awkwardness, tries to force himself on the POV character.
I never tire of Rachel Cusk's startlingly original turns of phrase coupled with her penetrating wisdom and disarming vulnerability. If you are anything like the fanboy I am don't pass this up.
Rachel Cusk is so brilliant!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Great book, acting fail.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Kind of liked it?
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Amazing book
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The Narrator is distractingly bad
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.