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Sing, Unburied, Sing
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Chris Chalk, Rutina Wesley
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for FICTION
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize
Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
Publishers Weekly Top 10 of 2017
"The heart of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing is story - the yearning for a narrative to help us understand ourselves, the pain of the gaps we'll never fill, the truths that are failed by words and must be translated through ritual and song...Ward's writing throbs with life, grief, and love, and this book is the kind that makes you ache to return to it." (Buzzfeed)
In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural 21st-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds.
Jojo is 13 years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn't lack in fathers to study, chief among them his black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent white father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent white grandfather, Big Joseph, who won't acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.
His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister's lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is black, and her children's father is white. She wants to be a better mother but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.
When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the state penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another 13-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He, too, has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.
Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an unforgettable family story.
A 2018 RUSA “Listen-Alike” for LINCOLN IN THE BARDO
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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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Hour of the Bees
- By: Lindsay Eagar
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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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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The Beans of Egypt, Maine
- By: Carolyn Chute
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean, William Dufris
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
The Beans of Egypt, Maine introduced the world to the notorious, unforgettable Bean clan of small town Egypt, Maine. Through her story of the Beans's struggle with their inner demons to survive against hardship and societal ignorance, Chute emerged as a writer of immense humanity and unparalleled insight into a world most of us knew little of - if we'd recognized it at all.
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1985-2018
- By Raelyn M Viti on 08-21-18
By: Carolyn Chute
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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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Overall
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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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Fruit of the Drunken Tree
- A Novel
- By: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.
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Maybe better to read this book than listen???
- By Amazon Customer on 12-12-18
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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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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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Story
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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Bleeding Violet
- By: Dia Reeves
- Narrated by: Suzy Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Southern Gods
- By: John Hornor Jacobs
- Narrated by: Eric G Dove
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Recent World War II veteran Bull Ingram is working as muscle when a Memphis DJ hires him to find Ramblin' John Hastur. The mysterious blues man's dark, driving music - broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio statio - is said to make living men insane and dead men rise. Disturbed and enraged by the bootleg recording the DJ plays for him, Ingram follows Hastur's trail into the strange, uncivilized backwoods of Arkansas, where he hears rumors the musician has sold his soul to the Devil.
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Big, Bold and Bright
- By John on 08-23-11
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
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Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
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The Hollow Ground
- By: Natalie S. Harnett
- Narrated by: Luci Christian
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.
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Disfunction makes a good read
- By NHull on 05-30-14
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Scribbling the Cat
- Travels with an African Soldier
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war.
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Astonishing
- By G. Robinson on 06-27-04
By: Alexandra Fuller
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What listeners say about Sing, Unburied, Sing
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- BJMQ
- 02-08-18
Amazing writing with compelling characters
This book held me spell bound. From the deep pathos and finely wrought characterizations to the poetic use of symbol and metaphor I could not put it down. Jesmyn Ward is a writer to watch- she is fantastic. I highly recommend Sing Unburied Sing.
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- Julie
- 08-06-18
Not an easy read, but a worthwhile one.
I had to start this book over several times, and I nearly gave up once or twice because of the brutal situations that the characters were in. It reminded me of both Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison’s work, but with an extra contemporary, original kick. Ward is definitely a poet and the writing is beautiful, though perhaps it is not for those who cannot deal with bits of magical realism. She makes you feel compassion for all the characters, even the ones that are seriously flawed, and she breaks stereotypes while she does it. My favorite character was the toddler baby sister. There are no cookie-cutter happy endings here, but there is deep healing and redemption. Listen to the end. It is worth it and will leave you thinking.
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- Greg
- 02-28-19
Deep South Drama
Love the complexity of the characters & the story. Family love combined with a background of southern racial tensions.
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Story
- Charlotte Mabry
- 07-10-18
I was happy to read this Jesmyn Ward book!
I enjoyed this book. I loved getting to know the characters and hearing the story through their eyes. I have not listened to many audible books and I am hooked. I love to read, but the DOT frowns on driving and reading. I loved hearing the story read. The readers were excellent. I did not like Salvage the Bones by this author, but I enjoyed this book. It is rich on many levels.
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Performance
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Story
- Daniel
- 02-07-18
Masterfully Written
What a deep and compelling story. So visual, at moments I really felt as if I was standing right next to the characters in the story. An amazing and thought provoking avenue.
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Performance
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- Di
- 03-07-18
excellent
all emotions here. the living and the dead bound by emotion. highly recommend this performance.
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Story
- Slopeggy
- 05-07-19
Narrator expertise
The narrators made this come alive. Particularly Kelvin Harrison. I feel as if I’ve watched a film rather than read a book. Kudos!
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Story
- ThisGurlsGottaRead
- 08-21-21
A Must-Listen
I have listened to over 100 audio books. I have read hundreds of books. This book has moved me like non other.
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Overall
- ewatley24
- 07-11-19
amazing
great storyline, love the different pov throughout the story, my favorite character was jojo. the book is amazing
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- Karen Heinemann
- 09-15-20
beautiful!
This novel is all about language. One of the best I've read. so layered + rich. highly recommend.
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