
State of Paradise
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Megan Tusing
About this listen
Along with her husband, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author returns to her mother's house in the Florida town where she grew up. As the summer heat sets in, she wrestles with family secrets and memories of her own troubled youth. Her mercurial sister, who lives next door, spends a growing amount of time using MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device provided to citizens of the town by ELECTRA, a tech company in South Florida, during the doldrums of a recent pandemic. But it’s not just the ominous cats, her mother’s burgeoning cult, or the fact that her belly button has become an increasingly deep cavern—something is off in the town, and it probably has to do with the posters of missing citizens spread throughout the streets.
During a violent rainstorm, the writer’s sister goes missing for several days. When she returns, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension, the writer is forced to investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author, and reality itself.
A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s Florida Diary is an interlocking and gripping whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, she reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.
"State of Paradise is a weird, wild, thrilling journey through cults, addiction, messed-up families, the pandemic, the weather, and the strangeness and beauty of the great state of Florida. Laura van den Berg's writing is razor sharp and full of depth and humor, and she has an incredible imagination. This book is freaking brilliant."
—Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours
©2024 Laura van den Berg (P)2024 Spotify AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Emlyn doesn't let herself think about the past. How she and her best friend, Janessa, barely speak anymore. How Tyler, the love of her life, left her half dead on the side of the road three years ago. Her new life is simple and safe. She lives alone in her Airstream trailer and works as a fishing and hunting guide in scenic Idaho. Her closest friends are the community's makeshift reverend and a handsome Forest Service ranger who took her in at her lowest.
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So good! Kept me guessing
- By Gotlost.onpurpose on 04-20-25
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The Ninth Hour
- A Novel
- By: Alice McDermott
- Narrated by: Euan Morton
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove - to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife - "that the hours of his life belong to himself alone". In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears unbidden to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
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Profoundly Thought Provoking
- By Sara on 01-17-18
By: Alice McDermott
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The Topeka School
- A Novel
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Nancy Linari, Peter Berkrot, Tristan Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak.
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Strong novel about 1990s
- By citizen, jazzmania on 01-11-20
By: Ben Lerner
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The Summer That Melted Everything
- By: Tiffany McDaniel
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 11 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Sal seems to appear out of nowhere - a bruised and tattered 13-year-old boy claiming to be the devil himself answering an invitation. Fielding Bliss, the son of a local prosecutor, brings him home, where he's welcomed into the Bliss family, who assume he's a runaway from a nearby farm town. When word spreads that the devil has come to Breathed, not everyone is happy to welcome this self-proclaimed fallen angel. Murmurs follow him, and tensions rise along with the temperatures as an unbearable heat wave rolls into town right along with him.
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Syrup Saps Town Full of Stereotypes
- By W Perry Hall on 08-17-16
By: Tiffany McDaniel
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Black Butterflies
- A Novel
- By: Priscilla Morris
- Narrated by: Rachel Atkins, Priscilla Morris
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect makeshift barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the people who live there—whether Muslim, Croat, or Serb—push the barriers aside. When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops.
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Beautiful prose -simple story
- By Cco on 02-10-25
By: Priscilla Morris
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When We Were Silent
- A Novel
- By: Fiona McPhillips
- Narrated by: India Mullen
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Louise Manson is the newest student at Highfield Manor, Dublin’s most exclusive private school. It seems nearly perfect: the high arched window alcoves and tall granite pillars, the overspill of lilac at the front gate and the immaculate playing fields, the giggling students, the dusty, oak-lined library, and the dark, festering secret she has come to expose. At first, Lou’s working-class status makes her the consummate outsider, though all that changes when she is befriended by the beautiful and wealthy Shauna Power.
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Loved!
- By Jenni on 10-22-24
By: Fiona McPhillips
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Cantoras
- A Novel
- By: Carolina De Robertis
- Narrated by: Carolina De Robertis
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A genre-defining novel and De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn.
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Excruciating to get through
- By Xochitl Casillas on 11-30-20
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Wolf at the Table
- By: Adam Rapp
- Narrated by: Paul Sparks
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.
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extraordinary writing.
- By michelle martinez on 05-23-24
By: Adam Rapp
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The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
- A Novel
- By: Dominic Smith
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her.
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Undone by Cadmium Yellow
- By Mel on 04-18-16
By: Dominic Smith
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Gods of Howl Mountain
- By: Taylor Brown
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina. Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted 1940 Ford coupe.
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Appalatia Noir
- By meanwhile on 09-18-18
By: Taylor Brown
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The Wolf Hunt
- A Novel
- By: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
- Narrated by: Gilli Messer
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Lilach has it all: a beautiful home in the heart of Silicon Valley, a successful husband and stable marriage, and a teenage son, Adam, with whom she has always felt a particular closeness. Israeli immigrants, the family has now lived in the U.S. long enough that they consider it home. But after a brutal attack on a local synagogue shakes their sense of safety, Adam enrolls in a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer. There, for the first time, he finds a sense of confidence and belonging. Then, tragedy strikes again.
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Animal cruelty
- By Modified on 08-22-23
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Universal Harvester
- A Novel
- By: John Darnielle
- Narrated by: John Darnielle
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It's a small town in the center of the state - the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It's good enough for Jeremy: It's a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck.
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Underwhelming
- By laurie on 02-10-17
By: John Darnielle
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Motherhood
- A Novel
- By: Sheila Heti
- Narrated by: Sheila Heti
- Length: 5 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with candor, originality, and humor. In her late 30s, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent audiobook considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forebearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice.
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Way beyond what I expected
- By S. Anderson on 01-03-19
By: Sheila Heti
What listeners say about State of Paradise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- unco
- 09-30-24
A quirky gem
I love the premise of this book. It is so wonderfully absurd. Was Laura van den Berg tripping as she wrote it? I feel less grounded in reality reading it. Given all that enjoyment I do find myself a bit lost here and there. I found myself drifting from the story as I listened causing me to have to rewind and begin again. I don't know if I would have fared better reading it as opposed to listening.
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- Julie McAdon
- 07-19-24
So confused
I couldn’t keep track of the rambling narrative and I never got close to any of the characters. Just really confusing.
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- Laurel Waterson
- 11-01-24
Fantastic, philosophical, reflects the times
I really enjoyed this absurd/magical adventure. The craftsmanship of words is excellent. I find a kinship between this novel and Duplex by Kathryn Davis. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I feel like I’ve struck a vein of literary gold.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joe Wilson
- 09-12-24
A constant surprise
The story of this novel creeps up on you, as though all of the sudden you’re sprinting in what you’d expected to be an easy stroll. It’s like Katherine Mansfield had written “Sea of Tranquility,” and set it in Florida.
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1 person found this helpful