
The Alternatives
A Novel
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By:
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Caoilinn Hughes
About this listen
“A bold, beautiful, complex novel, and I can’t wait to read what Hughes writes next. She, too, is an unstoppable force.”—New York Times Book Review
“A tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for our agonizing species, The Alternatives unfolds in a prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.”—Hernan Diaz
From the writer Anthony Doerr calls “a massive talent,” the story of four brilliant Irish sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the oldest disappears into the Irish countryside
The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.
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Critic reviews
“I wish I knew how Caoilinn Hughes has managed to write a book of such depth and gravity that is also so gripping and relentlessly funny. A tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for our agonizing species, The Alternatives unfolds in a prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.”—Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Trust
“The Alternatives is fizzy, brainy, and brilliant, always at the service of a drama of great emotional power. Caoilinn Hughes is an extraordinarily gifted writer.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog
“Hughes’s elegiac romp into our collective crises erupts in gorgeous language and sizzles with wit, yet is undergirded by pathos. A shapeshifter of a writer, she can draw any character, any foible with crystalline precision.”—Diane Cook, author of The New Wilderness
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- Narrated by: Anna Skellern
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Original Recording
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Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.
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Seriously, that was the ending?
- By alicia in athens on 02-13-25
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Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.
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Not Netherland.
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On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.
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Not my favorite Maggie O’Farrell novel…
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Wild Houses
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Insider look at a small crime
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What listeners say about The Alternatives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Susan Saegert
- 06-12-24
Thoughts
Characters are the interesting. Love the philosophical argument. Don't push so much on areviewers .enough!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Maura O'Toole
- 05-02-24
Loved it.
This book isn’t going to be for everyone because it leaves a lot of unanswered questions. But the ending is true to the thesis of the book, which is when a woman has given all that she has to everyone else in her life, what is left for herself?
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- Kathleen S. Wedl
- 05-26-24
Confusion
Characters hard to discern from one another, save Alwin. Too much intellectual detail, not enough story.
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- jeanne
- 10-02-24
I want this story to continue
I’ve become so enamored of the sisters and Dan that it’s a sorrow I can’t hear some of the rest of their story, their lives. This was Wonderful!!
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- CJW
- 04-24-24
Great character development.
No resolution of anything was frustrating. The book ended abruptly. Not sure if this is for a series, but it left me wanting.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Art Librarian
- 12-13-24
Beautiful narrative and themes
I absolutely love this book. While I don’t enjoy anything apocalypse-related, the four women in this story circle around one another against the background of everyday environmental and social threats. If you adore beautiful fiction and have ever wondered if you should live on a remote island pondering our shared future, this book is for you.
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- D. Joseph
- 05-30-24
The pompousness, the try.
Disliked the novel because it was typical & yet disjointed in a literary try not in a good way
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- Gail
- 04-28-24
False advertising
The book advertised by the publisher and the one I listened to were completely different. Yes, the parents died in mysterious circumstances, and those circumstances remained a mystery...it was never revealed in the book. These four "sisters" sounded more like colleagues to me, complete strangers in fact, getting together and hardly having a thing to say to each other. The author took the opportunity of four different careers to lecture on everything from global warming to continental drift to veganism to politics in Northern Ireland. It was the oddest collection of philosophies and it was hard to keep interested. At one point, as the four sisters are gathered at the bungalow of the eldest one, eventually found (who keeps waiting for them to leave), one of them asks, "Why are we here?" Indeed. Unless you enjoy esoteric discussions of high-brow topics, save your money.
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- Loving the 60 somethings
- 06-06-24
Hard to follow and understand
Too much technical and irrelevant detail. I couldn't follow and I thought it was boring. Sometime Irish dialect hard to understand.
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- dudette
- 04-21-24
It’s a tie between boring story and painful sophomoric political rants
I didn’t like the slow moving story and I didn’t like the annoying, idiotically simplistic lectures about global warming, Brexit, big pharma, etc etc. It was stupid
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1 person found this helpful