-
The Black Book
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 16 mins
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 $22.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
From the Nobel Prize winner and acclaimed author of My Name is Red—a brilliantly unconventional mystery of a missing wife, and a provocative meditation on identity.
“A glorious flight of dark, fantastic invention.” —The Washington Post
Galip is a lawyer living in Istanbul. His wife, the detective novel-loving Ruya, has disappeared. Could she have left him for her ex-husband or Celâl, a popular newspaper columnist? But Celâl, too, seems to have vanished. As Galip investigates, he finds himself assuming the enviable Celâl's identity, wearing his clothes, answering his phone calls, even writing his columns. Galip pursues every conceivable clue, but the nature of the mystery keeps changing, and when he receives a death threat, he begins to fear the worst.
With its cascade of beguiling stories about Istanbul, The Black Book is a brilliantly unconventional mystery, and a provocative meditation on identity. For Turkish literary readers it is the cherished cult novel in which Orhan Pamuk found his original voice, but it has largely been neglected by English-language listeners. Now, in Maureen Freely’s beautiful translation, they, too, may encounter all its riches.
A Translation and Afterword by Maureen Freely
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The White Castle
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja - "master" - a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.
-
-
INTERESTING
- By JK on 06-28-23
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
-
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
In the Beauty of the Lilies
- A Novel
- By: John Updike
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows listeners an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the moving picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.
-
-
In the Beauty of the Lillies
- By linda on 08-15-20
By: John Updike
-
My Name Is Red
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Erdag Goknar - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
-
-
Complex and interesting
- By Kathleen on 05-13-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
- Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Nazim Dikbas - editor
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a comprehensive and provocative theory of the novel and the experience of reading. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s famous distinction between “naïve” writers—those who write spontaneously—and “sentimental” writers—those who are reflective and aware—Pamuk reveals two unique ways of processing and composing the written word.
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Snow
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.
-
-
All the good & bad that is Pamuk
- By Elizabeth on 08-13-07
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The White Castle
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja - "master" - a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.
-
-
INTERESTING
- By JK on 06-28-23
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
-
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
In the Beauty of the Lilies
- A Novel
- By: John Updike
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Faith ultimately bursts into flame as Updike's major new novel, charting the lives of one family through four generations, shows listeners an America whose dream of perfection is translated into an obsession with God and the moving picture. Paterson, New Jersey, 1910: When a Presbyterian minister suddenly loses his faith and leaves the pulpit to become a salesman, he becomes a movie addict as well.
-
-
In the Beauty of the Lillies
- By linda on 08-15-20
By: John Updike
-
My Name Is Red
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Erdag Goknar - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
-
-
Complex and interesting
- By Kathleen on 05-13-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
- Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Nazim Dikbas - editor
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished Norton Lecture series, Pamuk presents a comprehensive and provocative theory of the novel and the experience of reading. Drawing on Friedrich Schiller’s famous distinction between “naïve” writers—those who write spontaneously—and “sentimental” writers—those who are reflective and aware—Pamuk reveals two unique ways of processing and composing the written word.
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Snow
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.
-
-
All the good & bad that is Pamuk
- By Elizabeth on 08-13-07
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
-
-
Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
A Gesture Life
- A Novel
- By: Chang-rae Lee
- Narrated by: Greg Watanabe
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A Gesture Life is the story of an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II.
-
-
Superb
- By BooksRLife on 11-19-20
By: Chang-rae Lee
-
A Disappearance in Fiji
- By: Nilima Rao
- Narrated by: Sid Sagar
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1914, Fiji: 25-year-old Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise—or, as he calls it, “this godforsaken island.” After a promising start to his police career in his native India and Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and grumpy, Akal plods through his work and dreams of getting back to Hong Kong. When an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji’s newspapers scream “kidnapping,” the inspector-general reluctantly assigns Akal the case.
-
-
Good historical story
- By JU on 09-20-23
By: Nilima Rao
-
Jade Dragon Mountain
- A Novel
- By: Elsa Hart
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Li Du was an imperial librarian. Now he is an exile. Arriving in Dayan, the last Chinese town before the Tibetan border, he is surprised to find it teeming with travelers, soldiers, and merchants. All have come for a spectacle unprecedented in this remote province: an eclipse of the sun commanded by the emperor himself. When a Jesuit astronomer is found murdered in the home of the local magistrate, blame is hastily placed on Tibetan bandits. But Li Du suspects this was no random killing.
-
-
Intriguing Mystery, Richly Woven
- By Marcelyn on 09-04-15
By: Elsa Hart
-
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
- By: Shehan Karunatilaka
- Narrated by: Shivantha Wijesinha
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali.
-
-
Absolutely Splendid...
- By Paul Frandano on 02-07-23
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Midsummer Mysteries
- Tales from the Queen of Mystery
- By: Agatha Christie
- Narrated by: Hugh Fraser, David Suchet, Joan Hickson
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Summertime—as the temperature rises, so does the potential for evil. From Cornwall to the French Riviera, whether against a background of Delphic temples or English country houses, Agatha Christie’s most famous characters solve complicated puzzles as the stakes heat up. Pull up a deckchair and enjoy plot twists and red herrings galore from the bestselling fiction writer of all time.
-
-
Mystery Maven
- By Mystery Maven on 05-23-23
By: Agatha Christie
-
The Wall
- By: John Hersey
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 29 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Riveting and compelling, The Wall tells the inspiring story of 40 men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with torture, starvation, humiliation, and cruelty - a gripping and visceral story, impossible to pause.
-
-
Fascinating
- By Phil on 06-14-21
By: John Hersey
-
The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
-
-
Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
-
Dirt Creek
- A Novel
- By: Hayley Scrivenor
- Narrated by: Sophie Loughran
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When 12-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins her investigation, Esther’s tenacious best friend, Ronnie, is determined to find Esther and bring her home. When schoolfriend Lewis tells Ronnie that he saw Esther with a strange man at the creek the afternoon she went missing, Ronnie feels she is one step closer to finding her.
-
-
Now that's what I call a debut
- By BEE on 08-08-22
By: Hayley Scrivenor
-
The White Lady
- A Novel
- By: Jacqueline Winspear
- Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, ultimately exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government. The private, quiet “Miss White" as Elinor is known, lives in a village in rural Kent, England, and to her fellow villagers seems something of an enigma. Well she might, as Elinor occupies a "grace and favor" property, a rare privilege offered to faithful servants of the Crown for services to the nation.
-
-
Mystery Maven
- By Mystery Maven on 03-24-23
Critic reviews
“A glorious flight of dark, fantastic invention.” —The Washington Post
"A splendid novel, as delicious to our mind's palate as a Turkish delight and as subtle ... in its design as a Persian rug." —San Francisco Chronicle
"An extraordinary, tantalizing novel." —The Nation
Related to this topic
-
The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
-
-
Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
-
-
Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
-
The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
-
-
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
-
-
Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
-
The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
-
-
Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
-
-
Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
-
-
Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
-
The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
-
-
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
-
-
Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
-
The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
-
-
Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
-
-
Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
-
A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
-
-
His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
-
Amulet
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Adriana Sananes
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A tour de force, Amulet is a highly charged first-person, semi-hallucinatory novel that embodies in one woman's voice the melancholy and violent recent history of Latin America. Amulet is a monologue, like Bolaño's acclaimed debut in English, By Night in Chile. The speaker is Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico in the 1960s, becoming the "Mother of Mexican Poetry", hanging out with the young poets in the cafés and bars of the University.
-
-
Read The Savage Detectives first
- By Alicia Grega on 12-05-13
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
-
The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
-
-
a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
-
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
-
-
A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Where the Past Begins
- A Writer's Memoir
- By: Amy Tan
- Narrated by: Amy Tan
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.
-
-
Narration Issues
- By Sara on 12-14-17
By: Amy Tan
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
-
-
The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
-
Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories
- The Inspector Montalbano, Book 0.5
- By: Andrea Camilleri
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 17 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories, Andrea Camilleri has selected 21 short stories, written with his trademark wit and humor, that follow Italy's famous detective through highlight cases of his career. From the title story, featuring a young Deputy Montalbano newly assigned to Vigàta, to "Montalbano Says No", in which the inspector makes a late-night call to Camilleri himself to refuse an outlandish case, this volume is an essential addition to any fan's collection and a wonderful way to introduce listeners to the internationally best-selling series.
-
-
THIS BOOK NEEDS TO BE LISTENED TO FIRST!!!
- By Reba on 12-31-16
By: Andrea Camilleri
-
The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
-
-
Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
-
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ethiopian émigré Dinaw Mengestu is a skilled observer of people who offers a colorful debut work of fiction. Insightful and swiftly paced, this novel evokes past and present in the course of its compelling narrative. It's the `70s, and one D.C. neighborhood is undergoing big changes. In the mix is Ethiopian grocery owner Sepha Stephanos - a man with a complex past who fled his homeland after seeing his father brutalized by themilitary. He hopes for new prospects in D.C.'s gentrification process.
-
-
Great book, wonderful reader
- By Lisbeth on 11-22-11
By: Dinaw Mengestu
-
Humboldt's Gift
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
-
-
Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
My Name Is Red
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Erdag Goknar - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
-
-
Complex and interesting
- By Kathleen on 05-13-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Nights of Plague
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Ekin Oklap - translator
- Narrated by: Amira Ghazalla
- Length: 29 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria—the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts.
-
-
TOO Long!!!
- By Rachel Bahadir on 07-31-23
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Snow
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.
-
-
All the good & bad that is Pamuk
- By Elizabeth on 08-13-07
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
-
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
The White Castle
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja - "master" - a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.
-
-
INTERESTING
- By JK on 06-28-23
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
My Name Is Red
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Erdag Goknar - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At once a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, and a brilliant symposium on the power of art, My Name Is Red is a transporting tale set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of 16th-century Istanbul, from one of the most prominent contemporary Turkish writers.
-
-
Complex and interesting
- By Kathleen on 05-13-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Nights of Plague
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Ekin Oklap - translator
- Narrated by: Amira Ghazalla
- Length: 29 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria—the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire—located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives—brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria—the island revolts.
-
-
TOO Long!!!
- By Rachel Bahadir on 07-31-23
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
Snow
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.
-
-
All the good & bad that is Pamuk
- By Elizabeth on 08-13-07
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
-
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
The White Castle
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 17th century, a young Italian scholar sailing from Venice to Naples is taken prisoner and delivered to Constantinople. There he falls into the custody of a scholar known as Hoja - "master" - a man who is his exact double. In the years that follow, the slave instructs his master in Western science and technology, from medicine to pyrotechnics. But Hoja wants to know more: why he and his captive are the persons they are and whether, given knowledge of each other's most intimate secrets, they could actually exchange identities.
-
-
INTERESTING
- By JK on 06-28-23
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Palace Walk
- Cairo Trilogy Series, Book 1
- By: Naguib Mahfouz, William Maynard Hutchins - translator, Olive E. Kenny - translator
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A national best seller in both hardcover and paperback, the first book of the masterful Cairo Trilogy introduces the engrossing saga of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s.
-
-
great book, not so great narration
- By Amazon Customer on 02-01-19
By: Naguib Mahfouz, and others
-
Alif the Unseen
- By: G. Willow Wilson
- Narrated by: Sanjiv Jhaveri
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients — dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups — from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif — the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind.
-
-
This Sanjiv Jhaveri Guy...
- By H. Hartman on 10-11-12
By: G. Willow Wilson
-
A Strangeness in My Mind
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Ekin Oklap - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 21 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since his boyhood Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he'd hoped, at the age of 12 he comes to Istanbul - "the center of the world" - and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father's trade, selling boza on the street and hoping to become rich like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut's side.
-
-
A Strangeness in My Mind: A Delight for my Commute
- By Andrea Frank on 03-19-16
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
The Bastard of Istanbul
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country's violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the "bastard" of the title, Asya, a 19-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul.
-
-
A tender gift from far away
- By Barbara on 11-07-07
By: Elif Shafak
-
The Forty Rules of Love
- A Novel of Rumi
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this follow-up to her acclaimed 2007 novel The Bastard of Istanbul, Turkish author Elif Shafak unfolds two tantalizing parallel narratives---one contemporary and the other set in the 13th century, when Rumi encountered his spiritual mentor, the whirling dervish known as Shams of Tabriz---that together incarnate the poet's timeless message of love.
-
-
Horrible reader
- By HI on 07-05-19
By: Elif Shafak
-
The New Life
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly engaging novel is launched into a world of hypnotic texts and (literally) Byzantine conspiracies that whirl across the steppes and forlorn frontier towns of Turkey. And with The New Life, Pamuk himself vaults from the forefront of his country's writers into the arena of world literature.
-
-
Very much worth hanging in there
- By John Fulton on 01-06-21
By: Orhan Pamuk
What listeners say about The Black Book
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 10-17-22
Not Bamok's Best
I found his ability to captivate the reader with a simple plot and premise fascinating. He made of a simple plot a canvas to paint a picture of Turkey and Istanbul at one of the bleakest of its Times. His narrative is flowing like a waterfall. However I didn't get immersed in the character like I did in his other works like (Snow) or (Museum of Innocence)
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Murasaki
- 05-26-18
Pamuk read by John Lee....
... can't get better than that. The book is not "easy," but what great book is? It's deep and mysterious and profound, as Pamuk so often can be.
John Lee, who always reads Pamuk, is one of the very best Audible performers; he seems to "get" the world of Pamuk, Istanbul and the rich history, Islamic metaphysics and wonderful tales of that world. "The Black Book" is, on one of its many levels, the "Thousand and One Nights" for smart, adventuresome readers. Listen to it!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
6 people found this helpful