
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Tim Carroll
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By:
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Anna Johnston
About this listen
A zany case of mistaken identity allows a lonely old man one last chance to be part of a family in this warm, life-affirming debut novel.
“A funny, heartfelt story about found family and seeing the silver lining in life. Fans of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove and Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures will especially enjoy this new novel.”—Library Journal
“Would you mind terribly, old boy, if I borrowed the rest of your life? I promise I’ll take excellent care of it.”
Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness.
But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.
Denise Simms is stuck breathing the same disappointing air again and again. A middle-aged mom and caregiver at Bernard's facility, her crumbling marriage and daughter's health concerns are suffocating her joy for life. Wounded by her two-faced husband, she vows never to let a man deceive her again.
As Fred walks in Bernard’s shoes, he leaves a trail of kindness behind him, fueling Denise's suspicions about his true identity. When unexpected truths are revealed, Fred and Denise rediscover their sense of purpose and learn how to return a broken life to mint condition.
Bittersweet and remarkably perceptive, The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife is a hilarious, feel-good, clever novel about grief, forgiveness, redemption, and finding family.
©2024 Anna Johnston (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall
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A Secret Service operative and dedicated survivalist, Special Agent Del Roosevelt had a plan for every world-ending scenario and regularly trained for them all. He was even ready for a date with the hottest woman in his office next Friday. At least he hoped so. But all that training, all those rations, all that prepping? Useless for the apocalypse that actually played out. Del wakes up half-buried in a giant trash pile, missing his thumbs. And, um, covered in red fur. He's stuck in a world of fuzzy monsters, senseless violence, and cult-like crusaders.
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Lack of Plot
- By Amazon Customer on 09-22-24
By: Eric Ugland
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The River Saga: The Complete Series
- The River Saga, Books 1-4
- By: Nathan Hystad
- Narrated by: Christopher Ryan Grant
- Length: 54 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Colton Beck has six months to live. He works for the Angor near Los Angeles, aware that any day could be his last. The Angor arrived twenty years ago, resolved to help mankind survive, but not everyone believes their motives are honorable. When the Angor offer humanity a colony world, Colton is determined to see another planet before his final breath. He's been diagnosed with Xeno, a rare disorder that surfaced with the Angor's arrival, but he won't let this stop him.
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Not worth the credit
- By James on 12-14-24
By: Nathan Hystad
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Who’s That Girl?
- By: Mhairi McFarlane
- Narrated by: Cassie Bradley
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Edie thought she was in love … until he told her he was marrying someone else. Then, when he kisses her on the day of his wedding, life really starts to unravel. Labelled a homewrecker, overnight Edie is the office outcast. To help, her boss offers a chance to get out of town, and she jumps at it. But when this fresh start unexpectedly throws her into the path of Hollywood heartthrob Elliot Owen and the limelight, the question on everyone’s lips is: who’s that girl? Edie is about to find out.
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Ugh, the ending!
- By Burrito on 11-11-24
By: Mhairi McFarlane
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The Answer Is No
- A Short Story
- By: Fredrik Backman, Elizabeth DeNoma - translator
- Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.
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Narrator doesn’t get Backman’s satire or rhythm
- By joey1603 on 12-01-24
By: Fredrik Backman, and others
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The Deal of a Lifetime
- A Novella
- By: Fredrik Backman
- Narrated by: Santino Fontana
- Length: 47 mins
- Unabridged
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It all begins with a father telling a story to his son on Christmas Eve. But this isn't your typical Christmas story. The father admits to his son that he's taken a life but he won't say whose - not yet. One week earlier, in a hospital late at night, the man met a five-year-old girl with cancer. She's a smart kid - smart enough to know that she won't beat cancer by drawing with crayons all day, but it seems to make the adults happy, so she keeps doing it.
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Novellas Are Horrible!!!!!
- By 3xcharm on 12-28-17
By: Fredrik Backman
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Dear Elizabeth
- A Play in Letters From Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and Back Again
- By: Sarah Ruhl
- Narrated by: Julian Sands, JoBeth Williams
- Length: 1 hr and 9 mins
- Original Recording
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The complicated relationship between the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell is revealed in nearly 30 years' worth of correspondence. Taken from their exchange of letters, Dear Elizabeth is a study in friendship, intimacy, and the power of words.
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spectacular history of words.
- By Mozart on 07-07-17
By: Sarah Ruhl
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How to Age Disgracefully
- A Novel
- By: Clare Pooley
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lydia takes a job running the Senior Citizens’ Social Club three afternoons a week, she assumes she’ll be spending her time drinking tea and playing gentle games of cards. The members of the Social Club, however, are not at all what Lydia was expecting. From Art, a failed actor turned kleptomaniac to Daphne, who has been hiding from her dark past for decades to Ruby, a Banksy-style knitter who gets revenge in yarn, these seniors look deceptively benign—but when age makes you invisible, secrets are so much easier to hide.
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Aging imperfections
- By Susan Love on 08-07-24
By: Clare Pooley
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And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
- A Novella
- By: Fredrik Backman
- Narrated by: David Morse
- Length: 1 hr and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Grandpa and Noah are sitting on a bench in a square that keeps getting smaller every day. The square is strange but also familiar, full of the odds and ends that have made up their lives: Grandpa's work desk, the stuffed dragon that Grandpa once gave to Noah, the sweet-smelling hyacinths that Grandma loved to grow in her garden.
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Heartbreakingly Perfect
- By Jmo930 on 11-21-16
By: Fredrik Backman
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Five Minutes from Chaos
- By: William Missouri Downs
- Narrated by: Rob Farella
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Funny, fast-moving, and thought-provoking, Five Minutes from Chaos tells the story of Charlie Neb, a philosophy professor who spends his days lecturing to anxiety-filled frat boys and cheerleaders.
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The Phoenix Ballroom
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Hogan
- Narrated by: Jane Copland
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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For fifty years, Venetia Hargreaves’s world revolved around her husband. She built their life around his big career, with dinner on the table at six, a lovely home, and a dutiful son just as business-minded as his father. Now Venetia’s a wealthy widow left with a beautiful but empty home, an enviable bank balance, and a distinct feeling that she missed the boat. Once upon a time, she was a dance instructor who dreamed of opening her own ballroom school with a fellow teacher who won her heart. Instead, Venetia chose the safer path.
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Hope, renewal,
- By Jennifer A Hayes on 04-12-25
By: Ruth Hogan
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How to Read a Book
- A Novel
- By: Monica Wood
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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From the award-winning author of The One-in-a-Million Boy comes a heartfelt, uplifting novel about a chance encounter at a bookstore, exploring redemption, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.
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This book wrecked me!
- By BlaneClark on 05-27-24
By: Monica Wood
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Family Family
- A Novel
- By: Laurie Frankel
- Narrated by: Laurie Frankel, Patti Murin
- Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero. Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do—she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.
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Interesting story but horrible language
- By Jed on 01-26-24
By: Laurie Frankel
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Theophilus North
- A Novel
- By: Thornton Wilder
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The last of Thornton Wilder’s works published during his lifetime, Theophilus North is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventures of Wilder’s twin brother who died at birth. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade.
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I Absolutely Loved It!
- By SandyK on 06-10-24
By: Thornton Wilder
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The Dispatcher
- By: Ryan David Jahn
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The phone rings. It's your daughter. She's been dead for four months. So begins East Texas police dispatcher Ian Hunt's fight to get his daughter back. The call is cut off by the man who snatched her from her bedroom seven years ago, and a basic description of the kidnapper is all Ian has to go on.
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Equates ignorance with accent
- By L. on 03-28-25
By: Ryan David Jahn
What listeners say about The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife
Highly rated for:
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Paprika
- 01-04-25
Love and humor
Excellent narrator. Interesting story development. Wonderful characters. Warm, humorous takes on some of the hardships of life… loss of loved ones, dementia, aging, addiction.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-30-25
Love and kindness great for the soul
I absolutely loved this book! It was the most beautiful, heartwarming story I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. Also written with the cutest touch of humor. The narrator for Fred’s character was pure perfection! I grew to love Fred more and more with every chapter. Be prepared to cry your eyes out! Give this beautiful story a listen. I guarantee you will love it.
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- energyeng
- 02-06-25
This is one of my all time favorite books.
I will not soon forget this heartwarming story of grief, loneliness, kindness, and unconditional love. I laughed and I cried. This story made me grateful and warmed my heart. Tim Carroll is a fabulous performer.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-14-25
Best book I’ve listened to in a long time
If I could give more than 5 stars this one would be the one I’d give them to!
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- Melissa
- 02-20-25
very sweet
sweet and touching. even though you knew the ending it was such a cute read
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- PMR
- 02-01-25
A great heartfelt story capturing the subtle joys of long term care.
The exquisite description of forgiveness and joy in relationships between fathers and daughters even after a lifetime of distress suggests the great hope that lies in forgiveness if we are brave enough to let go of our anger. Thank you for this lovely story.
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- Julia M
- 02-21-25
Engaging story
Both the story itself and the narration were spot on. I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.
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- Michael Iver
- 03-13-25
Very sweet and heartwarming
Loved the whole story, the narration was wonderful. Not all family has to be blood related.
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- Kindle Customer
- 03-09-25
Beautiful
I absolutely loved this book. The story was so believably inspiring, giving me hope that love will come to me, as I am now getting close to Fred's age.
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- josaid
- 03-08-25
The raw emotion in the story and the reader
Great story about the loneliness of getting old and the ability of people to sooth a yearning soul.
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