The Discomfort of Evening
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Genevieve Gaunt
About this listen
Winnter of the 2020 International Booker Prize
A stark and gripping tale of childhood grief from one of the most exciting new voices in Dutch literature
Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother’s hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of “blush words” that aren’t in the Bible.
One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family’s life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents’ suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of “the other side” and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her.
A best seller in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s radical debut novel The Discomfort of Evening offers listeners a rare vision of rural and religious life in the Netherlands. In it, they ask: In the absence of comfort and care, what can the mind of a child invent to protect itself? And what happens when that is not enough? With stunning psychological acuity and images of haunting, violent beauty, Rijneveld has created a captivating world of language unlike any other.
©2018 Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Translation © 2020 by Michele Hutchison. Epigraph quotations appear on: a statue of Maurice Gilliams in Antwerp (source unknown); from ‘Spring’ in The Collected Poems of Jan Wolkers, published as Verzamelde gedichten in 2008 by De Bezige Bij. (P)2020 Audible Ltd., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Genevieve Gaunt's performance of this audiobook - soft-voiced, delicately accented, hauntingly matter-of-fact—suits the 10-year-old narrator, Jas. There is an innocence to Gaunt's tone that adds to Jas's unsettling tale of loss and struggle." (AudioFile Magazine)
“The effects of the unspeakable grief felt by 10-year-old Jas’ family after the death of her beloved older brother are explored in painful and painstaking detail in this startling debut novel.... Rijneveld’s extraordinary narrator describes a small world of pain which is hard to look at and harder to ignore.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)
"Rijneveld's International Booker Prize-shortlisted debut is not a novel for those expecting triumphal outcomes. Readers who can persist through the agonies of a family falling apart, however, will find their breath taken away by Rijneveld's prose as filtered through Hutchison's deft translation.“ (Booklist, starred review)
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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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Toast
- The Story of a Boy's Hunger
- By: Nigel Slater
- Narrated by: Nigel Slater
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Toast is Nigel Slater's truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as he takes listeners on a tour of the contents of his family's pantry (rice pudding, tinned ham, cream soda, mince pies, lemon drops, bourbon biscuits), we are transported.
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Nigel Slater is fabulous!
- By S on 02-13-07
By: Nigel Slater
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The Road Home
- By: Rose Tremain
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008, The Road Home is the best-selling story of Lev, a middle-aged migrant from Eastern Europe, who moves to London in search of work after losing his wife and job. Lev's London is awash with money, celebrity and complacency. The world Tremain creates is both convincing and poignant.
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OK - nice narration - good characters
- By bea on 02-21-11
By: Rose Tremain
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum
- A Novel
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Pearl Hewitt
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the 20th century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.
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Another Kate Atkinson multi-generational story
- By Satisfied Customer on 11-08-18
By: Kate Atkinson
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The Paper Palace
- A Novel
- By: Miranda Cowley Heller
- Narrated by: Nan McNamara
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a 50-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at “The Paper Palace” - the family summer place she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: Last night, Elle and her oldest friend, Jonas, crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love.
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The story has too much child abuse discription
- By DTurek on 07-14-21
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Small Things Like These
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 1 hr and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery that forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
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Charming and Inspiring
- By David P on 09-05-22
By: Claire Keegan
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Long Lankin
- By: Lindsey Barraclough
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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When Cora and her little sister, Mimi, are sent to stay with their great-aunt in the isolated village of Bryers Guerdon, they receive a less than warm welcome and are desperate to go back to London. But Auntie Ida’s life was devastated the last time two young girls were at Guerdon Hall, and now her nieces’ arrival has reawakened an evil that has lain in wait for years. A haunting voice in an empty room; a strange, scarred man lurking in the graveyard; mysterious words scrawled on the walls of the abandoned church ... all point to a horrifying truth that has held Bryers Guerdon in its grip for centuries.
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AMAZING!!!
- By Sharron on 09-06-14
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Pennies for Hitler
- By: Jackie French
- Narrated by: Humphrey Bower
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1939, and for Georg, son of an English academic living in Germany, life is full of cream cakes and loving parents. It is also a time when his teacher measures the pupils' heads to see which of them have the most 'Aryan'- shaped heads. But when a university graduation ceremony turns into a pro-Nazi demonstration, Georg is smuggled out of Germany to war-torn London and then across enemy seas to Australia where he must forget his past and who he is in order to survive. Hatred is contagious, but Georg finds that kindness can be, too.
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This could be a Bryce Courtenay novel
- By K Cornwinkle on 07-02-14
By: Jackie French
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Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms
- By: Katherine Rundell
- Narrated by: Bianca Amato
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Even a life on the untamed plains of Africa can't prepare Wilhelmina for the wilds of an English boarding school in this lovely and lyrical novel from the author of Rooftoppers, which Booklist called "a glorious adventure". Wilhelmina Silver's world is golden. Living half-wild on an African farm with her horse, her monkey, and her best friend, every day is beautiful. But when her home is sold and Will is sent away to boarding school in England, the world becomes impossibly difficult.
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Wonderful!
- By Clayton on 10-11-24
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Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
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A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
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Running on Red Dog Road
- And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood
- By: Drema Hall Berkheimer
- Narrated by: Bailey Carr
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.
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Narrator’s attempt at a southern accent distracting to story
- By Ryan C. Bango on 01-05-22
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How to talk about this....
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Flights
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Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.
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Curious and beautifully written
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We Had to Remove This Post
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Kayleigh needs money. That’s why she takes a job as a content moderator for a social media platform whose name she isn’t allowed to mention. Her job: reviewing offensive videos and pictures, rants and conspiracy theories, and deciding which need to be removed. It’s grueling work. Kayleigh and her colleagues spend all day watching horrors and hate on their screens, evaluating them with the platform’s ever-changing terms of service while a supervisor sits behind them, timing and scoring their assessments.
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Do not waste your time
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What listeners say about The Discomfort of Evening
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-30-20
the discomfort of constipation
an in-depth look at the character and her life and environment. sadly unable to resonate with a ten year old who is being abused and harassed by all around her. seemed a bit over the top and cruel could never imagine letting my kids behave this way.
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- Kristen S.
- 09-03-20
Amazing
Simply beautiful. A gorgeous account of adolescent innocence and curiosity, of death and what it means to keep living, or not.
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1 person found this helpful
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- linda
- 05-27-23
Very good, well written and narrated
This was a very good book and the narration was perfect.
It is dark story expertly told
I noticed some reviewers were upset with some of the sexual content but I think it was necessary to highlight the extreme neglect these children experienced and how they tried to deal with what they were going through
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- Nicole Del Sesto
- 01-04-21
Daaaarrrrkkkkk
I don't know about evening, but I can tell you that this book was discomforting. Winner of the International Booker Prize this year, it's worthy. But, dark ... man.
The writing was incredible. The author has an amazing way with words, and they didn't hold anything back. The story was raw and unnerving.
I didn't enjoy it, but I did appreciate.
Rated R: Sexual situations
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5 people found this helpful
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- Sharlotte
- 03-09-21
Loved It!
The narration was superb, for starters, and a perfect match for this story. This book was exactly the kind I like best: something different involving a character study. Having read many Booker prize books over the years, I am surprised this was only shortlisted and not a winner. It had all the elements they usually seek out. I will look forward to more from this author!
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- Estelle D. Milch
- 11-11-20
Amazing though dark
This is brilliantly written I think but reveals the dark side of religious restrictive life. The insights shown of this young woman intrigues me. It was an excellent book to listen to.
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- Criticalthinker
- 12-04-20
Difficult themes and scenes, artful writing
Listening to this novel can be challenging. Anyone in their right mind will be disturbed by scenes and events described by the main character, a prepubescent girl named Jas. But Jas’s innocent perspective and frank, honest voice give this dark story an aura of purity. There is nothing exploitive or titillating here. It is stark and devastating in the telling, as it should be. The writing is perfection.
Jas’s entire world is her cold, strictly religious parents’ (they are Bible quoting Reformists) dairy farm, where she lives with an older brother and younger sister. A second brother, close to her age, dies in an accident, and the family falls into an abyss of grief. Her parents drift apart from one another and withdraw from their children (Jas yearns for her mother’s touch). The mother becomes anorexic and suicidal, the father harsh, angry and unforgiving. The teenaged brother grows increasingly cruel, abusive and dangerous, while Jas harms her own body as an act of penance for her brother’s death, for which she blames herself.
Death is the warp of this novel, grief the weft. Horrific things take place. But we see it all through the wide eyes of an innocent child. These severely neglected children explore each other sexually. The brother abuses and even kills animals for pleasure. As shocking as this is — for us, the listeners and readers — Jas does not fully understand what she is describing. She is curious, while we are horrified. Her child’s voice, and naïveté, are consistent through out the book. She is young for her years, in many ways, but wise in her observations. I liked her. I wanted to weep for her.
Jas dreams of escaping the farm (crossing the bridge over a lake, to “the other side,” from where, her father tells her, she can never return), but she is held fast by fear of retribution and the need for parental love. Love that is not offered.
The abrupt end of the novel is devastating. There is no denouement, just an end point. Death, and maybe — finally — comfort. This is a novel you will be thinking over for days.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Melinda
- 08-29-20
Beautifully read, beautiful book
This is an amazingly beautiful articulation of a naive young girls attempt to process her family’s grief and loss and her own ,through a thicket of rigidity, neglect, coldness and cruelty that ensued as a result. There is not an iota of maudlin sentiment in this writing. It is sharp and clear and despite the subject, just shines.
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5 people found this helpful
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- isavane samanna
- 09-17-20
Brilliant!
An amazing journey through grief and longing through the voice of a child. Shocking and endearing at the same time. Brilliant story and beautiful reading.
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4 people found this helpful
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- CV
- 03-03-21
The narrator is wonderful. My cat likes to listen.
The narrator is wonderful. My cat likes to listen. I think the narrator is the best part of the experience in print or audio play. I bought the book and it had a typo the audio performance made clear. It's very good audio art in my shrunken-headed opinion.
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