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The Enigma of Arrival
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
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Publisher's summary
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
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Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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House of Stone
- A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
- By: Anthony Shadid
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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When Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went home, not to Boston, Beirut, or Oklahoma, where he was raised by his Lebanese American family, but to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures.
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Bit depressing
- By Astrid Dahl on 03-17-12
By: Anthony Shadid
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A Russian Journal
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Steinbeck and Capa's account of their journey through Cold War Russia is a classic piece of reportage and travel writing.Just after the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune.
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Extremely Interesting
- By Jean on 12-04-14
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Essays of E. B. White
- By: E. B. White
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.
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E.B. White writes honestly, fearlessly and clearly
- By Bonny on 09-03-17
By: E. B. White
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The Road to Little Dribbling
- Adventures of an American in Britain
- By: Bill Bryson
- Narrated by: Nathan Osgood
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed—and what hasn’t.
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No Bryson?? Alas, another disappointed fan
- By Rick on 01-25-16
By: Bill Bryson
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Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Story of Lucy Gault
- By: William Trevor
- Narrated by: Katherine Borowitz
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The Story of Lucy Gault traces the repercussions of a child’s attempt to remain in her beloved home.Threatened with a move from Ireland to England, 9-year-old Lucy runs away, setting off a series of misunderstandings that will eventually touch each inhabitant of her village.
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A Most Heart warming read
- By Elizabeth K. Morse on 12-12-11
By: William Trevor
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The Unsettled Dust
- By: Robert Aickman
- Narrated by: Reece Shearsmith
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories in which strange things happen that the reader is unable to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged, but all have the same thing in common: they are brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our piece of mind actually is. 'The Unsettled Dust', 'The House of the Russians', 'No Stronger Than a Flower', 'The Cicerones' and 'Ravissante' first appeared in the Sub Rosa collection in 1968, but the stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990.
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Perfectly read, sheds new light on this work
- By James Townsend on 04-10-17
By: Robert Aickman
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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
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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.
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a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
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The Shepherd's Life
- Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
- By: James Rebanks
- Narrated by: Bryan Dick
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. He's the first son of a shepherd who was the first son of a shepherd himself; his family have lived and worked in the Lake District of Northern England for generations, further back than recorded history. It's a part of the world known mainly for its romantic descriptions by Wordsworth and the much-loved illustrated children's books of Beatrix Potter. But James' world is quite different. His way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work they demand.
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The Author Wears His Life As A Heavy Mantle
- By Sara on 12-06-15
By: James Rebanks
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Mixed feelings.
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Epic story but hard to follow - need reference mat
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Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
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Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.
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AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ
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Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East is an account of a geographic and spiritual journey to the East. The narrator, H.H. accompanies the members of a secret society on a journey through both time and space in search of the “ultimate truth”. Fun and entertaining at first, the company falls apart in a deep mountain gorge called Morbio Inferiore when the servant Leo disappears, triggering anxiety and strife. The members each go their own way, and many years later when the narrator tries to write his story of the ill-fated trip, he is unable to put together a coherent account.
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I love hesse. This was the weakest so far.
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A Way in the World
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- Unabridged
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Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
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ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
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The Feast of the Goat
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Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, 49-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of 1961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway.
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Enlightening But Challenging
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By: Mario Vargas Llosa, and others
What listeners say about The Enigma of Arrival
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- leongork
- 08-15-21
An amazing account of change
He stands at one place and observes changes in the scenery of people and buildings with a keen eye for character traits. He brings everything to life like a painting.
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- JK
- 08-08-21
A MASTER AUTHOR
This is a masterpiece.
The more I read by him the more I appreciate his style of writing.
In this book he is very philosophical.
It really is an autobiography.
The narration by mr. Simon Vance is unsurpassed.
Thanks to all for making this book available to us, JK
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1 person found this helpful
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- FlyGuy
- 02-27-21
Vance is Totally Terrific!!!!
The most important novel of a Nobel Prize winning author deserves a Nobel Prize-level performance -- and Simon Vance delivers! I almost cried when the performance ended -- partially due to the beauty of Naipaul's writing and partially due to Vance's masterful performance.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Yas
- 10-06-20
Quite intriguing
A masterpiece by a master. It is an intriguing work. Written with a tang of arrogance, like only Naipaul can achieve.
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4 people found this helpful
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- A Kmetovic
- 01-25-22
Didn’t want to
Write anything want out
Just wanted to leave stars
Requiring words is ridiculous!!!!!
Two words I’d like to write but won’t
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- Professor Spice
- 02-02-22
Slow but very evocative
Naipaul rented a cottage and went for a lot of walks. So, story, what story? On the bright side, he is a great writer, and he conveys beautifully the sense of coming to a place, getting to feel at home, realizing that it, too, is in flux (so really is there any such thing as home?), and moving on. Added bonus, the cottage is on the estate of a reclusive aristocrat who in his younger days appeared as a character in a couple of other English novels. Beautifully read, which helps keep you going.
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Overall
- Chike M Nzerue
- 05-02-20
A noveau novel
The novel started rather slowly with overly staid descriptions of gardens and the English countryside around Salisbury. One can tell that it's a non fiction novel, although it has elements that suggest fiction. He gives an elaborate description of his sister's funeral and cremation although he was not there. The novel is strongest to me when Naipaul turns the camera on himself and talks about his own losses as the son of the defunct British empire. His tone at times appears condescending towards gardeners and staff at the manor where he lived. His powers of describing characters is impressive. However the book would have been more uplifting if these descriptions also showed the glamor of ordinary prople .
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7 people found this helpful
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- Viewer
- 08-14-21
Compelling author with a distinctive technique
Naipaul's complex patterns of repetition, each recurring element or event associated with incremental differences of perspective from that already conveyed or association with novel facts that alter their prevailing import, etc. is executed with a skill and precision few would be able to regard without jealousy. As a stylist and master of rhetorical pace, he is among the first grade of 20th/21st century novelists...Esp. (in context of his peers), for his ability to preserve artistic consideration within the language of head-on description and overt analysis. Where there is implication, it is largely accomplished by matter of fact relation of events, the description of slowly decaying places, with more of the former out-loud appraisal than the latter "negative space" doing the heavy lifting. This is in marked contrast to a more widely advocated and attempted method (one championed by a larger cohort of writers the equal or even better of Naipaul) who insist that "showing" rather than telling of or weighing in on their characters' qualities, constitutions, motivations, foibles, fallbacks, virtues and contradictions, is the modality proper to narrative art. Somehow, Naipaul manages to retain a commanding hand while conveying these latter dimensions by directly telling and describing them. He does not greatly cater to the theoretically more seductive "show much, explain little, opine less" school of modernist stylistic. Given the heavy appeal of that approach to the literary elite of the 20th/21st centuries, Naipaul's habit of foregrounding outright commentary alongside direct example imbues his work with much needed originality. Like all great literary artists since Cervantes or Montaigne, Naipaul's ardent apprenticeship of multi-sided consideration, of polygonal sympathies, Naipaul's conviction of a definite plurality in human affairs, is a trait amply evinced in his tracking of a set of interrelated neighbors on a slowly-devolving, semirural UK estate during a brutal stretch of Thatcherite rule in the 1980s. Yet while the author makes similar pains to expend a healthy measure of overall book length on ostensible self-criticism, his self-probing challenges to greater ethical insight or maturity fall short. Fall more compelling are the portraits of others' vulnerabilities. Naipaul adroitly assays his subjects' ingrained coping and maintenance strategies, their personal relations, challenges and opportunities, their cheap alibis and worthy acts of grace, rendering expressed attitudes and expressions in a shrewdly selected context of pertinent conditions. Yet he never does this on himself! One wouldn't know at all, having read this lengthy manuscript, of his own long marriages or much, if anything, of his real flaws beyond a few carefully guarded and whitewashed youthful preconceptions, which he confines to former immaturities of ambition or creative persona. There is nothing more thorny or viital put to the stand than such vagary. Hence, while only an author of substantive talent could fashion this work's unique generic blend of fiction, memoir and introspection with coherence; while only such a craft could organize its intricate cycles of repetition, or supply as fine a rumination on placeness and place....insofar as Naipaul sidesteps the hard and humbling task of self-exposure and genuine critique, he falls short of his project's true aims.
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