The Forgiven
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Ralph Lister
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By:
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Lawrence Osborne
About this listen
In this stylish, haunting novel, journalist and novelist Lawrence Osborne explores the reverberations of a random accident on the lives of Moroccan Muslims and Western visitors who converge on a luxurious desert villa for a decadent weekend-long party.
David and Jo Henniger, a doctor and children's book author, in search of an escape from their less-than-happy lives in London, accept the invitation of their old friends Richard and Dally to attend their annual bacchanal at their home deep in the Moroccan desert - a ksar they have acquired and renovated into a luxurious retreat.
On the way, the Hennigers stop for lunch, and the bad-tempered David can't resist consuming most of a bottle of wine. Back on the road, darkness has descended, David is groggy, and the directions to the ksar are vague. Suddenly, two young men spring from the roadside, apparently attempting to interest passing drivers in the fossils they have for sale. Panicked, David swerves toward the two, leaving one dead on the road and the other running into the hills.
At the ksar, the festivities have begun: Richard and Dally’s international friends sit down to a lavish dinner prepared and served by a large staff of Moroccans. As the night progresses and the debauchery escalates, the Moroccans increasingly view the revelers as the godless "infidels" they are. When David and Jo show up late with the dead body of the young man in their car, word spreads among the locals that David has committed an unforgivable act.
Thus the stage is set for a weekend during which David and Jo must come to terms with David's misdeed, Jo's longings, and their own deteriorating relationship, and the flamboyant Richard and Dally must attempt to keep their revelers entertained despite growing tension from their staff and the Moroccan Berber father who comes to claim his son's body.
With spare, evocative prose, searing eroticism, and a gift for the unexpected, Osborne memorably portrays the privileged guests wrestling with their secrets amid the remoteness and beauty of the desert landscape. He also gradually reveals the jolting backstory of the young man who was killed and leaves David’s fate in the balance as the novel builds to a shattering conclusion.
Selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of the Year 2012.
Selected by Library Journal as one of the Year's Best Books 2012.
Year's Best Books Chosen by Writers, selected by Lionel Shriver, The Guardian 2012.
©2012, 2013 Lawrence Osborne (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A sinister and streamlined entertainment in the tradition of Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh and the early Ian McEwan.... This is a lean book that moves like a panther. Even better, Mr. Osborne has a keen and sometimes cruel eye for humans and their manners and morals, and for the natural world. You can open to almost any page and find brutally fine observations...surprising and dark and excellent.” (New York Times)
“Extraordinarily acute to human nature.... Stylishness holds the book together, and makes all the bits of plot machinery feel new again.... There are enough ways to read the book that one finishes it and immediately wants to start it again.” (Newsweek)
"Osborne writes mercilessly, savagely well. He excavates his characters, and the centuries-long cultural rift between the desert people and the Western infidels with a pathologist’s precision, wrapping fear, boredom, forgiveness, judgment, honour and sexual attraction into a novel that plunges with sinister pace towards its denouement." (The Daily Mail)
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Fragile Things
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Marvelous creations, including a short story set in the world of The Matrix and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction, can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his entertaining (and dark) sense of humor.
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Perhaps a different format?
- By Karen on 11-03-10
By: Neil Gaiman
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Bride of the Rat God
- By: Barbara Hambly
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1923, and silent film reigns in Hollywood. Of all the starlets, none is more beloved than Chrysanda Flamande, a diva as brilliant as she is difficult to manage. Handling her falls to Norah, widow of Chrysanda’s dead brother. She has always done her job well, but she was never equipped to deal with murder. When a violent killing shocks Chrysanda’s entourage, and other weird happenings swiftly follow, Norah begins to suspect that some strange power is stalking the star. In Chinatown she receives warning that a curse has been placed on the actress as vengeance for wearing a sacred amulet in one of her films.
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fun mix of fantasy and 1920s Hollywood
- By Kindle Customer on 11-11-14
By: Barbara Hambly
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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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Lost in Translation
- By: Nicole Mones
- Narrated by: Angela Lin
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A novel of searing intelligence and startling originality, Lost in Translation heralds the debut of a unique new voice on the literary landscape. Nicole Mones creates an unforgettable story of love and desire, of family ties and human conflict, and of one woman's struggle to lose herself in a foreign land - only to discover her home, her heart, herself.
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Absolutely fascinating!
- By Brendan on 10-16-10
By: Nicole Mones
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Honor
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno, Piter Marik
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London. Internationally best-selling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in.
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Complex but Compelling
- By Cariola on 04-14-13
By: Elif Shafak
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East of the Sun
- By: Julia Gregson
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Autumn 1928. Three young women are on their way to India, each with a new life in mind. Rose, a beautiful but naive bride-to-be, is anxious about leaving her family and marrying a man she hardly knows. Victoria, her bridesmaid couldn't be happier to get away from her overbearing mother, and is determined to find herself a husband. And Viva, their inexperienced chaperone, is in search of the India of her childhood, ghosts from the past and freedom.
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Indian history takes a back seat to 3 young women
- By Richard on 05-24-16
By: Julia Gregson
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The Visiting Privilege
- New and Collected Stories
- By: Joy Williams
- Narrated by: Richard Powers, Emily Woo Zeller, Elisabeth Rodgers, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Joy Williams has been celebrated as a master of the short story for four decades, her renown passing from one generation to the next even in the shifting landscape of contemporary writing. And at long last the incredible scope of her singular achievement is put on display: 33 stories drawn from three much-lauded collections and another 13 appearing here for the first time in book form.
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I sure tried.
- By A.C. CALLOWAY on 01-28-24
By: Joy Williams
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The Invisible Circus
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Madeleine Lambert
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation.
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Too bad zero was not a choice...
- By IVAL on 04-28-13
By: Jennifer Egan
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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A Spear of Summer Grass
- By: Deanna Raybourn
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even among Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather's savanna manor house until gossip subsides. Fairlight is the crumbling, sun-bleached skeleton of a faded African dream, a world where dissolute expats are bolstered by gin and jazz records, cigarettes and safaris. As mistress of this wasted estate, Delilah falls into the decadent pleasures of society.
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Disappointed
- By Vinity on 07-13-13
By: Deanna Raybourn
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Outside Looking In
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.
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STORYTELLING AS CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING
- By Christopher Meeks on 05-25-19
By: T. C. Boyle
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American Gods [TV Tie-In]
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life. But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow's best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger he meets on the way home, an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday.
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Read other Neil Gaiman first
- By Robert on 04-16-11
By: Neil Gaiman
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The Damnation Game
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Marty Strauss, a gambling addict recently released from prison, is hired to be the personal bodyguard of Joseph Whitehead, one of the wealthiest men in the world. The job proves more complicated and dangerous than he thought, however, as Marty soon gets caught up in a series of supernatural events involving Whitehead, his daughter (who is a heroin addict), and a devilish man named Mamoulian, with whom Whitehead made a Faustian bargain many years earlier, during World War II.
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Damned If You Do
- By Wag The Fox on 04-05-14
By: Clive Barker
What listeners say about The Forgiven
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- rajeev bhave
- 05-18-22
Unable to play the book
At chapter 13, 6 minutes into the chapter the book stopped playing. Frustrating!!
I was enjoying listening to the book.
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- Rene
- 03-30-19
Only marginal recommendation
Full of antiheroes and hedonists.
Great narration of story that I wouldn't have started in hindsight.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 06-09-22
Riveting
Excellent writing; excellent story set in Morocco , excellently narrated with sustained tension and an unexpected but plausible ending.
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2 people found this helpful
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- JDP
- 04-01-19
No for me
Saw this recommended in a newspaper article & wasn't my type of book and wouldn't be one I'd recommend. Not especially interesting & wording and phrases were almost comical at times.
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2 people found this helpful