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The Gathering
- Narrated by: Terry Donnelly
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
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Publisher's summary
Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2007
Regarded as one of her country's foremost voices, Irish author Anne Enright makes a fresh mark on a rich literary tradition. The Gathering is a deeply insightful family saga, steeped in secrets and intrigue, unfolding over three generations.
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The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing who is intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. As Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London--and, indeed, the whole world--seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.
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Big chewy novel, excellent narration
- By Sand on 08-21-14
By: Martin Amis
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Mr. Fox
- A Novel
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Secret Smile
- By: Nicci French
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
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Overall
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Story
Miranda's sister Kerri has a new boyfriend. He's a handsome charmer who seems to dote on Kerri. But Brendan isn't the man he says he is. Miranda should know. She broke off her own affair with him just a few weeks ago when she found him reading her diary.
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I want my 9 hours back
- By Ashley on 07-19-23
By: Nicci French
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The Poison Tree
- By: Erin Kelly
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Successful journalist Erin Kelly has electrified readers and critics alike with her debut novel The Poison Tree. In this scintillating work, Karen and her daughter Alice have established a safe, happy life free from the madness of Karen’s past. But when Karen’s former lover Rex is released from prison, her old associations intrude upon the present - and threaten everything she holds dear.
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I couldn't stop listening the book.
- By Gladys on 07-29-15
By: Erin Kelly
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Late in the Day
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- By: Tessa Hadley
- Narrated by: Abigail Thaw
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Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their 20s. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: She is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. The loss warps their relationships.
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It's all in the performance
- By RueRue on 02-08-19
By: Tessa Hadley
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High Dive
- By: Jonathan Lee
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Overall
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Taking us inside one of the 20th century's most ambitious assassination attempts - "making history personal", as one character puts it - High Dive moves between the luxurious hospitality of a British tourist town and the troubled city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of the armed struggle between the Irish Republican Army and those loyal to the UK government.
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Humor? Not Funny.
- By W Perry Hall on 04-10-16
By: Jonathan Lee
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I Couldn't Love You More
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A sweeping story of three generations of women, crossing from London to Ireland and back again, and the enduring effort to retrieve the secrets of the past.
By: Esther Freud
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The Year of the Runaways
- By: Sunjeev Sahota
- Narrated by: Sartaj Garewal
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar, and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband's clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a call.
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Maybe easier to read than to listen to.
- By Eric on 06-15-16
By: Sunjeev Sahota
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The Girls in the Garden
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- By: Lisa Jewell
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Overall
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Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people's houses. You've known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly. You think your children are safe. But are they really? On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her 13-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her?
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Delightful
- By Julie on 11-03-17
By: Lisa Jewell
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
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When Ravi Kapoor, an overworked London doctor, reaches the breaking point with his difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: “Can’t we just send him away somewhere? Somewhere far, far away.” His prayer is seemingly answered when Ravi’s entrepreneurial cousin sets up a retirement home in India, hoping to re-create in Bangalore an elegant lost corner of England. Several retirees are enticed by the promise of indulgent living at a bargain price, but upon arriving, they are dismayed to find that restoration of the once sophisiticated hotel has stalled....
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Screenwriters Changed it for the Better
- By Carole T. on 06-05-12
By: Deborah Moggach
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What listeners say about The Gathering
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Carrie Lewchuk
- 01-10-23
Dark side of large families
Not just fun & games. The insiders view to a grieving family with secrets within secrets
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Overall
- Donna
- 03-27-08
Story drags on...and on and on!
After two hours I had to admit defeat--the story still hadn't begun to take off. The narrator within the story (Veronica?) was not one with whom I could empathize. It might eventually have gotten better, but I don't have enough years left in my life to find out.
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10 people found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Brent
- 01-15-17
Told well, Narrator is a bit slow
The narration was a bit slow and the pauses too long for me. I put it at a speed of 1.70X and it was much more natural.
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- Darla A. Middlebrook
- 04-20-16
Good narrating could not salvage this book!
Terry Donnelly does a very good job with the performance of a difficult novel. I liked her voice, but could not really enjoy it because of the writing. I hope to be able to find Terry Donnelly doing other narrations that will do her performance skills justice.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the book itself for reading or listening because of the story.
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- RI in Canada
- 07-28-16
Unconvinced
I'm not sure why but ultimately, I think I was not convinced of the authenticity of the main character, Veronica. Do people really think like that? Has Enright really captured the careering collapse of the mind of the grieving woman? Essentially, this is a "blame-the-past" story. The suicide of Veronica's brother goes back two generations to the household of her grandmother and trauma of the family. The whole dysfunction of a family (3 children, 12 grandchildren, and a few of the next generation mentioned along the way as well). All of this is narrated through the flawed and unreliable mind of Veronica, who goes into depression and starts to invent possible explanations, some of which may be true, but she doesn't know. The book takes a hopeful turn near the end and really it gets more interesting as it goes, but even at the end I found the character of Veronica problematic and unconvincing.
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Overall
- Erin
- 04-16-15
Beautiful, but hard to finish
Beautiful language, less than compelling story. I didn't feel engaged or care about the characters. Author is an exceedingly skilled writer, but I left this feeling less than satisfied.
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- rose53
- 09-14-22
Didn’t like this book
I found this book very disjointed and hard to follow.
I would like to return it. I did not finish it
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- Therese
- 10-17-22
The story began well, but then was about dull sex
I enjoyed the beginnimg of the story bery much, but then was disappointed by numerous descriptioms of dull sex. The male organ is mentioned exhaustively. A story of pedophilia is part of the last seberal chapters. I can't recommend this book.
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- marykk
- 01-03-12
Depressing and tedious
This is tediously written and the narrator is depressed and depressing. It seems to touch on all the stereotypes of the Irish: alcoholism, dysfunctional families, abuse. More than half way into it, I just couldn't take the narrative any more or the constant switching from present to past and the it-might-have-happened-this-way approach. Ugh!
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- Darwin8u
- 07-25-15
You can not libel the dead
“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering
I grabbed a couple of my Irish writers to read while traveling back and forth to Ireland for pleasure. Ha. Pleasure. The Irish know how to feck, fight and die. Oh, and write.
Both novels centered around drownings, death, and memory. Both were Man Booker Prize winners (born two years apart). Both were very different looks back. Banville's The Sea was more poetic, more soothing; a search for the correct word, the proper memory. 'The Gathering' was angrier. It was a picked scab, a hot wound, a shout into a dark wet cave; tea without sugar or cream, aged whiskey without the water. Banville's novel was almost elegiac and poetic in its mourning. Enright's was a primal, woman scream. It was less of a memory than an imagined history, a search for meaning in loss, a desperate search for who and why in family.
'The Gathering' was very good, just not great. I'm almost apologetic about making Enright's novel seem an Irish twin to Banville's. It is a bit unfair. She deserves to have her book examined alone. But the themes, the Irishness, the Man Bookered. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore Man Booker hath joined together, let not man put asunder. I have hung the seabird of the second read, second published, around her book. Oh well, life moves forward and so do reviews and cranky critics.
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17 people found this helpful