
The Great Offshore Grounds
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Xe Sands
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By:
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Vanessa Veselka
About this listen
National Book Award Nominee
A wildly original, cross-country novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies - national, individual, and collective - that drive and define us.
On the day of their estranged father’s wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It’s been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of personal and professional dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her freeloading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what’s theirs. Except, instead of money, what their father gives them is information - a name - which forces them to come to grips with a long-held family secret. In the face of their new reality, the sisters and their adopted brother each set out on journeys that will test their faith in one another, as well as their definitions of freedom.
Moving from Seattle’s underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, Vanessa Veselka spins a tale with boundless verve, linguistic vitality, and undeniable tenderness.
©2020 Vanessa Veselka (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The Great Offshore Grounds reminded me of what a great novel can do - Veselka's seafaring epic has the forward momentum of a grand adventure and the spiraling depth of a new myth. All the pleasure of eighteenth century storytelling renewed for our newborn millennium. I love this textured, tonally complex wonder of a book, a quest for Melville's 'unimaginable sublimity' that never shies away from the messy flux of the body, or the oceanic scope of our shared global history. It's also a blast to read - darkly hilarious, astral, cerebral, suspenseful, warm-blooded, divine." (Karen Russell, author of Orange World)
“Astonishing depth and scope ... Veselka blends fascinating details of seamanship, cab driving, and boot camp with intimate, spot-on descriptions of contemporary American poverty ... This gritty and unsentimental work is compassionate, funny, and deeply human.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Energetic ... points of view shift kaleidoscopically, passages of history and politics are woven into the questlike narratives of the characters. The result is a fiery and occasionally luminous chaos that feels true to the experience of those for whom each day is lived at the edges of mainstream society.” (Kirkus)
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Little Eyes
- A Novel
- By: Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
They've infiltrated homes in Hong Kong, shops in Vancouver, the streets of in Sierra Leone, town squares in Oaxaca, schools in Tel Aviv, bedrooms in Indiana. They're everywhere. They're here. They're us. They're not pets, or ghosts, or robots. They're real people, but how can a person living in Berlin walk freely through the living room of someone in Sydney? How can someone in Bangkok have breakfast with your children in Buenos Aires, without your knowing? Especially when these people are completely anonymous, unknown, unfindable.
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it's interesting.
- By Nancy E. Griffin on 12-04-20
By: Samanta Schweblin, and others
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Time After Time
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Grunwald
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a clear December morning in 1937, at the famous gold clock in Grand Central Terminal, Joe Reynolds, a hardworking railroad man from Queens, meets a vibrant young woman who seems mysteriously out of place. Nora Lansing is a Manhattan socialite and an aspiring artist whose flapper clothing, pearl earrings, and talk of the Roaring Twenties don’t seem to match the bleak mood of Depression-era New York. Captivated by Nora from her first electric touch, Joe despairs when he tries to walk her home and she disappears. Finding her again will become the focus of his love and his life.
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The promise of the premise wasn't met
- By J on 02-18-20
By: Lisa Grunwald
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Inland
- A Novel
- By: Téa Obreht
- Narrated by: Anna Chlumsky, Edoardo Ballerini, Euan Morton
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, two extraordinary lives unfold. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life - her husband, who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons, who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home.
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I tried,
- By Julianne on 10-09-19
By: Téa Obreht
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Sorry for Your Trouble
- Stories
- By: Richard Ford
- Narrated by: Stephen Mendel
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love, and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself”, a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death....
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Beautifully conceived collection
- By Tom on 10-15-20
By: Richard Ford
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A Play for the End of the World
- A Novel
- By: Jai Chakrabarti
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Traveling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis.
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I can’t believe this is a debut novel
- By Jennifer Lang on 09-28-21
By: Jai Chakrabarti
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The Anatomy of Dreams
- A Novel
- By: Chloe Benjamin
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Sylvie Patterson, a bookish student at a Northern California boarding school, falls in love with a spirited, elusive classmate named Gabe, they embark on an experiment that changes their lives. Their headmaster, Dr. Adrian Keller, is a charismatic medical researcher who has staked his career on the therapeutic potential of lucid dreaming: by teaching his patients to become conscious during sleep, he believes he can relieve stress and trauma. Over the next six years, Sylvie and Gabe become consumed by Keller’s work, following him across the country.
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Really bad
- By Mugs on 04-30-20
By: Chloe Benjamin
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The Friends We Keep
- By: Jane Green
- Narrated by: Jane Green
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Evvie, Maggie, and Topher have known one another since college. Their friendship was something they swore would last forever. Now years have passed, the friends have drifted apart, and they never found the lives they wanted - the lives they dreamed of when they were young and everything seemed possible. Evvie starved herself to become a supermodel but derailed her career by sleeping with a married man. Maggie married Ben, the boy she fell in love with in college, never imagining the heartbreak his drinking would cause.
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Story was ok, narration was awful
- By Colleen on 06-10-19
By: Jane Green
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Small Pleasures
- A Novel
- By: Clare Chambers
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.
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Awful ending
- By greyhound on 03-07-22
By: Clare Chambers
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A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom
- A Novel
- By: John Boyne
- Narrated by: Tim McInnerny
- Length: 15 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons, one with his father’s violence in his blood, one with his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning. Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of 2,000 years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across 50 countries to a life among the stars, their destinies remain the same....
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AD 2016
- By Warren on 08-24-20
By: John Boyne
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Night Boat to Tangier
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Barry
- Narrated by: Kevin Barry
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen - Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs - sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice's estranged daughter, Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals, and serial exiles.
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Two Spooky Guys Waiting…
- By David on 12-06-19
By: Kevin Barry
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The Motion of the Body Through Space
- A Novel
- By: Lionel Shriver
- Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Lionel Shriver's entertaining send-up of today's cult of exercise - which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life - an aging husband's sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable.
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Very Good!
- By Tina on 06-01-20
By: Lionel Shriver
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The Dharma Bums
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Ethan Hawke
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans - mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer - whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
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Lyrical Rendition
- By Michael E on 04-28-20
By: Jack Kerouac
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The School of Mirrors
- A Novel
- By: Eva Stachniak
- Narrated by: Ell Potter
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
During the reign of Louis XV, impoverished but lovely teenage girls from all over France are sent to a discreet villa in the town of Versailles. Overseen by the King’s favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, they will be trained as potential courtesans for the King. When the time is right, each girl is smuggled into the palace of Versailles, with its legendary Hall of Mirrors.
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Fascinating but pedophilia nonetheless.
- By Barbara W. on 05-10-22
By: Eva Stachniak
Epic Family (blood and chosen) Saga
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A good philosophical question made it worth reading
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Did not hold my interest
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Rambling waste of time
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