
The Great Pretenders
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Narrated by:
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Alexandra Harris
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By:
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Laura Kalpakian
About this listen
The daughter of Hollywood royalty, Roxanne Granville is used to getting what she wants - even if she has to break the rules. But after a falling-out with her grandfather, a powerful movie mogul, she has to face life on her own for the first time....
Roxanne forges a career unique for women in the 1950s, becoming an agent for hungry young screenwriters. She struggles to be taken seriously by the men who rule Hollywood and who often assume that sexual favors are just a part of doing business. When she sells a script by a blacklisted writer under the name of a willing front man, more exiled writers seek her help. Roxanne wades into a world murky with duplicity and deception, and she can’t afford any more risks.
Then she meets Terrence Dexter, a compelling African-American journalist unlike anyone she’s ever known. Roxanne again breaks the rules and is quickly swept up in a passionate relationship with very real dangers that could destroy everything she’s carefully built.
Roxanne Granville is a woman who bravely defies convention. She won’t let men make all the rules and won’t let skin color determine whom she can love.
The Great Pretenders is a riveting, emotional novel that resonates in today’s world and reminds us that some things are worth fighting for.
©2019 Laura Kalpakian (P)2019 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Good listen!
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Critic reviews
"What a good book! Engagingly readable, full of Golden Age of Hollywood glitz - and a wonderful story of idealism, courage and the price of love. Enjoyed every page!" (Diana Gabaldon, number-one New York Times best-selling author of Outlander)
"In her riveting new novel, Laura Kalpakian has given us a heroine to cheer for in this juicy tale of Hollywood. Roxanne Granville’s journey from diffident daughter of privilege to boundary-shattering career woman who takes on both the Hollywood blacklist and the racial prejudices of the early Civil Rights era is breathtaking and moving, even epic.” (Melanie Benjamin, New York Times best-selling author of The Girls in the Picture)
“[An] empowering, beautifully written story transports readers to 1950s-era Hollywood.” (Woman’s World)
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- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at Christie's in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. Dressed in couture YSL, drinking the finest champagne at trendy Balthazar, Reba, as she's known, is the picture of a wealthy art collector. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she's a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make.
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Fascinating premise, boring book
- By Michael on 12-09-20
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Girl A
- A Novel
- By: Abigail Dean
- Narrated by: Ell Potter
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents - her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer.
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Disappointing...
- By kendra l kramer on 02-09-21
By: Abigail Dean
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Wunderland
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Cody Epstein
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Once inseparable, Berlin teenagers Ilse Fischer and Renate Bauer find their friendship ripped apart by their nation’s abrupt swing into fascism. Ilse, a so-called Aryan, throws her lot in with the Nazi Party, while Renate sees her once-secure world dismantled by Adolf Hitler's race laws and then shattered by a shocking betrayal. Decades later, that same betrayal will upend the life of Ilse's daughter, Ava, as she discovers long-buried truths about her mother's past.
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Amazing book
- By Paula Boudreault on 05-20-19
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The Night Watch
- By: Sarah Waters
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 18 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners - three women and a young man with a past - whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise, and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.
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A Captivating Tale of Resilience and War
- By Anonymous User on 12-27-23
By: Sarah Waters
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A Most Clever Girl
- A Novel of an American Spy
- By: Stephanie Marie Thornton
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The year 1963: Reeling from the death of her mother and President Kennedy’s assassination, Catherine Gray shows up on Elizabeth Bentley’s doorstep demanding answers to the shocking mystery she just uncovered about her family. What she doesn’t expect is for Bentley to ensnare her in her own story of becoming a controversial World War II spy and Cold War informer.
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Loved it
- By Jasper Van Wyk on 10-20-21
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Her Last Flight
- A Novel
- By: Beatriz Williams
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 13 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1947, photographer and war correspondent Janey Everett arrives at a remote surfing village on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to research a planned biography of forgotten aviation pioneer Sam Mallory, who joined the loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War and never returned. Obsessed with Sam’s fate, Janey has tracked down Irene Lindquist, the owner of a local island-hopping airline, whom she believes might actually be the legendary Irene Foster, Mallory’s onetime student and flying partner.
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My favorite so far, & I love them all
- By Kate Wilcox on 07-06-20
By: Beatriz Williams
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The Daughters of Foxcote Manor
- By: Eve Chase
- Narrated by: Katherine Press
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When the Harrington family discovers an abandoned baby deep in the woods, they decide to keep her a secret and raise her as their own. But within days a body is found in the grounds of their house and their perfect new family implodes. Years later, Sylvie, seeking answers to nagging questions about her life, is drawn into the wild beautiful woods where nothing is quite what it seems. Will she unearth the truth? And dare she reveal it?
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Boring story, monotone narration
- By Marie Case on 12-28-20
By: Eve Chase
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The Bookshop Ladies
- By: Faith Hogan
- Narrated by: Flora Montgomery
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Joy Blackwood has no idea why her French art dealer husband has left a valuable painting to a woman called Robyn Tessier in Ballycove, a small town on the west coast of Ireland, but she is determined to find out. She arrives in Ballycove to find that Robyn runs a rather chaotic and unprofitable bookshop. She is shy, suffering from unrequited love for dashing Kian, and badly in need of advice on how to make the bookshop successful.
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What matters most
- By Adrienne Bartlett on 08-06-24
By: Faith Hogan
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Smart Women
- By: Judy Blume
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh, Judy Blume
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Margo and B.B. are each divorced, and each is trying to reinvent her life in Colorado - while their respective teenage daughters look on with a mixture of humor and horror. But even smart women sometimes have a lot to learn - and they will, when B.B.’s ex-husband moves in next door to Margo.
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What smart women?
- By Monica Aragon on 05-15-24
By: Judy Blume
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Prep
- A Novel
- By: Curtis Sittenfeld
- Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie
- Length: 17 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant 14-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.
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“Lee Goes to High School”
- By Ree on 03-28-20
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Mika in Real Life
- A Novel
- By: Emiko Jean
- Narrated by: Sura Siu, Andi Arndt
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At thirty-five, Mika Suzuki’s life is a mess. Her last relationship ended in flames. Her roommate-slash-best friend might be a hoarder. She’s a perpetual disappointment to her traditional Japanese parents. And, most recently, she’s been fired from her latest dead-end job. Mika is at her lowest point when she receives a phone call from Penny—the daughter she placed for adoption sixteen years ago. Penny is determined to forge a relationship with her birth mother, and in turn, Mika longs to be someone Penny is proud of. Faced with her own inadequacies, Mika embellishes a fact about her life.
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Not Just a book, It's An Experience
- By Brenda C. on 08-04-22
By: Emiko Jean
Some of the writing is a little repetitive without meaning.
Good book and easy to stop and start
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OUTSTANDING
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Disappointing
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