-
The Hooligan's Return
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $24.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
At the center of The Hooligan's Return is the author himself, always an outcast, on a bleak lifelong journey through Nazism and communism to exile in America. But while Norman Manea's book is in many ways a memoir, it is also a deeply imaginative work, traversing time and place, life and literature, dream and reality, past and present. Autobiographical events merge with historic elements, always connecting the individual with the collective destiny. Manea speaks of the bloodiest time of the 20th century and of the emergence afterward of a global, competitive, and sometimes cynical modern society.
Both a harrowing memoir and an ambitious epic project, The Hooligan's Return achieves a subtle internal harmony as anxiety evolves into a delicate irony and a burlesque fantasy. Beautifully written and brilliantly conceived, this is the work of a writer with an acute understanding of the vast human potential for both evil and kindness, obedience and integrity.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Crossing the Borders of Time
- A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed
- By: Leslie Maitland
- Narrated by: Leslie Maitland
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees—the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed the harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before immigrating to New York.
-
-
I didn't want it to end..absolutely wonderful!
- By Ellen on 05-07-12
By: Leslie Maitland
-
The Girl with Seven Names
- A North Korean Defector’s Story
- By: Hyeonseo Lee, David John
- Narrated by: Josie Dunn
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?
-
-
Did not like narrator
- By Linda H. Andreae on 10-09-19
By: Hyeonseo Lee, and others
-
The Inextinguishable Symphony
- A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany
- By: Martin Goldsmith
- Narrated by: Martin Goldsmith
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 1933, more than 8,000 Jewish musicians, actors, and other artists were expelled from their positions with German orchestras, opera companies, and theater groups. Later that year, the Jüdische Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture Association, was created to allow Jewish artists to perform for Jewish audiences.
-
-
An incredible story
- By Stanner on 04-20-22
By: Martin Goldsmith
-
The Japanese Lover
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Joanna Gleason
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family's Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart.
-
-
My first negative review
- By Karen O'Byrne on 11-11-15
By: Isabel Allende
-
Violeta
- A Novel
- By: Isabel Allende, Frances Riddle
- Narrated by: Yareli Arizmendi
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.
-
-
Not my favorite....
- By Pat Brett on 02-14-22
By: Isabel Allende, and others
-
Lunch with Charlotte
- By: Leon Berger
- Narrated by: Leon Berger
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every Friday for the last 25 years of her life, I had lunch with Charlotte and each week she told me more of her extraordinary story. To all appearances, she was a strong and dignified survivor, with old-world courtesies, a twinkling sense of humor, and a lilting Austrian syntax. Yet deep within, she'd been scarred by a profound personal trauma.
-
-
A Well-told, Heart-wrenching Novel
- By deebuff on 01-08-16
By: Leon Berger
-
Crossing the Borders of Time
- A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed
- By: Leslie Maitland
- Narrated by: Leslie Maitland
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leslie Maitland is an award-winning former New York Times investigative reporter whose mother and grandparents fled Germany in 1938 for France, where, as Jews, they spent four years as refugees—the last two under risk of Nazi deportation. In 1942 they made it onto the last boat to escape France before the Germans sealed the harbors. Then, barred from entering the United States, they lived in Cuba for almost two years before immigrating to New York.
-
-
I didn't want it to end..absolutely wonderful!
- By Ellen on 05-07-12
By: Leslie Maitland
-
The Girl with Seven Names
- A North Korean Defector’s Story
- By: Hyeonseo Lee, David John
- Narrated by: Josie Dunn
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?
-
-
Did not like narrator
- By Linda H. Andreae on 10-09-19
By: Hyeonseo Lee, and others
-
The Inextinguishable Symphony
- A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany
- By: Martin Goldsmith
- Narrated by: Martin Goldsmith
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 1933, more than 8,000 Jewish musicians, actors, and other artists were expelled from their positions with German orchestras, opera companies, and theater groups. Later that year, the Jüdische Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture Association, was created to allow Jewish artists to perform for Jewish audiences.
-
-
An incredible story
- By Stanner on 04-20-22
By: Martin Goldsmith
-
The Japanese Lover
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Joanna Gleason
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family's Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart.
-
-
My first negative review
- By Karen O'Byrne on 11-11-15
By: Isabel Allende
-
Violeta
- A Novel
- By: Isabel Allende, Frances Riddle
- Narrated by: Yareli Arizmendi
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. From the start, her life is marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.
-
-
Not my favorite....
- By Pat Brett on 02-14-22
By: Isabel Allende, and others
-
Lunch with Charlotte
- By: Leon Berger
- Narrated by: Leon Berger
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every Friday for the last 25 years of her life, I had lunch with Charlotte and each week she told me more of her extraordinary story. To all appearances, she was a strong and dignified survivor, with old-world courtesies, a twinkling sense of humor, and a lilting Austrian syntax. Yet deep within, she'd been scarred by a profound personal trauma.
-
-
A Well-told, Heart-wrenching Novel
- By deebuff on 01-08-16
By: Leon Berger
-
Dear Leader
- Poet, Spy, Escapee - A Look inside North Korea
- By: Jang Jin-sung
- Narrated by: Daniel York
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.
-
-
Outstanding! A life-changing listen.
- By Gotta Tellya on 09-29-14
By: Jang Jin-sung
-
All Rivers Run to the Sea
- Memoirs
- By: Elie Wiesel
- Narrated by: Elie Wiesel
- Length: 1 hr and 30 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From his early years with his loving Jewish family to the horrors of Auschwitz to his life as a Nobel Prize-winning writer, Elie Wiesel tells his story. Passionate and poignant, All Rivers Run to the Sea is an unforgettable book of love and rage, doubt and faith, despair and trust, and ultimately, of wisdom.
-
-
A story of love and perseverance
- By Miss Right on 04-13-21
By: Elie Wiesel
-
Reading Lolita in Tehran
- A Memoir in Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
-
-
A literary critique of Russian lit.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-15-16
By: Azar Nafisi
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Snow
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.
-
-
All the good & bad that is Pamuk
- By Elizabeth on 08-13-07
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Lara
- The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago
- By: Anna Pasternak
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak - whose novel in progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet - he persecuted Boris' mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris' affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris' writing process.
-
-
A wonderfully enjoyable read
- By gran 80 on 03-15-17
By: Anna Pasternak
-
The Big Green Tent
- A Novel
- By: Ludmila Ulitskaya, Polly Gannon - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 22 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya's remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys - an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets - struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled.
-
-
Modern female Russian writer writing a saga starting with Stalin's death and ending with the poet Brodsky's. It also 3 male frie
- By Olive Gale Mullet on 04-14-17
By: Ludmila Ulitskaya, and others
-
Paris
- A Love Story; a Memoir
- By: Kati Marton
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this remarkably honest memoir, award-winning journalist and distinguished author Kati Marton presents an impassioned and romantic story of love, loss, and life after loss. Paris is at the heart of this deeply moving account. At every stage of her life, Paris offers Marton beauty and excitement, and now, after the sudden death of her husband, Richard Holbrooke, it offers a chance for a fresh beginning.
-
-
MLF: Must Love French
- By Pamela Harvey on 08-19-12
By: Kati Marton
-
Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
-
-
Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
-
Dancing with the Enemy
- My Family's Holocaust Secret
- By: Paul Glaser
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
-
-
Amazing Unique
- By Nordic Artisan on 05-11-19
By: Paul Glaser
-
Miral
- By: Rula Jebreal
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Written by the much-admired Italo-Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, Miral is a novel that focuses on remarkable women whose lives unfold in the turbulent political climate along the borders of Israel and Palestine. The story begins with Hind, a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem. Years later, Miral arrives at the school after her mother commits suicide.
-
-
Glad we are finally hearing from this culture
- By maida smith on 02-05-13
By: Rula Jebreal
-
The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
-
-
Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
Related to this topic
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Lara
- The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago
- By: Anna Pasternak
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak - whose novel in progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet - he persecuted Boris' mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris' affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris' writing process.
-
-
A wonderfully enjoyable read
- By gran 80 on 03-15-17
By: Anna Pasternak
-
Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
-
-
Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
-
Dancing with the Enemy
- My Family's Holocaust Secret
- By: Paul Glaser
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
-
-
Amazing Unique
- By Nordic Artisan on 05-11-19
By: Paul Glaser
-
The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
-
-
Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
-
Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
-
-
Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Lara
- The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago
- By: Anna Pasternak
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Stalin came into power in 1924, the Communist government began persecuting dissident writers. Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak - whose novel in progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet - he persecuted Boris' mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris' affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga's role in Boris' writing process.
-
-
A wonderfully enjoyable read
- By gran 80 on 03-15-17
By: Anna Pasternak
-
Things I've Been Silent About
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Naila Azad
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
-
-
Family portrait in the frame of history
- By Galina COS on 07-02-16
By: Azar Nafisi
-
Dancing with the Enemy
- My Family's Holocaust Secret
- By: Paul Glaser
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
-
-
Amazing Unique
- By Nordic Artisan on 05-11-19
By: Paul Glaser
-
The Pendulum
- A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past
- By: Julie Lindahl
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl's journey to uncover her grandparents' role in the Third Reich, as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler's elite, the SS. Out of the unbearable heart of the story - the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations - emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth.
-
-
Exceptional
- By Jean on 01-14-19
By: Julie Lindahl
-
Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
-
-
Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
-
Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
-
-
Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
-
Death Is Hard Work
- A Novel
- By: Khaled Khalifa, Leri Price - translator
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is - after all - only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: Their country is a war zone.
-
-
The bleakness of living in a war-torn country!
- By Susan on 03-20-19
By: Khaled Khalifa, and others
-
The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
-
-
Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
-
Enemies of the People
- My Family's Journey to America
- By: Kati Marton
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this true-life thriller, Kati Marton draws on her skill as an investigative reporter to discover who her journalist parents really were---and how they survived the Nazis in Budapest and imprisonment by the Soviets during the Cold War.
-
-
Couldn't stop listening
- By Jane on 04-09-10
By: Kati Marton
-
The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
-
-
one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
-
The Possessed
- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In The Possessed we watch Elif Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and see an 18th-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their places in The Possessed.
-
-
Dear Russian Literary Diary...
- By Darwin8u on 08-29-17
By: Elif Batuman
-
The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
-
-
Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
-
Survivor Cafe
- The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory
- By: Elizabeth Rosner
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rosner
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century human inheritance - not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust, but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy.
-
-
A book every generation should read
- By J. Faught on 09-29-17
By: Elizabeth Rosner
-
Out of the Depths
- The Story of a Child of Buchenwald Who Returned Home at Last
- By: Rabbi Israel Meir Lau
- Narrated by: Steve Blane
- Length: 15 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis' deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all possible odds.
-
-
Amazing Book, Amazing Man
- By Shari on 01-14-13
-
The Home That Was Our Country
- By: Alia Malek
- Narrated by: Alia Malek
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-Assad came to power in 1970. Its loss was central to her parents' decision to make their lives in America. In chronicling the people who lived in the Tahaan building, past and present, Alia portrays the Syrians—the Muslims, Christians, Jews, Armenians, and Kurds—who worked, loved, and suffered in close quarters, mirroring the political shifts in their country
-
-
Syria as never read before
- By rami hachwi on 09-17-18
By: Alia Malek
-
Mosaic
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.
-
-
Absolutely excellent!
- By Roberta on 09-22-11
By: Diane Armstrong
-
The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
-
-
Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk