
The Marriage Portrait
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Genevieve Gaunt
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Maggie O'Farrell
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By:
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Maggie O'Farrell
About this listen
WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FINALIST • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The author of award-winning Hamnet brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.
“I could not stop reading this incredible true story.”—Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick)
"O’Farrell pulls out little threads of historical detail to weave this story of a precocious girl sensitive to the contradictions of her station...You may know the history, and you may think you know what’s coming, but don’t be so sure."—The Washington Post
Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.
Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?
As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.
Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.
©2022 Maggie O'Farrell (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE WASHINGTON POST, GOODREADS • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE
"[A] glittering, propulsive new novel . . . Few writers play as confidently with the nuts and bolts of language, and historical characters netted from the past. O’Farrell adroitly shrinks Lucrezia to her own vanishing point, even if the probable cause of the duchess’s demise was a pulmonary embolism rather than poison. O’Farrell’s creative license beautifully frames the chasms that open up between husband and wife, implicating an institution that has galvanized our canonical writers, including the Victorian poet Robert Browning, whose dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ was inspired by Branzino’s portrait of Lucrezia.”—Oprah Daily
"O’Farrell intelligently connects Lucrezia’s trapped circumstances with the art that her husband, a notable patron and collector, commissions to immortalize her . . . There is a blinding power to the heightened, almost fetishistic beauty of Renaissance art, this novel suggests as it portrays a world of far greater brutality and fierceness.”—Wall Street Journal
"[O’Farrell] has spun pure gold out of this tragic history . . . The Marriage Portrait builds a rich interior world while vividly re-creating an era, in this case the Italian Renaissance, a period overflowing with intrigue and pomp, rustling heavy fabrics and glowing frescoes, blood and lust and the desire for power.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
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- By: Ann Napolitano
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them are a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured veteran returning from Afghanistan, a business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. Halfway across the country, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor.
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Stunning characterization and compelling storytelling!
- By Amazon User on 01-29-20
By: Ann Napolitano
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This Must Be the Place
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California; a father he loathes in Brooklyn; and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with 20 years ago, and this discovery will send him off course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
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A good story spoiled
- By White rose on 03-24-17
By: Maggie O'Farrell
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The Lions of Fifth Avenue
- A Novel
- By: Fiona Davis
- Narrated by: Erin Bennett, Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life - her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open.
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Exhilarating
- By Joanna Butler on 08-20-20
By: Fiona Davis
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Northern Spy
- Reese's Book Club (A Novel)
- By: Flynn Berry
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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A producer at the BBC and mother to a new baby, Tessa is at work in Belfast one day when the news of another raid comes on the air. The IRA may have gone underground in the two decades since the Good Friday Agreement, but they never really went away, and lately bomb threats, security checkpoints, and helicopters floating ominously over the city have become features of everyday life. As the news reporter requests the public's help in locating those responsible for the robbery, security footage reveals Tessa's sister, Marian, pulling a black ski mask over her face.
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“If you love a mystery....thrill ride of a book”????? Not so much
- By AJ *🦌 on 04-13-21
By: Flynn Berry
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The Nature of Fragile Things
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins, Jason Culp
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Sophie Whalen is a young Irish immigrant so desperate to get out of a New York tenement that she answers a mail-order bride ad and agrees to marry a man she knows nothing about. San Francisco widower Martin Hocking proves to be as aloof as he is mesmerizingly handsome. Sophie quickly develops deep affection for Kat, Martin's silent five-year-old daughter, but Martin's odd behavior leaves her with the uneasy feeling that something about her newfound situation isn't right.
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The Nature of Fragile Things is a 5 star listen!
- By Kathy… send to help my husband to sleep!! on 02-04-21
By: Susan Meissner
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Tidelands
- The Fairmile Series, Book 1
- By: Philippa Gregory
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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On Midsummer’s Eve, Alinor waits in the church graveyard, hoping to encounter the ghost of her missing husband and thus confirm his death. Until she can, she is neither maiden nor wife nor widow, living in a perilous limbo. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run. She shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marshy landscape of the Tidelands, not knowing she is leading a spy and an enemy into her life. England is in the grip of a bloody civil war that reaches into the most remote parts of the kingdom.
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Please pay close attention to the opening scenes and description of the land and sea
- By paula wright on 09-02-19
By: Philippa Gregory
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Sea of Tranquility
- A Novel
- By: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.
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An excellent listen.
- By Mark on 04-11-22
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I Am, I Am, I Am
- Seventeen Brushes with Death
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Daisy Donovan
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter - for whom this book was written - from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers.
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Her prose is beautiful!
- By Judy on 03-25-18
By: Maggie O'Farrell
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The Hand That First Held Mine
- By: Maggie O’Farrell
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Lexie Sinclair yearns for more than her parents’ genteel country life. She makes her way to the city, where she meets a magazine editor, Innes, a man unlike any she has ever imagined. He introduces her to the thrilling world of Bohemian postwar London, and Lexie learns to become a reporter, to know art and artists, to live fully, unconventionally, and with deep love. And when she finds herself pregnant by a man wholly unsuitable for marriage or fatherhood, she doesn’t hesitate a minute to have the baby on her own.
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Enjoy as much as I did.
- By Anonymous User on 11-09-21
By: Maggie O’Farrell
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The Diamond Eye
- A Novel
- By: Kate Quinn
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the snowbound city of Kiev, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.
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Excellent narration!
- By Denise Diener on 04-15-22
By: Kate Quinn
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All We Were Promised
- A Novel
- By: Ashton Lattimore
- Narrated by: Shayna Small, Ashton Lattimore
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Philadelphia, 1837. After Charlotte escaped from the crumbling White Oaks plantation down South, she’d expected freedom to feel different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. After all, Philadelphia is supposed to be the birthplace of American liberty. Instead, she’s locked away playing servant to her white-passing father, as they both attempt to hide their identities from slavecatchers who would destroy their new lives.
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Simply Amazing!
- By TMJ on 04-19-25
By: Ashton Lattimore
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The Push
- A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
- By: Ashley Audrain
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Blythe Connor is determined that she will be the warm, comforting mother to her new baby Violet that she herself never had. But in the thick of motherhood's exhausting early days, Blythe becomes convinced that something is wrong with her daughter - she doesn't behave like most children do. Or is it all in Blythe's head? Her husband, Fox, says she's imagining things. The more Fox dismisses her fears, the more Blythe begins to question her own sanity, and the more we begin to question what Blythe is telling us about her life as well.
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Disturbing, Jaw Dropping, Unforgettable
- By Wendi on 01-16-21
By: Ashley Audrain
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Great Circle
- A Novel
- By: Maggie Shipstead
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Alex McKenna
- Length: 25 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe.
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So glad I was drawn to this book.
- By timbo on 05-23-21
By: Maggie Shipstead
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After You’d Gone
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Elle Newlands
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice’s family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended.
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Very well written.
- By Audible Fan on 02-24-21
By: Maggie O'Farrell
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Instructions for a Heatwave
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way. Gretta’s three grown children converge on their parents’ home for the first time in years.
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Another Gem from O'Farrell
- By Cariola on 07-17-13
By: Maggie O'Farrell
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Three Wishes
- A Novel
- By: Liane Moriarty
- Narrated by: Heather Wilds
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful 33-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Together, laughter, drama, and mayhem follow them, but apart, each is dealing with her own share of ups and downs. Lyn has organized her life into one big checklist, Cat has just learned a startling secret about her marriage, and Gemma, who bolts every time a relationship hits the six-month mark, holds out hope for lasting love.
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Can’t listen due to narrator
- By Nina on 03-29-19
By: Liane Moriarty
Perfect narration for this story.
Wonderful Listen
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Connie Conway
Brilliantly written and performed!
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surprisingly great
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Yes!
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I liked the ending
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Brilliant
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Most excellent
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Maggie is a master
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I’m thankful for reading this.
Loved it
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Fascinating Tale
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