
The Portable Veblen
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
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $26.13
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Laurence Bouvard
About this listen
A laugh-out-loud love story with big ideas – and squirrels
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016
Can squirrels speak? Do snails scream?
Will a young couple, newly engaged, make it to their wedding day? Will their dysfunctional families ruin everything? Will they be undone by the advances of a very sexy, very unscrupulous heiress to a pharmaceuticals corporation?
Is getting married even a remotely reasonable idea in the twenty-first century?
And what in the world is a ‘Veblen’ anyway?
‘I can’t remember a book I enjoyed more’ Nina Stibbe
‘Seriously funny and extraordinarily well written’ Jonathan Franzen, Guardian books of the year
©2016 Elizabeth McKensie (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedListeners also enjoyed...
-
Birnam Wood
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Catton
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.
-
-
Outstanding thriller w/ exceptional character development
- By Bradley T. Collins on 04-21-23
By: Eleanor Catton
-
The Latecomer
- A Novel
- By: Jean Hanff Korelitz
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 16 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings—Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally—feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child.
-
-
Conservatives and religious are the villains
- By Ashley on 09-01-22
-
The Vaster Wilds
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
-
-
Slow torture written too hastily
- By Jennifer on 09-23-23
By: Lauren Groff
-
An Accidental Death
- A DC Smith Investigation Series, Book 1
- By: Peter Grainger
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.
-
-
Excellent British Mystery
- By Customer on 09-07-16
By: Peter Grainger
-
North Woods
- A Novel
- By: Daniel Mason
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.
-
-
An American Masterpiece
- By Psumissyh on 09-21-23
By: Daniel Mason
-
This Time Tomorrow
- A Novel
- By: Emma Straub
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Emma Straub
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday.
-
-
Loved!
- By AE on 05-25-22
By: Emma Straub
-
Birnam Wood
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Catton
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.
-
-
Outstanding thriller w/ exceptional character development
- By Bradley T. Collins on 04-21-23
By: Eleanor Catton
-
The Latecomer
- A Novel
- By: Jean Hanff Korelitz
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 16 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings—Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally—feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child.
-
-
Conservatives and religious are the villains
- By Ashley on 09-01-22
-
The Vaster Wilds
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
-
-
Slow torture written too hastily
- By Jennifer on 09-23-23
By: Lauren Groff
-
An Accidental Death
- A DC Smith Investigation Series, Book 1
- By: Peter Grainger
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.
-
-
Excellent British Mystery
- By Customer on 09-07-16
By: Peter Grainger
-
North Woods
- A Novel
- By: Daniel Mason
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall, Michael Crouch, Jason Culp, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets.
-
-
An American Masterpiece
- By Psumissyh on 09-21-23
By: Daniel Mason
-
This Time Tomorrow
- A Novel
- By: Emma Straub
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Emma Straub
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday.
-
-
Loved!
- By AE on 05-25-22
By: Emma Straub
-
The Authenticity Project
- A Novel
- By: Clare Pooley
- Narrated by: Anna Cordell
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes—in a plain, green journal—the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café. It’s run by the incredibly tidy and efficient Monica, who furtively adds her own entry and leaves the book in the wine bar across the street. Before long, the others who find the green notebook add the truths about their own deepest selves - and soon find each other In Real Life at Monica’s Café.
-
-
Sweet, easy listen
- By Benhandel on 04-23-20
By: Clare Pooley
-
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing
- A Novel
- By: Hank Green
- Narrated by: Kristen Sieh, Hank Green
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Carls just appeared. Coming home from work at three a.m., 23-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship - like a 10-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor - April and her friend Andy make a video with it, which Andy uploads Online. The next day April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world - everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires - and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense media spotlight.
-
-
Grape jelly in the void
- By Marissa Lehnerz on 09-27-18
By: Hank Green
-
The Sentence
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention", must solve the mystery of this haunting.
-
-
Addictive and surprising
- By Amazon Customer on 11-25-21
By: Louise Erdrich
-
The Shell Collector
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Hakeem Kae Kazim
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr's acclaimed debut collection take listeners from the African coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties - metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts - and conjures nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power.
-
-
Narrator not appropriate to the book.
- By Janet on 02-18-17
By: Anthony Doerr
-
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate; she works an easy job at a hip art gallery and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
-
-
I love it...
- By Claudia Gallegos on 07-12-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
-
My Oxford Year
- A Novel
- By: Julia Whelan
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
American Ella Durran has had the same plan for her life since she was 13: study at Oxford. At 24, she’s finally made it to England on a Rhodes Scholarship when she’s offered an unbelievable position in a rising political star’s presidential campaign. With the promise that she’ll work remotely and return to DC at the end of her Oxford year, she’s free to enjoy her Once in a Lifetime Experience. That is until a smart-mouthed local who is too quick with his tongue and his car ruins her shirt and her first day.
-
-
Beautiful
- By Clare on 05-03-18
By: Julia Whelan
-
A Great Deliverance
- Inspector Lynley, Book 1
- By: Elizabeth George
- Narrated by: Donada Peters
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".
-
-
good debut novel
- By Stevon on 11-11-19
By: Elizabeth George
-
The Rachel Incident
- A Novel
- By: Caroline O'Donoghue
- Narrated by: Tara Flynn
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
-
-
Best narration
- By LG on 01-12-24
-
Iron Lake
- Cork O'Connor, Book 1
- By: William Kent Krueger
- Narrated by: David Chandler
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anthony Award-winning author William Kent Krueger crafts this riveting tale about a small Minnesota town’s ex-sheriff who is having trouble retiring his badge. Cork O’Connor loses his job after being blamed for a tragedy on the local Anishinaabe Indian reservation. But he must set aside his personal demons when a young boy goes missing on the same day a judge commits suicide—and no one but O’Connor suspects foul play.
-
-
Great New Series
- By Lia on 06-01-18
-
The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
-
-
"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
-
Unsheltered
- A Novel
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Brilliantly executed and compulsively listenable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred - whether family or friends - and in the strength of the human spirit.
-
-
Spring for a professional narrator, please!
- By Gail D. on 11-05-18
-
Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting
- A Novel
- By: Clare Pooley
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Every day Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the ten stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. Every day she sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname: Impossibly-Pretty-Constant-Reader and Terribly-Lonely-Teenager. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He’d have died were it not for the timely intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver.
-
-
Wonderful friendship story
- By Barbara S on 10-17-22
By: Clare Pooley
Critic reviews
‘Raw and weird and hilarious’ Guardian
‘A touching, wildly funny and peculiarly elegant look at the travails of love of all kinds’ Sunday Express
‘Elizabeth McKenzie is clearly some sort of genius’ Paul Murray