
The Prophets
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Narrated by:
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Karen Chilton
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By:
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Robert Jones Jr.
About this listen
Best Book of the Year: NPR • The Washington Post • Boston Globe • TIME • USA Today • Entertainment Weekly • Real Simple • Parade • Buzzfeed • Electric Literature • LitHub • BookRiot • PopSugar • Goop • Library Journal • BookBub • KCRW
Finalist for the National Book Award
One of the New York Times' Notable Books of the Year
One of the New York Times' Best Historical Fiction of the Year
Instant New York Times Best Seller
A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.
Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony.
With a lyricism reminiscent of Toni Morrison, Robert Jones, Jr., fiercely summons the voices of slaver and enslaved alike, from Isaiah and Samuel to the calculating slave master to the long line of women that surround them, women who have carried the soul of the plantation on their shoulders. As tensions build and the weight of centuries - of ancestors and future generations to come - culminates in a climactic reckoning, The Prophets fearlessly reveals the pain and suffering of inheritance, but is also shot through with hope, beauty, and truth, portraying the enormous, heroic power of love.
©2021 Robert Jones, Jr. (P)2021 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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The historical content of how king Black woman have healed themselves in the mist of a world trying to kill them- amazing read!
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Wow.
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Interview: 'The Prophets' Raises Love Above All Else
Critic reviews
Winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award
Finalist for the Ernest J. Gaines Award For Literary Excellence
Finalist for the Crook's Corner Book Prize
Finalist for the Prix Médicis Etrange
Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize
Longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award
"An extraordinary, vivid novel written with heart and imagination....The Prophets really dazzles." –NPR, Weekend Edition
“[An] often lyrical and rebellious love story...Jones seems to be reaching across centuries of blood and memory in an attempt to shake awake a warrior armed with weapon and wit that lies sleeping in his imagined, beloved, Black reader....Jones proves himself an amazing lyricist, pulling poetry out of every image and shift of light....What a fiery kindness that ending, this book. A book I entered hesitantly, cautiously, I exited anew—something in me unloosed, running. May this book cast its spell on all of us, restore to us some memory of our most warrior and softest selves.” –The New York Times Book Review
“With this epic novel, Jones, who is known for his blogging and Twitter presence as Son of Baldwin, marks his entry into the literary arena....The greatest gift of this novel is its efforts to render emotional interiority to enslaved people who are too often depicted either as vessels for sadistic violence or as noble, superhuman warriors for liberation....Jones’s debut novel is an important contribution to American letters, Black queer studies and the present moment’s profound reckoning with the legacy of America’s racialized violence.” –The Washington Post

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I enjoyed the story
- By M. Abrego on 03-04-20
By: Hester Young
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The Antidote for Everything
- By: Kimmery Martin
- Narrated by: Dorothy Dillingham Blue
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Georgia Brown’s profession as a urologist requires her to interact with plenty of naked men, but her romantic prospects have fizzled. The most important person in her life is her friend Jonah Tsukada, a funny, empathetic family medicine doctor who works at the same hospital in Charleston, South Carolina and who has become as close as family to her. Just after Georgia leaves the country for a medical conference, Jonah shares startling news. The hospital is instructing doctors to stop providing medical care for transgender patients.
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50/50
- By RueRue on 03-13-20
By: Kimmery Martin
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A Brief History of Living Forever
- A Novel
- By: Jaroslav Kalfar
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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When Adéla discovers she has a terminal illness, she leaves behind her native Czech village for a chance at reuniting in America with Tereza, the daughter she gave up at birth, decades earlier. But the country Adéla experienced as a young woman, when she eloped with a filmmaker and starred in his cult sci-fi movie, has changed entirely. In 2030, America is ruled by an authoritarian government increasingly closed off to the rest of the world.
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Not so distant future
- By Kindle Customer on 05-14-23
By: Jaroslav Kalfar
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The Deluge
- By: Stephen Markley
- Narrated by: Corey Brill, Danny Campbell, Gibson Frazier, and others
- Length: 40 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat.
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Couldn’t get into it.
- By Review Reviewer on 01-20-23
By: Stephen Markley
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The Majority
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth L. Silver
- Narrated by: Sierra Prasada
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Half of the United States is waiting for Justice Sylvia Olin Bernstein to die. The other half is praying for her to hold on. At 83, “the contemptuous S.O.B.” doesn’t have much time left. What she has is a story, one she has wrested from the grip of history to tell herself—of how she rose to her historic position on the Supreme Court, and the barriers she broke along the way.
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Unusual story - what makes a supreme court justice
- By Angela on 07-14-23
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The History of a Difficult Child
- A Novel
- By: Mihret Sibhat
- Narrated by: Waceke Wambaa
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime.
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Intriguingly Unusual
- By Mule Maven on 10-07-23
By: Mihret Sibhat
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The Art of Prophecy
- A Novel
- By: Wesley Chu
- Narrated by: Natalie Naudus
- Length: 18 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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So many stories begin the same way: With a prophecy. A chosen one. And the inevitable quest to slay a villain, save the kingdom, and fulfill a grand destiny. But this is not that kind of story. It does begin with a prophecy: A child will rise to defeat the Eternal Khan, a cruel immortal god-king, and save the kingdom. And that prophecy did anoint a hero, Jian, raised since birth in luxury and splendor, and celebrated before he has won a single battle.
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Feast of the Girl Bosses
- By maria on 07-31-24
By: Wesley Chu
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Song of Solomon
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
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Maybe a beautiful story, This author should never narrate
- By Student on 01-02-20
By: Toni Morrison
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The Fifth Gospel
- A Novel
- By: Ian Caldwell
- Narrated by: Jack Davenport
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2004, as Pope John Paul II's reign enters its twilight, a mysterious exhibit is under construction at the Vatican Museums. A week before it is scheduled to open, its curator is murdered at a clandestine meeting on the outskirts of Rome. The same night a violent break-in rocks the home of the curator's research partner, Father Alex Andreou, a Greek Catholic priest who lives inside the Vatican with his five-year-old son.
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A Necessary Review of a Masterpiece
- By TheMedicalToker on 02-25-16
By: Ian Caldwell
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Thistlefoot
- A Novel
- By: GennaRose Nethercott
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The Yaga siblings—Bellatine, a young woodworker, and Isaac, a wayfaring street performer and con artist—have been estranged since childhood, separated both by resentment and by wide miles of American highway. But when they learn that they are to receive an inheritance, the siblings agree to meet—only to discover that their bequest isn’t land or money, but something far stranger: a sentient house on chicken legs.
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I can't decide if I liked it
- By Lorraine Cannon on 11-03-22
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The Fairy Bargains of Prospect Hill
- By: Rowenna Miller
- Narrated by: Jesse Vilinsky
- Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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There is no magic on Prospect Hill—or anywhere else, for that matter. But just on the other side of the veil is the world of the Fae. Generations ago, the first farmers on Prospect Hill learned to bargain small trades to make their lives a little easier. Much of that old wisdom was lost as the riverboats gave way to the rail lines and the farmers took work at mills and factories. Alaine Fairborn’s family, however, was always superstitious, and she still hums the rhymes to find a lost shoe and to ensure dry weather on her sister’s wedding day.
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Characters and world building
- By Amandahawkes on 02-14-24
By: Rowenna Miller
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All over Creation
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Ozeki
- Narrated by: Ruth Ozeki
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Yumi Fuller hasn’t set foot in her hometown of Liberty Falls, Idaho—heart of the potato-farming industry—since she ran away at age fifteen. Twenty-five years later, the prodigal daughter returns to confront her dying parents, her best friend, and her conflicted past, and finds herself caught up in an altogether new drama. The post-millennial farming community has been invaded by Agribusiness forces at war with a posse of activists, the Seeds of Resistance, who travel the country in a camping car, “The Spudnick,” biofueled by pilfered McDonald’s french-fry oil.
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ozeki !!!
- By Leah on 01-03-25
By: Ruth Ozeki
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The Narrow Road to the Deep North
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: David Atlas
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma Death Railway, is a daily struggle to save the men under his command. Until he receives a letter that will change him forever.
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The vanity and stupidity of the author
- By Off The Grid on 01-12-24
By: Richard Flanagan
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The Lords of Discipline
- By: Pat Conroy
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 19 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Lords of Discipline is a novel about coming of age, brotherhood, betrayal, and a man’s forging of his own personal code of honor. Will McLean, a senior on the cadets’ honor court, is an outsider by nature: a basketball star at a school that prizes military prowess above athletics, a military man in training who dares to question the escalating Vietnam war. And yet his greatest struggle will be with the corrupt institution of which he is a part.
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Hauntingly Excellent
- By Hbug on 02-21-23
By: Pat Conroy
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Díaz
- Narrated by: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Karen Olivo
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku: the curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.
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Lin-Manuel Miranda's performance is perfect
- By Alison on 02-27-18
By: Junot Díaz
It took a long time for me to get into the story. I listened to the audible production narrated by Karen Chiton’s soothing voice. It was her voice that kept me listening when I might have given up. Her voice is pitch perfect.
Jones writes a beautiful love story of two souls attempting to find dignity in the hellish conditions they find themselves. The slaves themselves and their lives are the focal of the story. The plantation owners occupy less of the story, as it’s mostly the slaves finding ways to survive unwieldly commands and ridiculous demands. It’s a story of survival.
This isn’t really a hard edged slave story, for me anyway. The prose creates a literary, almost dream-like (at times) story of perseverance during a horrendous time in Black history. It’s difficult to explain how lyrical prose affects blinding cruelty. Jones has written a deeply moving story.
lyrical
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Slow Burn
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Beautiful!
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Excellent listen.
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Poetically Powerful
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Deeply moving!
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In any event, I thought the book to be exceptional. Already a follower of “Son of Baldwin,” I came in with high expectations, slightly biased, and albeit skeptical, an “open mind.” At no point was I disappointed.
Incredible for his first Novel
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Difficult yet perfect
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An instant classic
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Beautiful Love Story
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