
The Safekeep
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Narrated by:
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Stina Nielsen
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Saskia Maarleveld
About this listen
Longlisted for the Booker Prize | “Remarkable…Compelling…Fine and taut…Indelible” —The New York Times • “Mesmerizing and shockingly good…I was utterly blown away.” —Miranda Cowley Heller, author of The Paper Palace • “A brilliant debut, as multifaceted as a gem.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) • “Moving, unnerving, and deeply sexy.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl Earring • “Fans of Patricia Highsmith and Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen will find much to admire here.”—Vulture
An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.
A house is a precious thing...
It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.
Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.
Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is a brilliantly plotted and provocative debut novel you won’t soon forget.
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Good Girl
- A Novel
- By: Aria Aber
- Narrated by: Mozhan Navabi
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of freedom.
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Rebel, Rebel
- By Suzanna on 02-17-25
By: Aria Aber
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Orbital
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Sarah Naudi
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
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Dull
- By ELLEZEE on 02-03-24
By: Samantha Harvey
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Boulder
- By: Eva Baltasar
- Narrated by: Lucianna Mauren
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Abridged
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Boulder é uma rocha em alto-mar. O trabalho na cozinha de um navio mercante é ideal para ela, afeita à solidão, vagando de porto em porto. Quando conhece...
By: Eva Baltasar
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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
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Boulder
- By: Eva Baltasar
- Narrated by: Aina Clotet
- Length: 2 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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La protagonista de Boulder és una dona atreta per la solitud com per un imant. Es guanya la vida fent de cuinera en un buc - la situació perfecta: una cabina, l'oceà, moltes hores per encarar el buit i algun port on conèixer dones. Fins que una la reté, se l'emporta entre les quatre parets d'una casa i l'embarca en la gestació assistida d'una criatura. ¿Què en farà, la maternitat, de l'amant coneguda en un bar? ¿I què farà ella a la gàbia? Dos anys després de Permagel i d'un viatge a través de mitja dotzena de llengües, l'obra de Baltasar torna a atracar entre nosaltres amb una heroïna com només sap crear-les ella.
By: Eva Baltasar
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Evenings and Weekends
- A Novel
- By: Oisín McKenna
- Narrated by: Isabel Adomakoh-Young
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer in London stops for no one. Not the half-naked drunks and stoners, the bachelorette parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried cigarettes. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She’s 30, pregnant, and broke.
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Amazing Narration
- By Kristen on 03-12-25
By: Oisín McKenna
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All Fours
- A Novel
- By: Miranda July
- Narrated by: Miranda July
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman.
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would not recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-24
By: Miranda July
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The Safekeeper
- By: Esther Archer Lakhani
- Narrated by: Karla Knudsen
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Her job is to keep their secrets safe. A secluded Retreat Center full of preternatural clientele. A talking crow who thinks she knows everything. A new boy in town asking a lot of nosy questions. Sound like a lot to handle? Not for 15-year-old Macy Steward, who lives at the Center and helps her parents run the highly unusual retreats. For Macy, this is simply normal routine. And it’s all going exactly as expected, that is until the guests become dangerously unpredictable, the talking crow goes suspiciously missing, and the new boy turns out to be so much more than he first appeared.
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Loved it!!
- By Dee on 04-14-21
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Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
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Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.
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One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
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Ghost Dogs
- On Killers and Kin
- By: Andre Dubus III
- Narrated by: Andre Dubus III
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Ghost Dogs, Dubus’s nonfiction prowess is on full display in his retelling of his own successes, failures, triumphs, and pain. In his longest essay, “If I Owned a Gun,” Dubus reflects on the empowerment and shame he felt in keeping a gun, and his decision, ultimately, to give it up. Elsewhere, he writes of a violent youth and of settled domesticity and fatherhood, about the omnipresent expectations and contradictions of masculinity, about the things writers remember and those they forget.
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boring
- By Anthony on 11-16-24
By: Andre Dubus III
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Crooked Seeds
- A Novel
- By: Karen Jennings
- Narrated by: Fiona Ramsay
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer. In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground.
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Sad, disgusting and not an intelligible metaphor
- By april on 04-23-24
By: Karen Jennings
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This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
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Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
Storytelling
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It’s all about perspective….
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Wow! This is a wonderful listen!
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Great book!
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Story line
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Excellent
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Awesome Read
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A Remarkable Debut
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A historical fiction debut about obsession and loss…
There are romantic and erotic components in this poetic love story, (long descriptions of sensual encounters, that may offend some) with a central theme of home throughout. Touching upon relationships, unspoken truths, xenophobic and antisemitic tendencies, and misogyny.
I enjoyed her writing and found the story very compelling. Most significant is the character development of Isabel over the course of the novel. I was surprised of learning the things the Dutch government did post-war. I am looking forward to reading more from this talented author.
A Beautifully Written Story
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Compelling tale of loss and safe haven
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