The Shimmering State
A Novel
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About this listen
Named a Book You Need to Read in 2021 by Harper’s Bazaar
A “moving, astounding, and totally unsettling” (Caroline Leavitt, New York Times best-selling author) literary debut following two patients in recovery after an experimental memory drug warps their lives.
Lucien moves to Los Angeles to be with his grandmother as she undergoes an experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s using the new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he’s also running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known artist whose legacy haunts him.
Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet Company. She still waitresses at the Chateau Marmont during her off-hours, witnessing the recreational use of Memoroxin - or Mem - among the Hollywood elite.
When Lucien and Sophie meet at The Center, founded by an ambitious yet conflicted doctor to treat patients who’ve abused Mem, they have no memory of how they got there - or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to each other. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from “before”?
“Contemplative and wonderfully evocative, finishing The Shimmering State is like waking from a dream, where you reenter the world with fresh eyes and wonder at the frailty of your own memories” (Jessica Chiarella, author of The Lost Girls).
©2021 Meredith Westgate. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children, and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It’s everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether she would rather throw herself off the high-rise balcony than spend another evening not talking to her husband and hanging up laundry.
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Confused by the choice of narrator
- By Bri T. on 02-13-22
By: Emily Itami
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She Wouldn't Change a Thing
- By: Sarah Adlakha
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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When 39-year-old Maria Forssmann wakes up in her 17-year-old body, she doesn’t know how she got there. All she does know is she has to get back: to her home in Bienville, Mississippi, to her job as a successful psychiatrist and, most importantly, to her husband, daughters, and unborn son.
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Very Religious
- By Gabrielle Glendening on 11-18-21
By: Sarah Adlakha
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Black & White
- By: Dani Shapiro
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to 14. As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart.
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It was okay
- By Lucy7 on 02-13-19
By: Dani Shapiro
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Tell Me Everything
- A Novel
- By: Cambria Brockman
- Narrated by: Ariadne Meyers
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In her first weeks at Hawthorne College, Malin is swept up into a tight-knit circle that will stick together through all four years. There’s Gemma, an insecure theater major from London; John, a tall, handsome, wealthy New Englander; Max, John’s cousin, a shy pre-med major; Khaled, a wisecracking prince from Abu Dhabi; and Ruby, a beautiful art history major. But Malin isn’t like the rest of her friends. She’s an expert at hiding her troubled past - all while using her extraordinary insight to detect their deepest vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
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beware
- By keith y. on 10-03-19
By: Cambria Brockman
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Where I Left Her
- By: Amber Garza
- Narrated by: Vivienne Leheny
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Whitney had some misgivings when she dropped her increasingly moody teenage daughter, Amelia, off at Lauren’s house. She’d never met the parents, and usually she’d go in, but Amelia clearly wasn’t going to let something so humiliating happen, so instead Whitney waved to her daughter before pulling away from the little house with the roses in front. But when she goes back the next day, an elderly couple answers the door - Amelia and Lauren aren’t there, and this couple swears they never were, that she’s at the wrong house.
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Kept me guessing!!
- By Sheppardspie on 09-13-21
By: Amber Garza
What listeners say about The Shimmering State
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Natalia
- 08-11-21
Incredible Debut— a Must-Read.
Meredith Westgate’s incredible debut is a story I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. So much so that I purchased the audiobook version to experience it again in a different format. The setting is so fully realized, her characters so layered and tragic. This story made me question the nature of memory, pain, grief and guilt. Does consciousness reside in our memories? The ways in which we numb our pain—is it for the high of it, to disconnect, to find the love that has left us? Or is it to punish ourselves, is it guilt that drives it?
A smart allusion to the opioid crisis and the ways in which we deal with grief, loneliness, and our need for belonging, this book with its beautiful prose and fluid, fully realized landscapes is one that I felt I inhabited as I read, and so in a way, I also lived it.
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3 people found this helpful
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- eap
- 03-11-22
The good and the bad
I give this book an B for a compelling storyline, strong enough to keep me engaged to a reasonably satisfying end, despite two incredibly annoying features. One, the voice of Lucien - so flat and lifeless with an extremely irritating habit of dropping the t's from words such as "tighten" or "important" so that they sound like "tigh-en", "impor-ent". Just why? Yes, there is an actual term for this trend, and it grates on the listener in about the same manner of "vocal fry". Second, the one dimensional presentation of Los Angeles is disappointing. Having lived here for 45 years, it gets old hearing about superficiality, "industry" people, beautiful people, health nuts, only certain landmarks, and so forth. This has not been my experience at all. A tiny slice of the city and it's culture is represented here, told with a rather harsh judgment.
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- Eulie
- 08-17-23
Loved every minute
I don’t agree with the negative reviews on Lucian’s narrator. I thought he, and the rest of the cast were very true in capturing a generational angst caught in a dysfunctional world. Superb! I have recommended to my friends
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- Geonn Cannon
- 08-14-21
Horrible Main Narrator
It's not fair to say the main narrator (for Lucien) is monotone, but he's one step above robotic. There's no connection to the character or the story. He's just reciting words off the page with the barest effort at inflection. It's like listening to a high schooler forced to read in English class.
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1 person found this helpful