The Singularities
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nicholas Guy Smith
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By:
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John Banville
About this listen
From the revered Booker Prize-winning author comes a playful, multilayered novel of nostalgia, life and death, and quantum theory, which opens with the return of one of his most celebrated characters as he is released from prison.
“A triumphant piece of writing…Prose of such luscious elegance…Exhilarating.”—The New York Times Book Review
A man with a borrowed name steps from a flashy red sports car—also borrowed—onto the estate of his youth. But all is not as it seems. There is a new family living in the drafty old house: the Godleys, descendants of the late, world-famous scientist Adam Godley, whose theory of existence threw the universe into chaos. And this mystery man, who has just completed a prison sentence, feels as if time has stopped, or was torn, or was opened in new and strange ways. He must now vie with the idiosyncratic Godley family, with their harried housekeeper who becomes his landlady, with the recently commissioned biographer of Godley Sr., and with a wealthy and beautiful woman from his past who comes bearing an unusual request.
With sparkling intelligence and rapier wit, John Banville revisits some of his career’s most memorable figures, in a novel as mischievous as it is brilliantly conceived. The Singularities occupies a singular space and will surely be one of his most admired works.
©2022 John Banville (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Reading John Banville is like being in the presence of a fathomlessly talented, witty, and intelligent magician—someone so captivatingly masterful at their craft, you suspect that they could make you disappear. The Singularities proves that [Banville] deserves a summons from Stockholm . . . Time and again Banville stuns with sentences so dazzling they’re like a lightning-quick boxer’s jab.”—Randy Rosenthal, Boston Globe
“A triumphant piece of writing . . . John Banville writes prose of such luscious elegance that it’s all too easy to view his work as an aesthetic project . . . Like much of his best work, [The Singularities] aims to both scrutinize and confront one of the central challenges of the human endeavor: how to create an accurate portrait of things . . . Exhilarating.”—Leo Robson, New York Times Book Review
“A bold, mind-bending novel . . . The Singularities is Banville at his most inventive . . . His verbal dexterity and poetic flourishes keep us absorbed throughout.”—Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune
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Archaeologist Verity Grey has been drawn to the dark legends of the Scottish Borderlands in search of the truth buried in a rocky field by the sea. Her eccentric boss has spent his whole life searching for the resting place of the lost Ninth Roman Legion and is convinced he's finally found it - not because of any scientific evidence, but because a local boy has "seen" a Roman soldier walking in the fields, a ghostly sentinel who guards the bodies of his long-dead comrades.
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Slow Build Atmospheric Story of Light Rom Susp
- By Sophia Rose on 12-15-16
By: Susanna Kearsley
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The Ten Thousand Doors of January
- By: Alix E. Harrow
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place. Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure, and danger. Each page turn reveals impossible truths about the world, and January discovers a story increasingly entwined with her own.
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A princess in a castle can't fend for herself
- By Summer on 11-11-19
By: Alix E. Harrow
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The Phantom Coach
- A Connoisseur's Collection of the Best Victorian Ghost Stories
- By: Michael Sims
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Dracula’s Guest (vampires) and The Dead Witness (detectives) have been widely praised, has gathered twelve of the best stories about humanity’s oldest supernatural obsession. The Phantom Coach includes tales by a surprising and often legendary cast, including Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as lost gems by forgotten masters such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and W. F. Harvey. Amelia B. Edwards’s chilling story gives the collection its title, while Ambrose Bierce ("The Moonlit Road"), Elizabeth Gaskell ("The Old Nurse’s Story"), and W. W. Jacobs ("The Monkey’s Paw") will turn you white as a sheet. With a skillful introduction to the genre and notes on each story by Sims, The Phantom Coach is a spectacular collection of ghostly Victorian thrills.
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Excellent Narration and Great Selection of Stories
- By Robert on 05-03-15
By: Michael Sims
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Summer
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Grace Conlin
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Wharton's most erotic and lyrical novel, Summer explores a daring theme for 1917, a woman's awakening to her sexuality. Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall lives in the small town of North Dormer, ignorant of desire until the arrival of architect Lucius Harney. Like the succulent summer landscape in the Berkshires around them, Charity's romance is lush and picturesque, but its consequences are harsh and real.
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Excellent first audible purchase!
- By lilyglint on 08-23-04
By: Edith Wharton
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Death in Venice
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: Peter Batchelor
- Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A stunningly beautiful youth and the city of Venice set the stage for Thomas Mann’s introspective examination of erotic love and philosophical wisdom.
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A problem with the narration
- By Erez on 03-19-12
By: Thomas Mann
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The Voyage Out
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 15 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naïve young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. In symbolic, lyrical, and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to face life intellectually and emotionally. Its wit and exquisiteness, and its profound depth and insight into humanity, will capture the imagination of the listener.
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Lovely
- By Edith on 05-24-19
By: Virginia Woolf
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
- By: V. E. Schwab
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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France, 1714: In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever - and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
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Prose style not to my liking
- By C.V. Cox on 10-18-20
By: V. E. Schwab
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Bend Sinister
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
- By Darwin8u on 12-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Crome Yellow
- By: Aldous Huxley
- Narrated by: Robert Whitfield
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the greatest prose writers and social commentators of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley here introduces us to a delightfully cynical, comic, and severe group of artists and intellectuals engaged in the most free-thinking and modern kind of talk imaginable. Poetry, occultism, ancestral history, and Italian primitive painting are just a few of the subjects competing for discussion among the amiable cast of eccentrics drawn together at Crome, an intensely English country manor.
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Bloomsbury in a blender, 1922
- By Adeliese Baumann on 01-02-17
By: Aldous Huxley
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The Dream House
- By: Craig Higginson
- Narrated by: Terry Lloyd-Roberts
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
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A farmhouse is being reproduced a dozen times, with slight variations, throughout a valley. Three small graves have been dug in the front garden, the middle one lying empty. A woman in a wheelchair sorts through boxes while her husband clambers around the old demolished buildings, wondering where the animals have gone. A young woman – called ‘the barren one’ behind her back – dreams of love, while an ageing headmaster contemplates the end of his life.
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Brilliant Dream House Narration
- By Simon Griffiths on 05-05-21
By: Craig Higginson
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Jacob's Room
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Jacob's Room was the first of Virginia Woolf's novels to be published by the Hogarth Press, founded with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in their home at Hogarth House in Richmond in 1917. It is an episodic tale that attempts to evoke the inner life of Jacob Flanders and his social milieu during the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century.
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A good listen
- By Cecilie Malling on 03-21-05
By: Virginia Woolf
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Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons, the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his photograph is all over the papers. His disgrace is public, his position as curator of the Queen’s pictures terminated… Maskell writes his own testament, in an act not unlike the restoration of one of his beloved pictures, in order for the process of verification and attribution to begin.
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Brilliant writer writes the most boring spy story
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Don't read this is you have been sexually abused
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The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
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OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
- By Karen on 07-20-07
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The Infinities
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On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his 19-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's "young man" - very likely more interested in the father than the daughter - who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit.
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family. even the gods seem to know about it.
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Christine Falls
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It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.
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Great Listen
- By Stephen McLeod on 04-11-08
By: John Banville, and others
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Mrs. Osmond
- A Novel
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: Amy Finegan
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Isabel Archer is a young American woman swept off to Europe in the late 19th century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and - as Isabel finds out too late - cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate.
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Clever Continuation of Henry James
- By Fate_D on 03-18-18
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The Untouchable
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Victor Maskell has been betrayed. After the announcement in the Commons, the hasty revelation of his double life of wartime espionage, his photograph is all over the papers. His disgrace is public, his position as curator of the Queen’s pictures terminated… Maskell writes his own testament, in an act not unlike the restoration of one of his beloved pictures, in order for the process of verification and attribution to begin.
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Brilliant writer writes the most boring spy story
- By David on 05-15-12
By: John Banville
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Snow
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- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
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The incomparable Booker Prize winner’s next great crime novel - the story of a family whose secrets resurface when a parish priest is found murdered in their ancestral home. Detective Inspector St. John Strafford has been summoned to County Wexford to investigate a murder. A parish priest has been found dead in Ballyglass House, the family seat of the aristocratic, secretive Osborne family.
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Don't read this is you have been sexually abused
- By Babs on 10-26-20
By: John Banville
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The Sea
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- Narrated by: John Lee
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The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
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OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
- By Karen on 07-20-07
By: John Banville
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- Narrated by: Julian Rhind-Tutt
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
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On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his 19-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's "young man" - very likely more interested in the father than the daughter - who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit.
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family. even the gods seem to know about it.
- By Annette on 03-21-10
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Christine Falls
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- By: John Banville, Benjamin Black
- Narrated by: Timothy Dalton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
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It's not the dead that seem strange to Quirke. It's the living. One night, after a few drinks at an office party, Quirke shuffles down into the morgue where he works and finds his brother-in-law, Malachy, altering a file he has no business even reading. Odd enough in itself to find Malachy there, but the next morning, when the haze has lifted, it looks an awful lot like his brother-in-law, the esteemed doctor, was in fact tampering with a corpse—and concealing the cause of death.
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Great Listen
- By Stephen McLeod on 04-11-08
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Isabel Archer is a young American woman swept off to Europe in the late 19th century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naïve girl's experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and - as Isabel finds out too late - cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate.
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Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism, and the heart-wrenching humor that have marked all of John Banville's extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave as he plumbs the memories of his first - and perhaps only - love (he, just 15, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring, and finally devastating).
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Gorgeous!
- By victoria on 03-27-13
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The Blue Guitar
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From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light, a new novel - at once trenchant, witty, and shattering - about the intricacies of artistic creation and theft, and about the ways in which we learn to possess one another and to hold on to ourselves. Equally self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating, our narrator, Oliver Otway Orme, is a painter of some renown and a petty thief who does not steal for profit and has never before been caught.
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Masterful
- By Amazon customer on 11-25-15
By: John Banville
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Eclipse
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Story
Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future, and more particularly, for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement.
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Well cast narrator and lush writing
- By Jeff Lacy on 04-12-18
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Time Pieces
- A Dublin Memoir
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.
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‘loved it!
- By SandyK on 02-24-24
By: John Banville
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Doctor Copernicus
- A Novel
- By: John Banville
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- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and controversy: wars are being waged by princes and bishops and the repercussions of Luther are being felt through a convulsing Germany. In a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. In this astonishing work of historical imagination, John Banville offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence.
By: John Banville
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Ghosts
- By: John Banville
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes a brilliantly haunting novel that forges an unforgettable amalgam of enchantment and menace that suggests both The Tempest and his own acclaimed The Book of Evidence.
By: John Banville
What listeners say about The Singularities
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Barbara
- 01-08-24
I'm mystified by this sly book
This is a weird, sly book that doubles back on itself in odd self-referential ways, and I'm just not sure what to make of it. The writing is gorgeous, arch and luscious; the narration superb, but I lost my footing in this weird realm of slippery and unreliable reality.
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- borogroves
- 06-24-23
No, not this
There are some books as enjoyable in audio as read. This is not one.
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- Diana Schwartz
- 11-02-22
John Banville - the best
This is a marvelous book by one of today's best writers. Highly recommend this book and author.
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- S. Harvester
- 05-18-23
A brilliant portrayal of a bleak and forbidding world
The exquisite syntax, brilliantly narrated, kept me listening to the story of a loveless, amoral world. The only smiles in this story are sardonic, or icy, or mocking. The first character to whom we are introduced is an unrepentant murderer, and we are taught to think of him as no worse, or better, than anyone else. Nihilistic to the nth degree and all in superb detail. It makes me want to flee to Dickens, or a Frank Capra movie.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-28-22
Impossible
After waiting with special enthusiasm for this novel from one of my favourite authors, I was severely disappointed. I lost the plot about a quarter way through. It is extremely and unnecessarily elaborate, with much philosophizing over nonsense along the way. Seems to get denser and duller. The narration is sometimes histrionic and, how to put it?, overly self-conscious, the narrator being a sort of godhead looking down on the world below. I thought it was pretentious and boring. I'll give it another try again some time, but at present cannot recommend it.
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1 person found this helpful