The Sympathizer
A Novel
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
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $24.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Francois Chau
About this listen
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016
A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.
The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.
©2015 Viet Thanh Nguyen. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2015 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
A Man of Two Faces
- A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
-
-
If you don't like coddled, cry-babies, then avoid
- By Wayne A. Curto on 12-30-23
-
The Refugees
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will.
-
-
Good collection of short stories
- By Thomas More on 03-19-17
-
The Orphan Master's Son
- A Novel
- By: Adam Johnson
- Narrated by: Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee, James Kyson Lee, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
-
-
The most compelling listen I've ever owned
- By Lisa on 01-27-12
By: Adam Johnson
-
Washington Black
- A Novel
- By: Esi Edugyan
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.
-
-
Now what do I do?
- By Mary L. Doyle on 10-04-18
By: Esi Edugyan
-
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
- A Novel
- By: James McBride
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
-
-
Multiple Stories Obfuscate Narrative
- By Stephnsea on 08-12-23
By: James McBride
-
Killers of the Flower Moon
- The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
- By: David Grann
- Narrated by: Will Patton, Ann Marie Lee, Danny Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
-
-
An outstanding story, highly recommended
- By S. Blakely on 06-22-17
By: David Grann
-
A Man of Two Faces
- A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
-
-
If you don't like coddled, cry-babies, then avoid
- By Wayne A. Curto on 12-30-23
-
The Refugees
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will.
-
-
Good collection of short stories
- By Thomas More on 03-19-17
-
The Orphan Master's Son
- A Novel
- By: Adam Johnson
- Narrated by: Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee, James Kyson Lee, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
-
-
The most compelling listen I've ever owned
- By Lisa on 01-27-12
By: Adam Johnson
-
Washington Black
- A Novel
- By: Esi Edugyan
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.
-
-
Now what do I do?
- By Mary L. Doyle on 10-04-18
By: Esi Edugyan
-
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
- A Novel
- By: James McBride
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
-
-
Multiple Stories Obfuscate Narrative
- By Stephnsea on 08-12-23
By: James McBride
-
Killers of the Flower Moon
- The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
- By: David Grann
- Narrated by: Will Patton, Ann Marie Lee, Danny Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
-
-
An outstanding story, highly recommended
- By S. Blakely on 06-22-17
By: David Grann
-
Trust (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
- By: Hernan Diaz
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathan Davis, Mozhan Marnò, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
-
-
Before Purchasing
- By JLDLOfficial on 08-13-22
By: Hernan Diaz
-
The Kite Runner
- By: Khaled Hosseini
- Narrated by: Khaled Hosseini
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why we think it’s a great listen: Never before has an author’s narration of his fiction been so important to fully grasping the book’s impact and global implications. Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them.
-
-
A Worhty Read
- By P. C..S. on 08-17-03
By: Khaled Hosseini
-
Babel
- Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution
- By: R. F. Kuang
- Narrated by: Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Billie Fulford-Brown
- Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.
-
-
The novel language lovers have been waiting for
- By LisaLee on 09-06-22
By: R. F. Kuang
-
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
- A Novel
- By: Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo, Julia Whelan, Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated.
-
-
Glucose Gluttony
- By W Perry Hall on 03-17-18
-
Nothing Ever Dies
- Vietnam and the Memory of War
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the best-selling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese.
-
-
Good, probably should be read and not listened to via audible for the best experience.
- By Tanya on 10-24-16
-
The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
-
-
Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
-
A Tale of Two Cities [Tantor]
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A Tale of Two Cities is one of Charles Dickens's most exciting novels. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, it tells the story of a family threatened by the terrible events of the past. Doctor Manette was wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille for 18 years without trial by the aristocratic authorities.
-
-
it's the singer not the song*
- By Maynard on 11-09-13
By: Charles Dickens
-
The Black Echo: Special Edition
- Harry Bosch, Book 1
- By: Michael Connelly
- Narrated by: Titus Welliver
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal...because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit.
-
-
Titus Welliver has really stepped in it!
- By George Moneo on 04-08-20
By: Michael Connelly
-
East of Eden
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 25 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
-
-
Why have I avoided this Beautiful Book???
- By Kelly on 03-25-17
By: John Steinbeck
-
Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
-
-
Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
-
Invisible Man
- A Novel
- By: Ralph Ellison
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching—yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.
-
-
How Did This Escape Me?
- By E. Pearson on 11-23-11
By: Ralph Ellison
-
The Trees
- A Novel
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Percival Everett's The Trees is a must-listen that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
-
-
Mindless repetitive bigotry
- By Catherine Spiller on 03-27-23
By: Percival Everett
Featured Article: The Best Vietnam War Audiobooks, Fiction and Nonfiction
Over the past four decades, many people have written about the Vietnam War in an effort to make sense of the raging debates, the staggering death and destruction, and the lingering trauma. History is often complicated, biased, or missing key information, especially when it comes to war. Arm yourself with comprehensive knowledge of the conflict with our selection of titles detailing the Vietnam War, from fiction to nonfiction, personal stories to histories.
Related to this topic
-
The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
-
-
Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
-
The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
-
-
Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
-
House of Meetings
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.
-
-
Martin Amis at the height of his powers; wonderous
- By Todd on 06-16-15
By: Martin Amis
-
A Fraction of the Whole
- By: Steve Toltz
- Narrated by: Colin McPhillamy, Craig Baldwin
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.
-
-
A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz
-
Shalimar the Clown
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Maximilian Ophuls is murdered outside his daughter's home by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, it appears to be a political killing. Ophuls is the former U.S. ambassador to India and America's leading figure in counter-terrorism. But there is much more to Ophuls and his assassin, a mysterious man calling himself "Shalimar the Clown", than meets the eye. One woman is at the center of their shared history, a history of betrayal and deception.
-
-
Incredible
- By Barry on 12-07-05
By: Salman Rushdie
-
The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
-
-
A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
-
The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
-
-
Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
-
The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
-
-
Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
-
House of Meetings
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.
-
-
Martin Amis at the height of his powers; wonderous
- By Todd on 06-16-15
By: Martin Amis
-
A Fraction of the Whole
- By: Steve Toltz
- Narrated by: Colin McPhillamy, Craig Baldwin
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.
-
-
A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz
-
Shalimar the Clown
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Maximilian Ophuls is murdered outside his daughter's home by his Kashmiri Muslim driver, it appears to be a political killing. Ophuls is the former U.S. ambassador to India and America's leading figure in counter-terrorism. But there is much more to Ophuls and his assassin, a mysterious man calling himself "Shalimar the Clown", than meets the eye. One woman is at the center of their shared history, a history of betrayal and deception.
-
-
Incredible
- By Barry on 12-07-05
By: Salman Rushdie
-
The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
-
-
A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
-
I, Who Did Not Die
- A Sweeping Story of Loss, Redemption, and Fate
- By: Zahed Haftlang, Najah Aboud
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Khorramshahr, Iran, May 1982 - It was the bloodiest battle of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century, and Najah, a 29-year-old wounded Iraqi conscript, was face to face with a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier who was ordered to kill him. Instead, the boy committed an astonishing act of mercy. It was an act that decades later would save his own life.
-
-
- By jennie on 04-10-24
By: Zahed Haftlang, and others
-
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
- By: Mohammed Hanif
- Narrated by: Paul Bhattacharjee
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There is a saying that when lovers fall out, a plane goes down. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is the story of one such plane. Why did a Hercules C130, the world's sturdiest aircraft, carrying Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq, go down on 17 August, 1988?
Was it because of: mechanical failure; human error; the CIA's impatience; a blind woman's curse; generals not happy with their pension plans; the mango season? Or could it be your narrator, Ali Shigri?
-
-
Time Capsule
- By Rishi C on 11-13-17
By: Mohammed Hanif
-
Guapa
- By: Saleem Haddad
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rasa spends his days translating for Western journalists and pining for the nights when he can sneak his lover, Taymour, into his room. One night Rasa's grandmother - the woman who raised him - catches them in bed together. The following day Rasa is consumed by the search for his best friend, Maj, a fiery activist and drag queen star of the underground bar Guapa, who has been arrested by the police.
-
-
Guapa
- By Mah Maass on 08-25-16
By: Saleem Haddad
-
In the First Circle
- By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harry T. Willets - translator
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 31 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Moscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. The Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russian diplomat who promises to deliver secrets about the nascent Soviet Atomic Bomb program. On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state - or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps, and almost certain death.
-
-
One of the five finest novels written in the 20th Century
- By Ellis D Vener on 04-08-19
By: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others
-
The Centurions
- By: Jean Larteguy, Robert D. Kaplan - foreward
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the "age of heroics is over". As relevant today as it was half a century ago, The Centurions is a gripping military adventure, an extended symposium on waging war in a new global order, and an essential investigation of the ethics of counterinsurgency.
-
-
Superbly read. Unbelievably timely
- By Benjamin on 05-05-21
By: Jean Larteguy, and others
-
The Quiet American
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Joseph Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alden Pyle, an idealistic young American, is sent to Vietnam to promote democracy amidst the intrigue and violence of the French war with the Vietminh, while his friend, Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, looks on.
-
-
Terrible narrator nearly derails Greene novel.
- By Richard on 07-12-12
By: Graham Greene
-
Sapphire Skies
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
2000: The wreckage of a downed WWII fighter plane is discovered in the forests near Russia's Ukrainian border.The aircraft belonged to Natalya Azarova, ace pilot and pin-up girl for Soviet propaganda, but the question of her fate remains unanswered. Was she a German spy who faked her own death, as the Kremlin claims? Her lover, Valentin Orlov, now a highly-decorated general, refuses to believe it. Lily, a young Australian woman, has moved to Moscow to escape from tragedy.
-
-
A Disturbing Disappointment
- By Sara on 08-07-14
-
Shame
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is "not quite Pakistan". In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men - one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure - Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation.
-
-
Should have quit at chapter 2
- By G. Miller on 06-23-23
By: Salman Rushdie
-
In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
-
-
My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
-
Golden Earrings
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Catalina, grand-daughter of Spanish refugees, is a disciplined student with the School of the Paris Opera Ballet. Little gets inthe way of her career until the visit of an otherworldly being, who leaves her a mysterious pair of golden earrings. Given a quest, Catalina realises she must explore her own Spanish heritage and makes the connection between the visitor and ‘La Rusa’, a young Andalusian flamenco star. La Rusa died in exile in Paris in 1952, her death ruled as suicide. But as Catalina begins to discover, there were those in the community, who had good reason for wanting La Rusa dead.
-
-
Fabulous story
- By Paddington on 10-19-12
-
The Kindly Ones
- By: Jonathan Littell
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 39 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
-
-
Office politics in hell
- By Maine Colonial 🌲 on 04-02-13
By: Jonathan Littell
-
Topaz
- By: Leon Uris
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Paris, 1962, Devereaux and Nordstrom uncover Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms. But when nobody acts after sharing his findings, Devereaux becomes the target of an assassination attempt and soon realizes the plot extends far beyond Cuba - and himself. A thrilling and well-paced novel filled with Cold War intrigue, Topaz features two agents on a journey around the world to save NATO and themselves.
-
-
A spy thriller in disguise
- By Shmuel M on 04-14-19
By: Leon Uris
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
A Man of Two Faces
- A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
-
-
If you don't like coddled, cry-babies, then avoid
- By Wayne A. Curto on 12-30-23
-
The Refugees
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will.
-
-
Good collection of short stories
- By Thomas More on 03-19-17
-
Nothing Ever Dies
- Vietnam and the Memory of War
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the best-selling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese.
-
-
Good, probably should be read and not listened to via audible for the best experience.
- By Tanya on 10-24-16
-
The Human Stain
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America—a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.
By: Philip Roth
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
-
-
tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
-
A Man of Two Faces
- A Memoir, a History, a Memorial
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
-
-
If you don't like coddled, cry-babies, then avoid
- By Wayne A. Curto on 12-30-23
-
The Refugees
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will.
-
-
Good collection of short stories
- By Thomas More on 03-19-17
-
Nothing Ever Dies
- Vietnam and the Memory of War
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the best-selling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese.
-
-
Good, probably should be read and not listened to via audible for the best experience.
- By Tanya on 10-24-16
-
The Human Stain
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America—a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.
By: Philip Roth
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
-
-
tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
-
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Complete Collection
- By: Lydia Davis
- Narrated by: Mia Barron, Thérèse Plummer, Jonathan Davis
- Length: 21 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lydia Davis is one of our most original and influential writers, a storyteller celebrated for her emotional acuity, her formal inventiveness, and her ability to capture the mind in overdrive. She has been called "an American virtuoso of the short story form" ( Salon.com ) and "one of the quiet giants... of American fiction" ( Los Angeles Times Book Review ). This volume contains all her stories to date, from the acclaimed "Break It Down" (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee "Varieties of Disturbance".
-
-
Intro & Outro’s Ruin It
- By Amazon Customer on 09-06-20
By: Lydia Davis
-
Hurricane Season
- By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabon, Ana Osorio
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
-
-
Wow
- By Anonymous User on 11-20-20
By: Fernanda Melchor, and others
-
How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
-
-
Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
-
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.
-
-
A World I DON'T Ever Want to Escape From.
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-12
By: Michael Chabon
-
On Beauty
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
-
-
Somewhat Disappointed
- By Cherokee on 11-15-05
By: Zadie Smith
-
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Diaz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
-
-
Wondrous Book!!!
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Junot Diaz
-
The Orphan Master's Son
- A Novel
- By: Adam Johnson
- Narrated by: Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee, James Kyson Lee, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
-
-
The most compelling listen I've ever owned
- By Lisa on 01-27-12
By: Adam Johnson
-
Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
-
-
Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
-
Tenth of December
- Stories
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Writing brilliantly and profoundly about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war, Saunders cuts to the core of the contemporary experience. These stories take on the big questions and explore the fault lines of our own morality, delving into the questions of what makes us good and what makes us human.
-
-
Be prepared for something different...but good!
- By Mr. D on 02-21-14
By: George Saunders
-
The Days of Abandonment
- By: Elena Ferrante
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An IndiBound best seller, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband, with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.
-
-
D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
- By Margaret M. Cranston on 01-18-16
By: Elena Ferrante
-
Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
-
-
The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
-
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.
-
-
Utterly beautiful!
- By L.A. on 12-27-19
By: Saidiya Hartman
What listeners say about The Sympathizer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- JKC
- 07-15-17
A clinical eye for the hypochondria of exile
This is a novel about the Vietnam War. But it is unique in that: a) there are no Americans in it, and b) the war is already over. For everybody except the Vietnamese, that is.
We have come to think of the Vietnam War as an American conflict. Donald Goldstein deemed it “the most traumatic experience for the United States in the twentieth century”). How much more must it be so for the Vietnamese themselves? We don’t think too much about that question. (Try Googling “Vietnam conflict”. You’ll get more references to 60’s protest music than to Vietnamese society.)
But the themes are even more profound than that. This is not just a novel about a shooting war in southeast Asia; it is about the conflict between the individual and the state. To what extent does the culture in which we are raised supply the social environment and physical habitat we require to flourish?
Viet Thanh Nguyen has mastered the art of writing fiction from the viewpoint of displaced persons. Some authors – Faulkner, Steinbeck – illuminate a region through the eyes of its denizens. Nguyen’s perspective is the opposite – he studies the individual by removing him from his natural habitat and analyzing what happens to him.
In “The Sympathizer”, Nguyen studies a varied population of Vietnamese displaced by the war. The largest cohort is composed of ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) officers and their families exiled to southern California after the fall of Saigon. But there are also individual specimens of alienated NVA/VLF partisans: one man estranged from family and friends by horrible disfigurement suffered during the war; another whose humanity has been replaced by political slogans; a woman ostracized by her own family for her affair with a French priest. All observed and reported by her biracial son who is also a sort of double political agent: the most stateless and equivocal character in the whole novel.
Nguyen has a clinical eye for the symptoms that beset the uprooted - the diminution of stature they suffer when removed from their community, the despondency that sets in when they lose their place in society. Chapter 6 has a poignant passage cataloguing the humble Orange County occupations of men who once wielded military might in Vietnam. Nguyen finishes with a brilliant riff about these men “moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments, as their testes shrivel, day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation…”
But the Sympathizer sees the other side of the war’s dislocation as well. Back in Vietnam, the victors suffer their own sorts of alienation. The community in which the Vietnamese people have flourished for centuries has been replaced by a sterile and inhuman ideology.
So, does the State nourish the individual, or crush his spirit? Which is to be preferred, Imperialism or Communism? Catholicism or Capitalism? In his isolation cell in a Vietnamese re-education camp, the narrator reaches his own, searing conclusions.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Bonnie Nolan
- 02-15-18
Fantastic
This book is incredibly moving and brilliant. Nguyen is a master wordsmith and storyteller - highly recommend.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Dawn
- 07-17-18
Relentless but beautiful writing
I think whoever called in the Vietnamese Portnoy’s Complaint had it right. Complex and incredible writing but pretty exhausting for me in the long run with a lot of philosophizing, politics and personal angst along with the back and forth on whose side our hero was really on if anyone’s, which I guess is probably the point! The politics are deep and sad. A time in history which of course our war in Vietnam screwed up even more. Our hero is of mixed race who is hated and not accepted by most, anywhere he lives. But since he’s a spy does that matter, I’m still not sure. It does help explain his ambiguity though. Also told from a very male point of view which did also wear me out by the end, his relationships or desire for certain women just ultimately all about him. And for him to have to finally mention the size of his penis...oh brother. But no spoiler alerts here you’ll have to listen to the book to find out.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jonathan Fein
- 10-28-17
wow. heavy, thoughtful story
wow. heavy, thoughtful story. a significant story which puts you deep inside Vietnam's recent past and psychology.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Andre
- 08-20-16
Tale of Two Minds
What did you love best about The Sympathizer?
What I loved best about The Sympathizer was the writing. It was poetic and epic. It was also creative in its use of a confessional. The second thing I loved best about this novel was its structure. I listened to the last and first three chapters a second time and noticed that people and things that showed up in the first chapters appeared in the last, such as a rucksack with a false bottom. Nguyen tightly wove his tale to tie everything together.
What other book might you compare The Sympathizer to and why?
I compared The Sympathizer to Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities because both books were about the excesses of revolutions. Nguyen in his second paragraph also mirrored Dickens' use of time anaphora in the opening paragraph of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, ..." Both books are about two-ness.
Other books that inspired Nguyen were Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, because the sympathizer and his friends compared their friendship to that of the famous French trio. Also, the sympathizer, a Eurasian, found sympathies with Dumas, a mulatto.
Richard Condon's brainwashing, Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate is another inspiration as well as Ron Chernow's biography of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton who was born a bastard and opponents never let him forget it. Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man is another influence because the sympathizer speaks of his own invisibility in cultures and blending into settings and crowds like a chameleon.
What about Francois Chau’s performance did you like?
Francois Chau melted into the characters so that I saw and heard them and not him. Francois Chau is the ultimate sympathizer when it comes to performing great books.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
Yes, I wanted to listen to The Sympathizer all in one sitting. I finished it in five days.
Any additional comments?
This Pulitzer-winning novel is one of my favorite recent novels. It is also a conversation starter. I am thrilled that I listened to this book, and I highly recommend it..
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- P. Smith
- 10-04-16
To be caught in a spider web of super powers
Told from the point of view of a Vietnamese native, it gives the perspective of the lose /lose situation the French then American wars put them in and how dehumanizing and futile it all was. Written very well it is not depressing, despite the subject matter.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Suzanne Weatherman
- 09-03-16
Priceless
The thought provoking themes in this book are so important they are priceless. It was not easy to listen to, but I am happy to have done so.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Joslyn Long
- 03-06-19
Excellent listen
I enjoyed this audiobook very much. it's a novel I've had on my reading list for a long time, but I'm actually glad I listened to it rather than read it. the narrator's voice and accent brought the main character to life for me. There were parts that were very difficult to listen to, but war is a very difficult reality, so those parts that are graphic and sad are necessary. There was never a moment I was bored. Every bit had my attention. Highly recommend, but for mature audiences.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- deborah
- 07-18-16
Identity
This novel is timely as we struggle as a nation with or past, present and future identity. The Sympathizer is a novel about a man and a nation struggling it's just that. I could not put this book down both listening to it and reading it as time may allow. The narrator is excellent and does not interfere with the voice of the book. Vietnam Than Nguyen wove a complex narrative and pieces of history and identity into a novel that flowed like water. I could not stop reading or thinking about it. Although I knew a fair amount about the war, the resistance movement post war was new to me as were the details of the reeducation camps.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Erin Bohmbach
- 10-21-16
Astonishing!
At once visceral and ethereal, Francois Chau's narration truly engulfs you in the haunting and occasionally hilarious universe of this text. Viet Thahn Nguyen is an absolute force of an author & I can't wait to read whatever he writes next.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!