
The Vanished Birds
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Shayna Small
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By:
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Simon Jimenez
About this listen
A “highly imaginative and utterly exhilarating” (Thrillist) debut that is “the best of what science fiction can be: a thought-provoking, heartrending story about the choices that define our lives” (Kirkus Reviews, Best Debut Fiction and Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year).
Finalist for the Locus Award • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by Tordotcom and Kirkus Reviews
A mysterious child lands in the care of a solitary woman, changing both of their lives forever.
I expected many things from this trip. I did not expect a family.
A ship captain, unfettered from time. A mute child, burdened with unimaginable power. A millennia-old woman, haunted by lifetimes of mistakes. In this captivating debut of connection across space and time, these outsiders will find in each other the things they lack: a place of love and belonging. A safe haven. A new beginning.
But the past hungers for them, and when it catches up, it threatens to tear this makeshift family apart.
Praise for The Vanished Birds
“This is the most impressive debut of 2020.”(Locus)
“This extraordinary science fiction epic, which delves deep into the perils of failing to learn from one’s mistakes, is perfect for fans of big ideas and intimate reflections.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“A lyrical and moving narrative of space travel, found families, and lost loves set against an evocative space-opera background.” (Booklist, starred review)
“The Vanished Birds finds an intimate heartbeat of longing in a saga of galactic progress and its crushing fallout.... A novel of vast scope that yet makes time for compassion, wonder, and poetry.” (Indra Das, author of The Devourers)
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- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing from the magical world of her iconic Sundance award-winning film, Julie Dash’s stand-alone novel tells another rich, historical tale of the Gullah-Geechee people: a multigenerational story about a Brooklyn College anthropology student who finds an unexpected homecoming when she heads to the South Carolina Sea Islands to study her ancestors.
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My BFF Bahni...
- By Lillian Collins on 12-31-22
By: Julie Dash
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The Unsettled
- A Novel
- By: Ayana Mathis
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.
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Well that was depressing
- By Holly on 12-05-23
By: Ayana Mathis
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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
- A Novel
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Arundhati Roy
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety - in search of meaning and of love.
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Author narration does not work for me
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-17
By: Arundhati Roy
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The Lonely Hearts Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Heather O'Neill
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of When We Lost Our Heads, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans - in love with each other since they can remember - whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future. The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins.
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IMPECCABLE BEAUTIFUL Writing, Interesting Story
- By Jordyn on 05-24-17
By: Heather O'Neill
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The Skin and Its Girl
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Cypher
- Narrated by: Victoria Nassif, Haneen Arafat Murphy
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns vibrantly, permanently cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis’ centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of their lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening back to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love.
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Engaging story, very well told
- By Moth77 on 05-10-25
By: Sarah Cypher
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A Brief History of Living Forever
- A Novel
- By: Jaroslav Kalfar
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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When Adéla discovers she has a terminal illness, she leaves behind her native Czech village for a chance at reuniting in America with Tereza, the daughter she gave up at birth, decades earlier. But the country Adéla experienced as a young woman, when she eloped with a filmmaker and starred in his cult sci-fi movie, has changed entirely. In 2030, America is ruled by an authoritarian government increasingly closed off to the rest of the world.
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Not so distant future
- By Kindle Customer on 05-14-23
By: Jaroslav Kalfar
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Perish
- A Novel
- By: LaToya Watkins
- Narrated by: Jeremy Michael Durm, Keyonni James, Chanté McCormick, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Bear it or perish yourself. Those are the words Helen Jean hears that fateful night in her cousin’s outhouse that change the trajectory of her life. Spanning decades, Perish tracks the choices Helen Jean—the matriarch of the Turner family—makes and the way those choices have rippled across generations, from her children to her grandchildren and beyond. This family’s “reunion” unearths long-kept secrets and forces each member to ask themselves important questions about who is deserving of forgiveness and who bears the cross of blame.
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listened twice...great performance
- By Carol on 09-20-22
By: LaToya Watkins
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The Unraveling
- By: Melanie Hamrick
- Narrated by: Summer Morton
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Jocelyn Banks has always felt like an outsider in the ballet world. She was raised in rural Louisiana, taught to scrap and hustle for the life she wanted. And ever since Jocelyn found ballet, she has been able to take her life into her own hands. After years of success at the North American Ballet, she is now on a hiatus to enjoy life in London. But in an instant, Jocelyn’s world is turned upside down and she’s forced find a way back into the ballet world. But the ballet scene in London is completely different from the one in America.
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Twisty unexpected dance drama
- By Pony2018 on 08-30-24
By: Melanie Hamrick
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Everything Here Is Beautiful
- By: Mira T. Lee
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Emily Woo Zeller, Ozzie Rodriguez, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Two sisters - Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister's protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When their mother dies and Lucia starts hearing voices, it is Miranda who must find a way to reach her sister. But Lucia impetuously plows ahead, marrying a bighearted, older man only to leave him, suddenly, to have a baby with a young Latino immigrant.
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Review
- By Sherri H Skalski on 01-30-18
By: Mira T. Lee
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Build Your House Around My Body
- A Novel
- By: Violet Kupersmith
- Narrated by: Quyen Ngo
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge. Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last minute.
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Epic, Horrifying & Mystical
- By Jonathan T. Jefferson on 07-20-21
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The Incorrigibles
- A Novel
- By: Meredith Jaeger
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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1890, San Francisco. Seduced by her employer’s nephew, Annie Gilmurray, an Irish maid, is accused of stealing the ring he promised her. Sentenced to one year in San Quentin, Annie is heartbroken and frightened among the inmates of the women’s ward: prostitutes, murderers, and pickpockets. But Annie finds beauty and friendship in a brutal place, where the women look out for one another, dreaming of a better life after release. But their world inside San Quentin's walls is a dangerous one, and when the unthinkable happens, Annie makes a choice that will alter the course of her future forever.
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A page-turner following strong women finding their agency imbued with rich, local SF history
- By S. Brett on 06-04-24
By: Meredith Jaeger
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Caucasia
- A Novel
- By: Danzy Senna
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston. The sisters are so close that they speak their own language, yet Birdie, with her light skin and straight hair, is often mistaken for white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at school. Despite their differences, Cole is Birdie's confidant, her protector, the mirror by which she understands herself. Then their parents' marriage collapses.
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Wanted it to be better
- By AmyP33 on 05-27-25
By: Danzy Senna
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Mount Misery
- A Novel
- By: Samuel Shem
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient.
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Not as good as The House Of God
- By Thomas C. Kelley on 02-03-23
By: Samuel Shem
The most beautiful story
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Didn't live up to potential
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I will say the narrator did a pretty great job, despite her portrayal of male characters being hard to distinguish at times. Other than that she was great.
Great book if you love space opera. Highly recommend.
Great book. Wow.
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The audiobook made that despair much more prevalent. The narrator has a Melancholy delivery. words are drawn out in a dramatic way that reminds me of when a friend is quietly explaining something very sad and personal. after hours of this delivery and the sad tones of the book itself, I was done. It was no longer a fun adventure balanced by moments of seriousness, it was simply a sad trudge through other people's lives.
The Narrator's Melancholy Was Too Much
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While the narrator does a good job infusing this story with emotion their range of voices left me wanting after to many characters started to sound like kids from a cartoon.
Ambitious premise that fails to deliver
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really enjoyed it.
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Incredible Deeply moving
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Jimenez provide quite a bit of backstory for the characters such that the tale is more a story, rather than a novel. The secret of the boy's jaunts remains a mystery, nor was it ever clear how he was first identified and how everyone seems to know of him.
The narration was reasonable with decent character distinction. Pacing is smooth and brisk.
Avian jaunts
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Unusual
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Character driven, tech minimum space opera
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