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There but for the
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
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Publisher's summary
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and the story of Miles is one told from the points of view of four of them: a woman in her 40s called Anna, a man in his 60s called Mark, a woman in her 80s called May, and a 10-year-old child called Brooke. The thing is... none of these people knows Miles anything more than glancingly. So how much is it possible to know about a stranger? And what are the consequences of even the most casual, most fleeting meetings we have every day with other human beings?
Brilliantly audacious, disarmingly playful, full of Smith's trademark wit and puns, There but for the is a deft exploration of the human need for separation - from our pasts and from one another - and the redemptive possibilities for connections.
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Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is elegant, smart and in control. Only Jenny, her care assistant, knows that she harbours a painful secret, and only she can prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave. As the women talk, Jenny pieces together the answers to many questions that arise: Why has she kept possession of a house that her family don’t know about? What happened there that holds the key to a distant tragedy?
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Amazing reader elevates book to a higher level
- By Doggy Bird on 10-04-14
By: Barbara Vine
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The Last Thing I Remember
- By: Deborah Bee
- Narrated by: Yolanda Kettle, Lucy Middleweek
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A novel that grips from the very beginning and that will live long in the memory, The Last Thing I Remember is Deborah Bee's startling debut thriller. Sarah is in a coma. Her memory is gone - she doesn't know how she got there. And she doesn't know how she might get out. But then she discovers that her injury wasn't an accident. And that the assailant hasn't been caught. Unable to speak, see or move, Sarah must use every clue that she overhears to piece together her own past.
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Grow up...
- By Kelly on 03-08-20
By: Deborah Bee
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Fragile Things
- By: Neil Gaiman
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Marvelous creations, including a short story set in the world of The Matrix and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction, can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his entertaining (and dark) sense of humor.
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Perhaps a different format?
- By Karen on 11-03-10
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Fire and Hemlock
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Polly has two sets of memories.... One is normal: school, home, friends. The other, stranger memories begin nine years ago, when she was 10 and gate-crashed an odd funeral in the mansion near her grandmother's house. Polly's just beginning to recall the sometimes marvelous, sometimes frightening adventures she embarked on with Tom Lynn after that. And then she did something terrible, and everything changed. But what did she do? Why can't she remember? Polly must uncover the secret, or her true love - and perhaps Polly herself - will be lost.
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Finally!!!
- By Jamie D. on 07-10-21
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The Perfect Lie
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For Lucy Riddick, Venice has always been the dream destination, the ideal place to lose herself. And now she needs to do just that. The secret she's been keeping has finally caught up with her and Lucy needs to disappear - fast. But what if, when she sets foot in Venice, Lucy finds the one thing she has been running from?
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Fun and Absorbing
- By Jen Griffin on 10-15-15
By: Emily Barr
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The Third Wife
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the early hours of a summer morning, a young woman steps into the path of an oncoming bus. A tragic accident? Or suicide? At the center of this puzzle is Adrian Wolfe, a successful architect and grief-stricken widower, who, a year after his third wife's death, begins to investigate the cause. As Adrian looks back on their brief but seemingly happy marriage, disturbing secrets begin to surface. The divorces from his two previous wives had been amicable, or so it seemed; his children, all five of them, were resilient as ever, or so he thought.
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Not a mystery
- By Susan on 07-06-18
By: Lisa Jewell
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Down Cemetery Road
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead.
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A bit of a slog....
- By rhl60 on 01-26-24
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The Bone Clocks
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Following a scalding row with her mother, 15-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
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Not Short Listed, This Time
- By Mel on 09-23-14
By: David Mitchell
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Some Kind of Fairy Tale
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Twenty years ago, 16-year-old Tara Martin disappeared from a small town in the heart of England. Now, her sudden return and the mind-bending tale of where she’s been will challenge our very perception of the truth. For 20 years after Tara Martin disappeared, her parents and her brother, Peter, lived in denial of the grim fact that she was gone for good. Then suddenly on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings at her parents’ home, and there, dishevelled and slightly peculiar looking, Tara stands. It’s a miracle, but alarm bells are ringing for Peter. Tara’s story just does not add up.
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Extremely Well Done
- By Amanda on 07-11-12
By: Graham Joyce
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What listeners say about There but for the
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mirela
- 03-12-12
Not my cup of tea
What disappointed you about There but for the?
I stuck through this book, but it just didn't speak to me... Strange punctuation style, seemingly irrelevant stories that have a somewhat interesting twist of circular story telling. However, I must not be the target reader type for this book, I didn't love it.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Elinore
- 02-24-13
I don't know how I missed this author until now.
Any additional comments?
This book had everything I like--a good story and well-developed characters, but also an Interest in ideas, words and sentences. This is a book I would typically prefer to read than hear, but the audio worked for me very well, even with all the changes in perspective and voice.
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1 person found this helpful
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- B. Hudson
- 08-28-12
Disappointed
What would have made There but for the better?
A different narrator might have helped. The voice grated on my nerves.
What was most disappointing about Ali Smith’s story?
Disjointed and boring. Maybe reading it instead of listening would have given me an appreciation for it. I couldn't even make it through the last 2 hours.
How could the performance have been better?
Some inflection!
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1 person found this helpful
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- GoForItOldLady
- 06-17-21
Strange
I kept listening to this book, full of hour after hour of whatever, mostly to see whether there is any plot. I suppose there is one, but it’s very understated. There certainly isn’t what I think of as a climax or resolution. There are people to like and there are people to dislike, and there is a very precocious 10-year-old girl who seems to be mostly, but not solely, an observer. Her dialogue and interior monologues are quirky but interesting. Sometimes the action skips around quite unexpectedly, with no transitions, leaving the listener to wonder what is going on. The narrator’s voice is especially convincing when she takes on the point if view of the little girl.
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- Kayla
- 04-03-12
couldn't get through it
Would you ever listen to anything by Ali Smith again?
probably not
What didn’t you like about Anne Flosnik’s performance?
her voice is extremely grating, and she says the dialogue tags in consistent drone
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- denise
- 10-10-13
Awful
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
If you enjoy confusing plot lines by fast talkers
Would you ever listen to anything by Ali Smith again?
Not likely
What didn’t you like about Anne Flosnik’s performance?
Speech pattern too fast
If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from There but for the?
Nearly all
Any additional comments?
Very dissatisfied
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- Robert
- 08-24-12
Insufferable as a bad house guest
This book is as insufferable as the house guest that ties the book together. I got this book based on its awards and strong critical reviews but found the book an annoying slog. Smith uses devices that I usually enjoy in writting (streams of consiousness, multiple narratives, no real heavy plotting) but creates a book that just caused me to give a thousand mile stare when listening too.
Here are some of the problems I had with the book:
1) Characters are poorly introduced and you need to spend a large chunk of time figuring out where the fit into the plot rather than enjoying the story; a few characters and plot lines I just gave up on; some books are worth the effort of really trying to understand it; this is not one of them.
2) Streams of consiousness that go no where and speak like some trivia napkin or fortune cookie
3) the book seems to be in love with its own cleverness like Smith just discovered certain ideas in metafiction and narrative and decided to take it out for a test drive with little consequence or interesting results
This might be your cup of tea but I just found the book awful. The narrator also has a rather shrill tone of a school marm.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Missis Guzz
- 08-10-24
Confusing and nonsensical
What is happening? It makes no sense. Hard to follow. There but for the missing story!
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- Karen K
- 01-23-15
Why I Didn't Like This Book - But You Might
I normally wouldn't stop reading a book and then review it but I am making an exception here. I want to review it so other people know what I know but I didn't want to spend any more of my life listening to it when there are so many other books. I should listen to samples before buying books too so at least I would have known about the really strong theatrical English accent the narrator uses. I am not a big fan of narrators with accents but sometimes they are OK. This one I found made it hard to understand what was being said. Between the accent and the slang I got lost a lot, and add on to that the content which involves a lot of stream of consciousness and cutesy word play, I have never listened to a book so poorly suited to be an audiobook. If you like these sorts of very British books with clever wording and stories of lives of quiet desperation, maybe this is your book. BUT I suggest you read it rather than listen to it. I am not sure why I picked this out in the first place - something in the description caught my interest but I think I will avoid books like this in the future. The last straw for me was a scene where a man was walking through a park (that much I got) and I thought he was talking to his mother, then he seemed to be talking to his dead father but I wasn't really sure, and I could never tell which comments were said aloud and which just thought. If you can't tell whether someone is talking to themselves, or a live person, or a dead person, I think it is time to move on to a different book. So I will.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Toby
- 10-14-14
Love from the beginning to the end
What did you love best about There but for the?
The young girl, Brooke, was certainly one of the loves of this book. Overall, there was much to love about this novel. The diversity of the various characters made it like being in the heart of London.
What was one of the most memorable moments of There but for the?
I cannot name only one. I vastly enjoyed the conversations Brooke had with others and especially, her parents. Obviously, also Miles!
What about Anne Flosnik’s performance did you like?
Everything. Flosnik is one of my all-time favorite readers.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
I don't think in terms of film, so cannot answer this question.
Any additional comments?
I don't much like comparisons to film. No book can ever, really, be made into the perfect film, or so I believe. This was a tremendous read that flowed flawlessly from character to character and scene to scene. What a marvelous writer, Ms. Ali Smith.
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