This Mournable Body
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Adenrele Ojo
About this listen
Anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow's boarding house and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.
In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival.
As a last resort, Tambudzai takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents' impoverished homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga's tense and psychologically charged novel, that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.
©2018 Tsitsi Dangarembga (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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Brick Lane
- By: Monica Ali
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Sastre
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Abridged
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Nanzeen's inauspicious birth in a Bangladeshi village imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents. Married off to a man old enough to be her father, Nanzeen moves to London and cares for her family. But gradually she begins to question whether fate controls her or whether she has a hand in her own destiny. She discovers both the complexity that comes with free choice and the depth of her attachment to her husband, her daughters and her new world.
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A truly wonderful book!
- By A M on 11-24-03
By: Monica Ali
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Deborah Moggach
- Narrated by: Juliet Mills
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When Ravi Kapoor, an overworked London doctor, reaches the breaking point with his difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: “Can’t we just send him away somewhere? Somewhere far, far away.” His prayer is seemingly answered when Ravi’s entrepreneurial cousin sets up a retirement home in India, hoping to re-create in Bangalore an elegant lost corner of England. Several retirees are enticed by the promise of indulgent living at a bargain price, but upon arriving, they are dismayed to find that restoration of the once sophisiticated hotel has stalled....
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Screenwriters Changed it for the Better
- By Carole T. on 06-05-12
By: Deborah Moggach
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When the Moon Is Low
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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Putney
- A Novel
- By: Sofka Zinovieff
- Narrated by: Michelle Ford
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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Hum If You Don't Know the Words
- By: Bianca Marais
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.
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Completely wrong accents
- By Debbie on 02-12-22
By: Bianca Marais
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Gold Dust
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Jennifer Vuletic
- Length: 18 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Three women linked by their blood, their dreams...and their sins. From Leningrad in the '70s to America and London in the present day, Kimberley Freeman's new novel follows the lives of two sisters, Lena and Natalia, and their cousin, Sofi, as they move away from Russia and all they have known. Despite promising to always take care of each other, a pact to meet every winter is shattered as their lives change and long-held resentments begin to surface. Can that resentment turn to hatred? To murder?
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It's just not the same without Caroline Lee
- By Maria on 12-04-17
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Wild Lavender
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Kate Hood
- Length: 20 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Simone Fleurier is wrenched from her home on a Provencal lavender farm at the age of 14 after the accidental death of her father. Forced to become a maid at the boarding house of her Aunt Augustine in Marseilles, Simone's life is hard and impoverished. But one of her aunt's boarders, the beautiful Camille Casal, a star at the local music hall, gives Simone a dream: that one day she too will be a famous singer and dancer.
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An Extrodinary Story
- By Wade on 08-16-08
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Don't Let Him Know
- By: Sandip Roy
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In a boxy apartment building in an Illinois university town, Romola Mitra, a newly arrived young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life. Decades later, her son Amit finds that letter and thinks he has discovered his mother's secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes.
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another great book by Roy
- By Amazon Customer on 04-27-15
By: Sandip Roy
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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Flame Tree Road
- By: Shona Patel
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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India, 1870s. In a tiny village where society is ruled by a caste system and women are defined solely by marriage, young Biren Roy dreams of forging a new destiny. When his mother suffers the fate of widowhood - shunned by her loved ones and forced to live in solitary penance - Biren devotes his life to effecting change.
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Riveting Love Story
- By Granny on 01-15-20
By: Shona Patel
What listeners say about This Mournable Body
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Howard
- 02-10-20
Please use African readers for African stories
I’m African born and love stories from my home continent. This story is no exception. Such a pity the reader attempts an African accent but fails on pronunciation every time.
It’s so distracting from the story. I think American listeners would also prefer to hear the story in an authentic African voice from the stories own region.
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21 people found this helpful
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- Susan Mwananshiku Tembo
- 10-02-22
Narrator
I am loving this series, however this book should be read with someone who can pronounce the African words, and hearing it an American accent doesn’t work. It’s distracting …
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- Vivifyme
- 04-21-24
Terrible narration
I’m sure the narrator is great at the job, but the accents and pronunciation were terrible. It made things much harder to follow and connect with the story and the setting. The narration of earlier books in the setting excellent.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-08-20
A disappointing experience
I found it hard to relate to this book particularly as a Zimbabwean. The narrator is not Shona speaking and I could hardly understand what she was saying most of the time which left a sour taste in my mouth each time she was trying to pronounce some of the words. Her performance was stellar in all other aspects but this one. This really throws one off. Overall the plot was good with a lot of unexpected turns, considering that it's a sequel to Nervous Conditions; although the ending was a bit rushed.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kathryn Sweetlove
- 05-10-21
Disappointed - spoilt by poor casting
Having spent several years living in rural Zimbabwe, I was so was excited to buy this title. But the US accent takes away so much of the flavour and spirit of the author’s words. The reader did not even bother to research Shona pronunciation. It should have been a Zimbabwean voice.
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- gardner, S.
- 01-19-19
At times it seemed overwritten & needlessly complex
This was not a bad book by any means, but it was very hard to follow. The author used a lot of allegory throughout the book, and at times I wasn’t able to make sense of it. I couldn’t ever fully grasp the purpose of the book or what meaning the author wanted to convey through the telling of this story. It seemed at times to be overwritten, and in my opinion it could have been amazing had the approach been simpler and a little more linear.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Emma
- 04-30-23
Love the series
So appreciate the story that has deep political meaning and it’s told in such an interesting way. I appreciate all the character sketches and the humor and tragedy.
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- MrsMap
- 12-10-20
Disappointed
A note to audible...the same way you use European readers for European books, please put as much effort in finding readers who can pronounce words in the native language of the writer. Or at the very least, find a consultant who can help the readers with pronunciation. I cringed so many times as the words and vowel sounds were anglicized and butchered. Please stop this. This is the second book by a Southern African author where your readers just missed the mark. It becomes so distracting.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 12-19-20
Riveting
I quite enjoyed the book however I struggled with the performance as it so happens that I am a shona speaker so the butchering of shona names and references had me cringing and I could not adjust. I think the producers could have spent a bit more effort to prepare the performer with proper pronunciations of shona. Excellent book though
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1 person found this helpful
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- Chipo Takawira
- 03-21-23
Good story
Being a native Shona speaker and having to listen to the narrator struggle with pronunciation affected listening and fully enjoying the story.
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