
This Strange Eventful History
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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
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By:
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Claire Messud
About this listen
An immersive, masterful story of a family born on the wrong side of history, from one of our finest contemporary novelists.
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.
Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force … one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).
“A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud’s epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become ‘colonized’ by family.”—Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Netanyahus
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Story
A bracing, hypnotic, coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children. Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship.
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Notable more for the ideas an insights than story.
- By Edward J Bridge on 11-05-17
By: Claire Messud
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Burma Sahib
- A Novel
- By: Paul Theroux
- Narrated by: Charlie Anson
- Length: 17 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing all of this while grappling with his own self-worth, his sense that he was not cut out for this, is soon overwhelming for the young Blair.
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Glorious writing
- By Nina Jacobson on 02-21-24
By: Paul Theroux
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Kant's Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature.
By: Claire Messud
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The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.
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This One Should Win
- By K. Bella Bestia on 10-13-24
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Wild Houses
- By: Colin Barrett
- Narrated by: Damian Gildea
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The riotous, raucous, and deeply resonant debut novel from “one of the best story writers in the English language today” (Financial Times), Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry.
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Insider look at a small crime
- By Probably did on 03-24-24
By: Colin Barrett
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The Hunters
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld, Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A Simple Tale is the moving account of Maria Poniatowski, an aging Ukrainian woman who was taken by the Germans for slave labor and eventually relocated to Canada as a displaced person. She struggles to provide her son, Radek, with every opportunity, but his eventual success increases the gulf between him and his mother. The Hunters, the second novella, is narrated by an American academic spending a summer in London who grows obsessed with the neighbors downstairs.
By: Claire Messud
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Playground
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Robin Siegerman, Eunice Wong, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
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What a tremendous story
- By Deb Hatch on 11-08-24
By: Richard Powers
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Headshot
- A Novel
- By: Rita Bullwinkel
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country.
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Wonderful Narrator
- By love it on 08-09-24
By: Rita Bullwinkel
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I Heard Her Call My Name
- A Memoir of Transition
- By: Lucy Sante
- Narrated by: Lucy Sante
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.
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I'm so glad I read this book
- By Judy in Salt Lake on 03-09-25
By: Lucy Sante
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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
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The Hypocrite
- A Novel
- By: Jo Hamya
- Narrated by: Claire Kinson
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them.
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Consistently boring
- By lifelong learner on 10-09-24
By: Jo Hamya
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Reboot
- A Novel
- By: Justin Taylor
- Narrated by: Justin Taylor
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, part-time alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.
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Diminishing Rewards
- By Laurence R. Baker on 02-06-25
By: Justin Taylor
Beautifully written. Needed editing.
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Lots of characters
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Deep exploration of character; interesting historic backdrop
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Achingly beautiful
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accents drove me nuts
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7 ages of man
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Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
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Riveting , Elegiac, perfectly Evocative
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Great performance, boring story
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good book awful reading
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