What Is Left the Daughter
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Narrated by:
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Bronson Pinchot
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By:
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Howard Norman
About this listen
Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country’s finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books—The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L—in this erotically charged and morally complex story.
Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges—the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.
Setting in motion the novel’s chain of life-altering passions, and the wartime perfidy at its core, is the arrival of German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents—including a German U-boat’s sinking of the Nova Scotia–Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling—lend intense narrative power to Norman’s uncannily layered story.
Wyatt’s account of the astonishing events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out 21 years later. It’s a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one.
An utterly stirring novel, this is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.
©2010 Howard Norman (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
On its surface, What Is Left the Daughter is a tight, small tale written as a single letter by protagonist Wyatt Hillyer to his estranged 21-year-old daughter but its outsize scope paints a picture of love and loss in wartime that belies author Howard Norman’s compact storytelling. In 1941 Nova Scotia, the teenage Wyatt’s aunt and uncle take him in after he loses both parents to separate suicides. As tragic as their deaths are, it’s the events that follow, recalled with heartbreaking detail in Wyatt’s missive, that gives the novel its emotional thrust.
Narrating the short book its 256 pages top out at a listening time of about seven hours is actor Bronson Pinchot, best known for playing loopy immigrant Balki Bartokomous on the 1980s sitcom Perfect Strangers. Here, Pinchot lends Wyatt a guileless, plaintive voice as he details life during World War II-era Canada, especially with his carpenter uncle, who obsessively papers the walls of his shed with news stories of German U-boat disasters, and his beautiful adopted cousin, Tilda, whose romance with a young German student divides their small town.
Given the novel’s epistolary structure, playing the melancholic Wyatt more or less one-note is a risk that pays off; Pinchot’s measured intonation reveals more about the character’s emotional inner life than would a more robust cadence. That said, the listener is hardly deprived of Pinchot’s talents, as Norman has populated his book with a wealth of quirky secondary characters that lets the actor utilize his knack for adopting accents (here, he has fun with Irish, German, and, of course, Canadian dialects). The result is a performance that lends an already excellent novel more beauty, more depth, and, if possible, more raw feeling. Jaime Buerger
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Story
Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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Secrets of a Charmed Life
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for decades...beginning with who she really is. What Kendra receives from Isabel is both a gift and a burden--one that will test her convictions and her heart.
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Rare 5-Star Across the Board!
- By Imamomof4 on 06-14-15
By: Susan Meissner
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Crewel World
- By: Monica Ferris
- Narrated by: Susan Boyce
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Betsy Devonshire arrived in Excelsior, Minnesota, all she wanted was to visit her sister Margot and get her life in order. She never dreamed her sister would give her a place to stay and a job at her needlecraft shop. In fact, things had never looked so good - until Margot was murdered. In a town this friendly, it's hard to imagine who could have committed such a horrible act, but Betsy has a few ideas. There's an ex-employee who wants to start her own needlework store. And there's the landlord who wanted Margot out. Now Betsy's putting together a list of motives and suspects....
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British style mystery set in America
- By Sara on 01-13-14
By: Monica Ferris
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They Left Us Everything
- A Memoir
- By: Plum Johnson
- Narrated by: Pilar Witherspoon
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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After almost 20 years of caring for elderly parents - first for their senile father and then for their cantankerous 93-year-old mother - author Plum Johnson and her three younger brothers have finally fallen to their middle-aged knees with conflicted feelings of grief and relief. Now they must empty and sell the beloved family home, 23 rooms bulging with history, antiques, and oxygen tanks. Plum thought, How tough will that be? I know how to buy garbage bags. But the task turns out to be much harder and more rewarding than she ever imagined.
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Thought provoking
- By Margaret on 05-02-17
By: Plum Johnson
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The Flight of Gemma Hardy
- A Novel
- By: Margot Livesey
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Fate has not been kind to Gemma Hardy. Orphaned then neglected, young Gemma seemed destined for a life of hardship and loneliness. Yet her bright spirit burns strong. Fiercely intelligent, singularly determined, Gemma overcomes each challenge and setback, growing stronger and more certain of her path. Now an independent young woman, she accepts a position as an au pair on the remote and beautiful Orkney Islands. But Gemma’s biggest trial is about to begin....
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f you loved Jane Eyre, you will like this novel.
- By Cecilia on 02-09-12
By: Margot Livesey
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After the Parade
- By: Lori Ostlund
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Sensitive, big-hearted, and achingly self-conscious, 40-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After 20 years under the Pygmalion-like direction of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to stop letting life happen to him and to take control of his own fate.
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Narrator
- By Barbara on 11-10-24
By: Lori Ostlund
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Goodnight from London
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Robson
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1940, ambitious young American journalist Ruby Sutton gets her big break: the chance to report on the European war as a staff writer for Picture Weekly newsmagazine in London. She jumps at the chance, for it's an opportunity not only to prove herself, but also to start fresh in a city and country that know nothing of her humble origins. But life in besieged Britain tests Ruby in ways she never imagined.
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Light story
- By Bev Holdgate on 08-10-17
By: Jennifer Robson
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The Map of True Places
- By: Brunonia Barry
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Zee Finch has come a long way from a motherless childhood spent stealing boats—a talent that earned her the nickname Trouble. She’s now a respected psychotherapist working with the world-famous Dr. Liz Mattei. She’s also about to marry one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors. But the suicide of Zee’s patient Lilly Braedon throws Zee into emotional chaos and takes her back to places she thought she’d left behind.
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Bad Narrator
- By Samantha on 06-30-10
By: Brunonia Barry
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The Sheep Queen
- By: Tom Savage
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
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Excellent in all respects
- By Marlene J. Gustafson on 05-11-19
By: Tom Savage
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Manhattans and Murder
- The Murder, She Wrote Mysteries, Book 2
- By: Jessica Fletcher, Donald Bain
- Narrated by: Beth Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Promoting her latest books brings best-selling mystery writer Jessica Fletcher to New York for Christmas. Her schedule includes book signings, chat-show appearances, department store shopping...and murder. But it all begins with a sidewalk Santa staring at Jessica with fear and recognition.
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A release of an older Donald Bain book in the series, thank goodness
- By Dorise on 02-01-19
By: Jessica Fletcher, and others
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The Hour I First Believed
- A Novel
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 25 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When high-school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family's Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.
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excellent all around yarn
- By G. on 01-10-09
By: Wally Lamb
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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Grief Cottage
- By: Gail Godwin
- Narrated by: Jacob York
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life.
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Character story or ghost story ?
- By RueRue on 12-18-17
By: Gail Godwin
What listeners say about What Is Left the Daughter
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Elizabeth
- 04-26-11
Loved it!
I loved this book. I never listen to books twice, but I think I may listen again. Never do I think of the narrator as a narrator - I think of him as a man writing a letter to his daughter. I loved the setting, the time and the characters. Wonderful dialogue that made me giggle out loud. I highly recommend it! (I wish there was a Part II.)
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Kristi Warriner
- 08-08-10
Good work by Bronson Pinchot
Bronson Pinchot, the narrator, shows how having a good actor, as opposed to a good reader, can bring much to a novel. He did a fantastic job with this. Great character development, interesting historical backdrop, and a decent plot add up to a good listen. The denouement was a bit overlong, but by then I liked the book so much I didn't care that it was hanging around a bit after it could've wrapped things up.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Bookmarque
- 08-24-15
An emotional novel with the power to surprise
A quiet story about a man trying to live with the circumstances of his life; some he's responsible for and others he's not. The daughter referred to in the title is his own, as the entire narrative is a letter to her, but she's not the only daughter with a less than perfect relationship with her father. Wyatt's story starts when his parents commit suicide by leaping from different bridges within hours of each other. Old enough to live on his own, he instead chooses to live with his aunt and uncle in a remote village in Nova Scotia. There he meets his cousin Tilda and falls in love.
Over the next decades there is a lot of loss, but also moments of satisfaction and serenity for Wyatt. The sled and toboggan business is so quaint and such an acquired skill that I think it's an excellent stand in for Wyatt's temperament. Given that he never really gets the girl, is sent to prison, made so uncomfortable at home that he leaves town and is estranged from his daughter, you'd think that would make for a bitter, angry person. Wyatt is sanguine though; accepting what he's done himself and what happens at the hands of others. Maybe that's what kept this from being a really emotional book for me; that Wyatt seemed so utterly controlled and unaffected. The story was told skillfully and had many surprises so I will seek out more by this author.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Elizabeth
- 08-05-10
Quiet, Yet Powerful
This novel starts slowly, building to a quiet, yet powerful climax of lives changed forever from a U-Boat's sinking of a local ferry. The author, Howard Noman, creates characters that move with authority in their own lives, and not once did I glimpse any authorial heavy hand in the plotlines--the author is invisible, as it should be.
We'd just been on vacation in that area of Canada, and I could envision all the places in the novel. But Norman's writing is so strong and vivid that a trip to our neighbors to the North is not necessary. I get a sense of the bakery, the living room, the series of hotels, the Halifax harbor as well as the library in this small Canadian town--all the settings well-drawn so the characters move easily in their own space.
I also gained an insight into that time in our collective histories: of how intimately we were all affected by World War II. But in this book, the large national experiences of war and loss reverberate with a sometimes touching, sometimes sad, yet ultimately uplifting intensity. I didn't want that last chapter to end, wanting to stay with the people of this place to see how they fared.
I heartily recommend this!
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Martha
- 12-09-10
Great Story, Great Narration
Bronson Pinchot does a great job with all the voices in the story which is compelling and surprising. I very much enjoyed this book.
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- Chrissie
- 10-10-12
Good, but not that memorable
Yes, I liked it, but I doubt if it leaves any lasting impression. I did learn a bit about Canadian German submarine warfare off the coast of Nova Scotia during WW2. This story is a letter of love and explanation from father to daughter. The daughter did not grow up with the father. The family situation is a puzzle that is unraveled so his daughter will better understand. Perfect narration by Bronson Pinchot. It sounds exactly as if the father were reading a letter he has written to his own daughter.
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- Loren Falls
- 01-16-12
Quiet Tragedy
What made the experience of listening to What Is Left the Daughter the most enjoyable?
The consistant personality of the first person narrator.
What was one of the most memorable moments of What Is Left the Daughter?
The surprising action at the uncle's house.
What about Bronson Pinchot’s performance did you like?
Consistant, unique, period voice, underlying suppression
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
Tragedy and passivity in WWII Novia Scotia
Any additional comments?
Was a little long at the end.
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Overall
- Teatime2
- 04-23-11
a little gem of a story
The depressing culture of a small Nova Scotia village is just one more quirky character in this short novel. All are interesting, although some more opaque than others.
Written as a letter from the main character to the daughter he hardly ever knew, it seems also an attempt to make some sense of a life lived mainly as a series of reactions to outside events, beginning with the suicides of his parents from different bridges on the same day and continuing through various other personal losses and disappointments, with a background of WWII activity and the quite interesting history of German U-boat presence in Canadian waters. It's a story of ordinary people, ordinary places but extraordinary events.
My main complaint concerning the writing was the irritating inclusion in the dialogue of so many "I said," "She said," "He saids." Probably the written word wouldn't have struck me so strongly. I felt at least 75% of these could have been edited out.
The narrator does a great job with the male roles but his female voices are awkward and distracting. I do believe this detracted from appreciation of the characters. Otherwise, his demeanor seemed quite appropriate for the character he was portraying.
In the end, the way I evaluate a book is to consider whether or not I was eager to keep reading. Yes, this story drew me in and was worth the time spent.
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- julie kadoshima
- 10-17-19
dry as burnt toast
I waited 7 hours for the story to get better and it did, when it ended. Droll as drying paint.
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