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- By: Margaret Atwood
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- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose.
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-
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The Heart Goes Last
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins
- Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Margaret Atwood puts the human heart to the ultimate test in an utterly brilliant new novel that is as visionary as The Handmaid's Tale and as richly imagined as The Blind Assassin. Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around - and fast.
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- By: Margaret Atwood
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Margaret Atwood's classic novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is about the future. Now, in Oryx and Crake, the future has changed: it's much worse. The narrator of this riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death.
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Great book, poor narrator.
- By jackie on 12-03-2017
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Calypso
- By: David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris' cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.
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Solid Sedaris. Hilarious late middle age memoir.
- By Anonymous User on 07-10-2018
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The Robber Bride
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 20 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is inspired by The Robber Bridegroom, a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic proportions, and sets her loose in the lives of three friends.
-
-
Fun, interesting read
- By Arena on 24-05-2016
-
Less
- By: Andrew Sean Greer
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Who says you can't run away from your problems? Arthur Less is a failed novelist about to turn 50. A wedding invitation arrives in the post: it is from an ex-boyfriend of nine years who is engaged to someone else. Arthur can't say yes - it would be too awkward; he can't say no - it would look like defeat. So, he begins to accept the invitations on his desk to half-baked literary events around the world. From France to India, Germany to Japan, Arthur almost falls in love, almost falls to his death, and puts miles between him and the plight he refuses to face.
-
-
Genuine greatness
- By John Alsop on 20-09-2018
Publisher's Summary
A collection of highly imaginative short pieces that speak to our times with deadly accuracy. Vintage Atwood creativity, intelligence, and humor: think Alias Grace. Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace. A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in Alphinland, the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists. In The Freeze-Dried Bridegroom, a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise. In Lusus Naturae, a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In Torching the Dusties, an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. And in Stone Mattress, a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.
This audiobook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
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- 10-08-2016
Bitter, bitter old age tales that sting
I love Margaret Atwood's work but lately she is putting out some tales that are so full of disappointment in the human condition it is hard to like them.
Three of the stories are connected through characters and the rest in despair and reflections on life from the view of older bitter people, the magical tale is not so magic All the sex is tainted in use and abuse and so is therefore the love we get to see, even brotherly or asexual love are presented as a form of resignation.
Perhaps is me, but I find that she confuses bitterness with satire. And when it is spread so thickly it distorts everything into bleakness.
The writing is good and the plots are interesting, but the negativity gives no place to enjoy even the revenges or the past memories of the characters that feel cheated and used by their past loves making all an exercise in desperation for older character that discover or are very aware of their mortal coil.
It is good reading if you like Margaret Atwood but with the caveat that it is not happy reading or life affirming.
7 of 13 people found this review helpful