Orbital
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Narrated by:
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Sarah Naudi
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By:
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Samantha Harvey
About this listen
A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space—not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.
Profound, contemplative, and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.
©2023 Samantha Harvey (P)2023 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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- A Novel
- By: Anne Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Michaels
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
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Slow slow pace
- By Hawaiian 54 on 12-28-24
By: Anne Michaels
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In Ascension
- By: Martin MacInnes
- Narrated by: Freya Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
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In few words: Amelie stumbles into Interstellar
- By Scott on 01-07-25
By: Martin MacInnes
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Couldn’t stick with - just too annoying
- By elizabeth on 11-22-24
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Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth.
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I did not enjoy this
- By MarcB on 09-17-24
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Like reading a stranger’s diary
- By Christopher on 12-30-24
By: Aysegül Savas
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Growth
- A History and a Reckoning
- By: Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: Daniel Susskind
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities, and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
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Looking for a conclusion that will sell books
- By DCS on 10-05-24
By: Daniel Susskind
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Held
- A Novel
- By: Anne Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Michaels
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
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Slow slow pace
- By Hawaiian 54 on 12-28-24
By: Anne Michaels
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In Ascension
- By: Martin MacInnes
- Narrated by: Freya Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth's first life forms—what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
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In few words: Amelie stumbles into Interstellar
- By Scott on 01-07-25
By: Martin MacInnes
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The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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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Couldn’t stick with - just too annoying
- By elizabeth on 11-22-24
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Someone Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Junior Nyong'o
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
After abandoning his once-promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Hannah—a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Hannah on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington, DC, that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel, the larger-than-life father figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as a cover for a harder, more troubling truth.
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I did not enjoy this
- By MarcB on 09-17-24
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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The Anthropologists
- By: Aysegül Savas
- Narrated by: Kathryn Aboya
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you’re filming a park.”
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Like reading a stranger’s diary
- By Christopher on 12-30-24
By: Aysegül Savas
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Growth
- A History and a Reckoning
- By: Daniel Susskind
- Narrated by: Daniel Susskind
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Yet prosperity has come at a price: environmental destruction, desolation of local cultures, the rise of vast inequalities, and destabilizing technologies. Faced with such damage, many now claim that the only way forward is through "degrowth," deliberately shrinking our economic footprint. Instead, Daniel Susskind argues, we must keep growth but redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value.
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Looking for a conclusion that will sell books
- By DCS on 10-05-24
By: Daniel Susskind
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The Shapeless Unease
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Samantha Harvey
- Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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The Shapeless Unease is Harvey's darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death, and the will to survive, from "this generation's Virginia Woolf" (Telegraph).
By: Samantha Harvey
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Stone Yard Devotional
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
By: Charlotte Wood
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Station Breaker
- Station Breaker Series, Book 1
- By: Andrew Mayne
- Narrated by: Kyle McCarley
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Astronaut David Dixon's first mission to space goes horribly awry when a gunfight breaks out on a Russian space station. He finds himself making an emergency landing from orbit and becomes the most wanted man on Earth. Desperate to unravel the plot he's found himself in, he takes his pursuers on a wild chase from space to the backstreets of Rio and beyond. Dixon's survival relies on his skills as a pilot and willingness to do whatever it takes.
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Good story, but frustrating
- By Fred G on 12-21-17
By: Andrew Mayne
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Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
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Painfully powerful Tale.
- By Tom on 01-30-24
By: Paul Lynch
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The Wilderness
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early sixties, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past, for Jake has Alzheimer's.
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Beautifully written and narrated
- By Kim on 01-13-11
By: Samantha Harvey
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My Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is miles away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change.
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A beautiful book
- By Vly Summit on 05-19-24
By: Hisham Matar
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Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.
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One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
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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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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Brilliant!
- By paperguy on 11-20-24
By: Richard Powers
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Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
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A deep dive into the culture and beliefs of people in Appalachia
- By Tall Dr Ruth on 01-04-25
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Enlightenment
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London.
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So lost
- By Kindle Customer on 07-13-24
By: Sarah Perry
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Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
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Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
What listeners say about Orbital
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- Lynn
- 12-13-24
a meditation more than a novel
The writing is quite lyrical and evocative, but there's essentially no plot and only sketches of characters. Really disliked the wispy-voiced narration style. Recording seems to have some technical issues where the sound fades in and out as if the reader was shifting in her seat.
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- cms
- 12-20-24
Wonderful
Beautiful language, spectacular imagery, deeply human. Lovely voice too. Was disappointed when it ended, looking forward to more from the author.
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- BOYD C MYERS
- 01-01-25
One Day
An immersive journey above our orb. Visions, dreams, fears, big picture, spacial expanse, sine waves of travel from a dimension few experience. I’m glad someone suggested I buy a ticket. I too will encourage others. Thank you Samantha for knitting the words to paint a video immersion!
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Performance
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- kimberly childs
- 12-03-24
Perspective of inner and outer space
Fascinating exploration of what astronauts must experience as they hurtle around the earth. Shifting perspectives on many levels that broadened me out of my usual limits.
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Performance
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- Jessica
- 12-06-24
The poetry
I loved the thought provoking imagery and the beautiful way in which the story was told.
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- NW Native
- 12-03-24
One of the most beautiful novels ever.
Profoundly poetic and inspiring. Stunning prose. This and All the Beautiful Horses may be my all time favorites.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
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- Aranesan
- 10-09-24
A short delight
Harvey uses the trajectory of an orbiting space station experiencing an unearthly sixteen sunrises in a single day as it traverses around the planet to trace out the apparent plotlessness of human life on spaceship earth as we float in space.
Within this framework she focuses the lenses wide and long as we take in the whole world, micro to macro, the progress of humankind, the evolution of life and the universe and the oneness we should feel being in this rather lonely universe.
This was a short delight.
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- Darlene Chalker
- 12-12-24
Lyrical narration
Poetic, lyrical, profound descriptions of life on the space station as the astronauts experience multiple days and nights on earth as they speed around the planet over and over. We are given a tour of the earth through sunrises and sunsets and their connections to earth which are both grounding and mystical.
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- Hawaiian 54
- 12-10-24
The remive from emotion the speaker gives as the story progresses.
So dry.
So far removed from joy and beauty.
Interesting but felt very clinical.
Good attempt at multinational representation but still-very dry.
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- Kent Sturcken
- 12-02-24
A fine blend of prose and poetry
A wonderful voyage through the void. The blend of pros and poetry was really something unique. Not a lot of action.
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