Ripe
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Laurel Lefkow
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By:
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Sarah Rose Etter
About this listen
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of 2023 by Time, Huffington Post, Kirkus, and more * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Roxane Gay Audacious Book Club Selection * A Marie Claire Book Club Pick
A surreal novel with “a dark, delicious edge” (Time) about a woman in Silicon Valley who must decide how much she’s willing to give up for success—from an award-winning writer whose work Roxane Gay calls “utterly unique and remarkable.”
A year into her dream job at a cutthroat Silicon Valley start-up, Cassie finds herself trapped in a corporate nightmare. Between the long hours, toxic bosses, and unethical projects, she also struggles to reconcile the glittering promise of a city where obscene wealth lives alongside abject poverty and suffering. Ivy League grads complain about the snack selection from a conference room with a view of unhoused people bathing in the bay. Start-up burnouts leap into the paths of commuter trains, and men literally set themselves on fire in the streets.
Though isolated, Cassie is never alone. From her earliest memory, a miniature black hole has been her constant companion. It feeds on her depression and anxiety, growing or shrinking in relation to her distress. The black hole watches, but it also waits. Its relentless pull draws Cassie ever closer as the world around her unravels.
When she ends up unexpectedly pregnant at the same time her CEO’s demands cross into illegal territory, Cassie must decide whether the tempting fruits of Silicon Valley are really worth it. Sharp but vulnerable, unsettling yet darkly comic, Ripe portrays one millennial woman’s journey through our late-capitalist hellscape and offers a brilliantly incisive look at the absurdities of modern life.
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Ava Simon designs storage boxes for STÄDA, a slick Brooklyn-based furniture company. She’s hard-working, obsessive, and heartbroken from a tragedy that killed her girlfriend and upended her life. It’s been years since she’s let anyone in. But when Ava’s new boss—the young and magnetic Mat Putnam—offers Ava a ride home one afternoon, an unlikely relationship blossoms. Ava remembers how rewarding it can be to open up—and, despite her instincts, she becomes enamored. But Mat isn’t who he claims to be, and the romance takes a sharp turn.
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a fun, quirky story
- By Barbara S on 09-02-21
By: Eve Gleichman, and others
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Lakewood
- A Novel
- By: Megan Giddings
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
When Lena Johnson’s beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the Black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan. On paper, her new job is too good to be true. High paying. No out of pocket medical expenses. A free place to live. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program - and lie to her friends and family about the research being done in Lakewood.
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Fact or Fiction
- By Penda K on 06-09-20
By: Megan Giddings
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Lifted by the Great Nothing
- By: Karim Dimechkie
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Max doesn't remember his mother, who was murdered by burglars before they emigrated from Beirut to New Jersey. He lives with his father, Rasheed, who is enamored of his concept of American culture - baseball and barbeques - and tries to shed his Lebanese heritage completely.
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Excellent
- By Cheyenne on 06-13-15
By: Karim Dimechkie
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The Opposite of Loneliness
- Essays and Stories
- By: Marina Keegan
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.
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Probably buy the book too.
- By Soupergirl on 09-14-15
By: Marina Keegan
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A Good Country
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- By: Laleh Khadivi
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A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California - about where identity truly lies, and how we find it. Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Reza Courdee, a 14-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner.
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A very important contribution
- By Mia on 05-29-17
By: Laleh Khadivi
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If I Forget You
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Overall
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Twenty-one years after they were driven apart by circumstances beyond their control, two former lovers have a chance encounter on a Manhattan street. What follows is a tense, suspenseful exploration of the many facets of enduring love. Told from alternating points of view through time, If I Forget You tells the story of Henry Gold, a poet whose rise from poverty embodies the American dream, and Margot Fuller, the daughter of a prominent, wealthy family, and their unlikely, star-crossed love affair.
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Good, but not great.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-01-16
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No idea what was happening at any time
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Broder is the perfect narrator!
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Eve has an adoring girlfriend, an impulsive streak, and a secret fear that she’s wasting her brief youth with just one person. So one evening she posts some nudes online. This is how Eve meets Olivia, and through Olivia the charismatic Nathan. Despite her better instincts, the three soon begin a relationship—one that disturbs Eve as much as it enthralls her.
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What a fun romp!
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Not exactly what I expected….
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Millie, 30, just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization of just how hollow that vision has become.
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Little Marek, the abused and delusional son of the village shepherd, believes his mother died giving birth to him. One of Marek’s few consolations is his enduring bond with the blind village midwife, Ina, who suckled him when he was a baby. For some people, Ina’s ability to receive transmissions of sacred knowledge from the natural world is a godsend. For others, Ina’s home in the woods is a godless place.
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uncomfortable
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Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss.
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12/10
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On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls. Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
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she did it again!
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Alternating between the two women’s perspectives, Fruit of the Dead incorporates its mythic inspiration with a light touch and devastating precision. The result is a tale that explores love, control, obliteration, and America’s late-capitalist mythos. Lyon’s reinvention of Persephone and Demeter’s story makes for a haunting, electric novel that readers will not soon forget.
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Imaginative and Beautiful Reimagining
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Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.
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Revelation through Food
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
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Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate; she works an easy job at a hip art gallery and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
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I love it...
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What listeners say about Ripe
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Annamm.
- 07-25-23
EG Pomogrates and black holes
I did like this book, but I am confused. All the metaphors and then the ending that didn’t conclude any of them? Pls someone, EG is what? I must have missed something…
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- Mildred Enriquez
- 08-09-23
Gloomy book about choices and values
I liked this book because it was realistic with the feelings young women encounter working in high pressure work environments. I liked the definitions at the beginning of every chapter because I feel like the set the stage in an artful sU that makes you think. I also liked the odd relationship the main character was in because it was clearly not the best choice for her, but she stayed in it anyway because it was the easy choice. This book held up a mirror to our American way of life and some values we hold as important that don't always serve us. Plus it shines a light on corporate ethics and how what they say on corporate mission statements is not usually how they run their business.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Karen
- 07-21-23
Intense and insightful
Dispels all the glamour of the tech world and San Francisco. Unique writing style. Definitely worth the read, but difficult.
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- Jody travis thompson
- 02-18-24
Awful story
So annoyed 3/4 of the way through that I ended up fast forwarding to the end just to confirm that the tediousness finished.
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- Alexis_Vandew
- 08-18-23
EG, Sorry to say it doesn't get any better
The best part of this book was when it ended so I could move on to something else. I struggled with the main character from the beginning. I wanted to sympathize with her depression but she was just so awful. Her views of everyone and everything made her come off pretensious. Her constant poor choices and lack of doing anything to change her situation were agitating.
There were glimmers of hope for this book, but they were short-lived and buried by the constant "eg" and "black hole" metaphor. Both of which were extremely distracting and irritating. I found myself rolling my eyes and sighing every time either of them were mentioned, and they were mentioned every couple minutes.
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- Cynthia
- 09-08-23
Ghastly
If you're miserable and you want company, this book's for you. The only reason I finished it was that I kept thinking that it would have at least one redeeming feature. But no.
Boring, repetitive writing. Zero character development. No transformation, no change, not even a zombie to spice things up. Move on.
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- Shayla Williams
- 07-18-23
Difficult to rate this.
The chapters start. Definition. Every time. And then E.G. some idea that may or may not be profound but E.G. by the time my focus is back on the narrative E.G. the story has moved on, and then goes like a normal story for a while, so I start to get into it again and then out of nowhere E.G. there's this stop and I am wondering why E.G. is popping up all the time E.G. as if the author is trying to drive me as crazy as her character. It's a lot easier to ignore E.G. when your eyes are going over text, but the poor narrator has probably had to read the letters E.G. so many times while recording this book that I would not blame her for stabbing anyone she knows with those initials if she ever has a mental health crisis.
I would give the narrator the benefit of the doubt here, except that she was so quiet at maximum volume that I still needed to be in a silent room to hear much of the story.
The premise is interesting. The character is interesting. The societal commentary is interesting. Even the definitions at the start of the chapters were interesting. The plot had almost no forward motion whatsoever, and the enraging overuse of E.G. killed what little there was.
This might be a decent book in print, but was the WORST audiobook experience I have had in years.
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- Anonymous User
- 10-27-23
So what was the black hole anyway?
I live in SF but moved here after I retired! She was lucky she lived in a pro choice state! Her first mistake was choosing a dick for her FWB! Talking to her after it was aborted and about a store she took him to that he in turn took his gf to was the last straw! She tried to please everyone but in the end pleased no I hated the ending! one including herself!
Got it — the black hole was her life!
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