The English Problem
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Vidish Athavale
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By:
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Beena Kamlani
About this listen
A young Indian man is tapped to help his country’s fight for freedom—but his heart engages him in a different war.
“Grand, sweeping, mesmerizing . . . a richly detailed, politically profound story of love, of migration, of individuals caught up in the great convulsions of history.”—Joseph O’Neill, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Godwin
Shiv Advani is an eighteen-year-old growing up in India. But he is no ordinary young man. Shiv has been personally chosen by Mahatma Gandhi to come to England, learn their laws, and then return home and help drive the British out of India. Before he leaves, his family insists he fulfill his arranged marriage, and he is hastily betrothed to a young woman he hardly knows.
He arrives in London and soon discovers a world he is both repelled by and drawn to. Shiv knows his duty: get in, learn the letter of the law, get out. But as anyone who has ever lived in a British colony can tell you, “the English Problem” is multifaceted. The racist colonialism of “the empire on which the sun never sets” seeps into everything—not just landed territories, but territories of the mind: literature, language, religion, sexuality, self-identity. Soon the people Shiv sought to be liberated from will be the people he desperately wants to be a part of. In the end, Shiv must fight not only for his country’s liberation but also his own.
Set against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement, with appearances by historical figures such as Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Mahatma Gandhi, The English Problem is so self-assured and ambitious, it is hard to believe it is a debut.
©2025 Beena Kamlani (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Kamlani’s story of one man’s odyssey of discovery contains extensive historical context. Replete with lyrical imagery of rivers, the saga confronts issues of racism, class disparities, parenthood, and sexual acceptance. . . . Kamlani’s ambitious debut packs an important dose of relevant history into a very human story.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A dynamic character portrait as well as a nuanced depiction of India’s struggles against British rule. It’s a triumph.”—Publishers Weekly
“[A]n assured work of historical fiction . . . Shiv, an engaging, torn, and complicated figure, centers Kamlani’s gripping and revealing account of London’s creative circle, the crimes of colonialism, and the slow march to India’s independence.”—Booklist
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By: Nnedi Okorafor
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All the Water in the World
- A Novel
- By: Eiren Caffall
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north.
By: Eiren Caffall
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The Heart of Winter
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Evison
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke were never meant to be together—at least if you ask Ruth. Yet their catastrophic blind date in college evolved into a seventy-year marriage and a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island with their hens and beloved Labrador, Megs. Through the years, the Winters have fallen in and out of lockstep, and from their haunting losses and guarded secrets, a dependable partnership has been forged.
By: Jonathan Evison
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Dirtbag Queen
- By: Andy Corren
- Narrated by: Andy Corren
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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“Because she was my mother, the death of zaftig good-time gal Renay Corren is newsworthy to me, and I treat it with the same respect and reverence she had for, well, nothing. A more disrespectful, trash talking woman was not to be found.” So began Andy Corren's unforgettable obituary for his mother, Renay Mandel Corren, in her hometown paper The Fayetteville Observer, a tribute that went on to touch the hearts of millions around the globe. In his brief telling of the life and legend that was Renay, Andy captured only a slice of his loving and fabulously unconventional mother.
By: Andy Corren
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How to Be Enough
- Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists
- By: Ellen Hendriksen
- Narrated by: Ellen Hendriksen
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Ellen Hendriksen—clinical psychologist, anxiety specialist, and author of How to Be Yourself—charts a flexible, forgiving, and freeing path, all without giving up the excellence your high standards and hard work have gotten you. She delivers seven shifts—including from self-criticism to kindness, control to authenticity, procrastination to productivity, comparison to contentment—to find self-acceptance, rewrite the Inner Rulebook, and most of all, cultivate the authentic human connections we’re all craving.
By: Ellen Hendriksen
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Lightfall: Book One of The Everlands
- The Everlands Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Ed Crocker
- Narrated by: Shakira Shute
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave. Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood.
By: Ed Crocker
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We Lived on the Horizon
- A Novel
- By: Erika Swyler
- Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Saint Enita Malovis feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data.
By: Erika Swyler
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The Sinners All Bow
- Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne
- By: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Narrated by: Kate Winkler Dawson
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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On a cold winter day in 1832, Sarah Maria Cornell was found dead in a quiet farmyard in a small New England town. When her troubled past and a secret correspondence with charismatic Methodist minister Reverend Ephraim Avery was uncovered, more questions emerged. Was Sarah’s death a suicide...or something much darker? Determined to uncover the real story, Victorian writer Catharine Read Arnold Williams threw herself into the investigation as the trial was unfolding and wrote what many claim to be the first American true-crime narrative, Fall River.