The Granddaughter
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Richard Burnip
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Sarah Moule
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By:
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Bernhard Schlink
About this listen
“Compelling . . . unfailingly interesting, building suspense as readers wonder what will happen” —Booklist (starred review)
“[A] powerful story of loss and the desire to move forward.” —Publishers Weekly
From the bestselling author of The Reader, a striking exploration of the past, told through the story of a German bookseller’s attempt to connect with his radicalized granddaughter.
It is only after the sudden death of his wife, Birgit, that Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier when she fled East Germany to join him: she had to abandon her baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes up his bookshop in present day Berlin and sets off to find her lost child in the east.
His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, intent on reclaiming and settling ancestral lands to the East. Among them, Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. His granddaughter? Their worlds could not be more different— an ideological gulf of mistrust yawns between them— but he is determined to accept her as his own.
More than twenty-five years after The Reader, Bernhard Schlink once again offers a masterfully gripping novel that powerfully probes the past’s role in contemporary life, transporting us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to modern day Australia, and asking what unites or separates us.
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
©2025 Bernhard Schlink (P)2025 HarperCollins PublishersRelated to this topic
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Story
In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples.
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Middling
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-24
By: Josephine Quinn
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Gabriel's Moon
- A Novel
- By: William Boyd
- Narrated by: George Blagden
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Gabriel Dax is a young man haunted by the memories of a fire that took his mother’s life. Every night, when sleep finally comes, he dreams about his childhood home in flames. His days are spent on the move as an acclaimed travel writer, capturing the changing landscapes of Europe in the grip of the Cold War. When he is offered the chance to interview Patrice Lumumba, newly elected president of the People’s Republic of the Congo, he finds himself drawn into a web of duplicities and betrayals.
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One of the best Boyd storylines, but...
- By WKB on 12-19-24
By: William Boyd
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The Art of Uncertainty
- How to Live in the Mystery of Life and Love It
- By: Dennis Merritt Jones
- Narrated by: Tim Andres Pabon
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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What if we could learn to accept I don't know and embrace the possibility that the future is full of mystery, excitement, and unlimited opportunity? The Art of Uncertainty is an invitation to the listener to consider its essential message: learning to love the unknown by staying present in the moment....The only thing we can control is our next thought. What if we could learn how to be at peace with uncertainty and embrace the possibility that the future is full of mystery, excitement, and unlimited opportunity?
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love love love!!!
- By Tramani on 03-08-15
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Dark Wire
- The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever
- By: Joseph Cox
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in 2018, a powerful app for secure communications, called Anom, began to take root among drug dealers and other criminals. It had extraordinary safeguards to keep out prying eyes--the power to quickly wipe data, voice-masking technology, and more. It was better than other apps popular among organized crime syndicates, except for one thing: it was secretly run by law enforcement. Over the next few years, the FBI, along with law enforcement partners in Australia and parts of Europe, got a front row seat to the global criminal underworld.
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Amazing story
- By Katie W. on 06-08-24
By: Joseph Cox
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Kingmaker
- Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue
- By: Sonia Purnell
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 16 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pamela Churchill Harriman died in 1997, the obituaries that followed were predictably scathing–and many were downright sexist. Written off as a mere courtesan and social climber, her true legacy was overshadowed by a glamorous social life and her infamous erotic adventures. Much of what she did behind the scenes–on both sides of the Atlantic–remained invisible and secret. That is, until now: with a wealth of fresh research, interviews and newly discovered sources, Sonia Purnell unveils for the first time the full, spectacular story of how she left an indelible mark on the world today.
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Tediously boring
- By Elizabeth von Kessler on 10-12-24
By: Sonia Purnell
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The Invention of Good and Evil
- A World History of Morality
- By: Hanno Sauer
- Narrated by: Callum Coates
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.
By: Hanno Sauer
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The Empusium
- A Health Resort Horror Story
- By: Olga Tokarczuk
- Narrated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Natasha Soudek
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world.
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Never ending Misogyny
- By Nina O on 10-11-24
By: Olga Tokarczuk
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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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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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Medieval Horizons
- Why the Middle Ages Matter
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: Ian Mortimer
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.
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Altered my perception of History
- By IowaGreyhound on 06-25-24
By: Ian Mortimer
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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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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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The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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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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The City and Its Uncertain Walls
- A Novel
- By: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel - translator
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life. Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world—a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves.
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Easily One of His Best, Maybe Even the Best
- By Buddy Lamorey on 11-24-24
By: Haruki Murakami, and others