
Whale Fall
A Novel
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About this listen
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK • A stunning debut from an award-winning writer, about loss, isolation, folklore, and the joy and dissonance of finding oneself by exploring life outside one’s community
“Both blunt and exquisite . . . O’Connor’s excellent debut . . . is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude.”—Maggie Shipstead, New York Times Book Review
"Whale Fall is a powerful novel, written with a calm, luminous precision, each feeling rendered with chiseled care, the drama of island life unfolding with piercing emotional accuracy."—Colm Toibin, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island
In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.
The arrival of two English ethnographers who hope to study the island culture, then, feels like a boon to her—both a glimpse of life outside her community and a means of escape. The longer the ethnographers stay, the more she feels herself pulled towards them, reckoning with a sensual awakening inside herself, despite her misgivings that her community is being misconstrued and exoticized.
With shimmering prose tempered by sharp wit, Whale Fall tells the story of what happens when one person's ambitions threaten the fabric of a community, and what can happen when they are realized. O'Connor paints a portrait of a community and a woman on the precipice, forced to confront an outside world that seems to be closing in on them.
©2024 Elizabeth O'Connor (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and NPR
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
“Both blunt and exquisite . . . O’Connor’s excellent debut . . . is an example of precisely observed writing that makes a character’s specific existence glimmer with verisimilitude.”—Maggie Shipstead, New York Times Book Review
"Spare and bracing...O'Connor constructs her setting with precise, atmospheric detail that captures a world slowly being eroded....It all makes for a haunting and lucid exploration of the moments leading up to immense change."—NPR
“In Whale Fall, the landscape and its people speak together…By rejecting nostalgia but still foregrounding landscape, Whale Fall makes space for the more intimate, surreal ways that culture can relate to nature.”—The Nation
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Brain Damage
- By: Freida McFadden
- Narrated by: Megan Tusing
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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As Charly struggles to recover from her brain injury, she begins to realize that the events of that fateful night are trapped in the damaged right side of her brain. Now, she must put the jigsaw pieces together to discover the identity of the man who tried to kill her...before he finishes the job he started.
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Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
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The Answer Is No
- A Short Story
- By: Fredrik Backman, Elizabeth DeNoma - translator
- Narrated by: Stacy Gonzalez
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.
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Narrator doesn’t get Backman’s satire or rhythm
- By joey1603 on 12-01-24
By: Fredrik Backman, and others
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He Who Fights with Monsters 2
- A LitRPG Adventure (He Who Fights with Monsters, Book 2)
- By: Shirtaloon, Travis Deverell
- Narrated by: Heath Miller
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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But Jason Asano is settling into his new life. Now, a contest draws young elites to the city of Greenstone to compete for a grand prize. Jason must gather a band of companions if he is to stand a chance against the best the world has to offer. While the young adventurers are caught up in competition, the city leaders deal with revelations of betrayal as a vast and terrible enemy is revealed. Although Jason seems uninvolved, he has unknowingly crossed the enemy’s path before.
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Contrary to common reviews
- By Karen on 05-21-21
By: Shirtaloon, and others
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Say No More
- By: Caroline Overington
- Narrated by: Anna Skellern
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Original Recording
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Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.
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Seriously, that was the ending?
- By alicia in athens on 02-13-25
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The Mystery of Mrs. Christie
- A Novel
- By: Marie Benedict
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In December 1926, Agatha Christie goes missing. Investigators find her empty car on the edge of a deep, gloomy pond, the only clues some tire tracks nearby and a fur coat left in the car - strange for a frigid night. Her World War I veteran husband and her daughter have no knowledge of her whereabouts, and England unleashes an unprecedented manhunt to find the up-and-coming mystery author. Eleven days later, she reappears, just as mysteriously as she disappeared, claiming amnesia and providing no explanations for her time away.
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I don’t think they had iPads in 1926
- By Sydney Castro on 12-29-20
By: Marie Benedict
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The House on the Water
- A Novella
- By: Margot Hunt
- Narrated by: Taylor Schilling
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
- Original Recording
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Every year, Caroline Reed takes a trip with her best friend, Esme Lamont. They’re usually accompanied by their spouses - but this year, everything’s changed. Esme has just gone through a bitter divorce, and Caroline's wondering if her own marriage is reaching its breaking point as she and her husband, John, cope with the discovery that their son has been abusing drugs. Still, the inseparable duo books a weeklong stay at a beach-front home in Shoreham, Florida, inviting Esme’s brother, Nick, and his new husband. After a blissful first night in the vacation home, tragedy strikes.
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Wonderful Story
- By David M. Wilcox on 12-04-20
By: Margot Hunt
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The Great Gatsby
- By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Narrated by: Jake Gyllenhaal
- Length: 4 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel of the Roaring Twenties is beloved by generations of readers and stands as his crowning work. This new audio edition, authorized by the Fitzgerald estate, is narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Jake Gyllenhaal (Brokeback Mountain). Gyllenhaal's performance is a faithful delivery in the voice of Nick Carraway, the Midwesterner turned New York bond salesman, who rents a small house next door to the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby....
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Simple, Beautiful, and Exquisitely Textured
- By Darwin8u on 04-09-13
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Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it. Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her.
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John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.
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Yes, Another Island Book
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In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
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Bored voice
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Whalefall
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Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year.
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Thin and mislabeled
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The Transit of Venus
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Caro, gallant and adventurous, has been courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other's lives, love, death, and two secrets wait in ambush for them.
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Held
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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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Would give six stars if possible
- By love it on 08-31-24
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The Road from Belhaven
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Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it. Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her.
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Historical cultural context
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Clear
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John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.
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Yes, Another Island Book
- By Kate Juliff on 11-10-24
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Health and Safety
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In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
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Bored voice
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Whalefall
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Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. He knows it’s a long shot, but Jay feels it’s the only way for him to lift the weight of guilt he has carried since his dad’s death by suicide the previous year.
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Thin and mislabeled
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The Transit of Venus
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Caro, gallant and adventurous, has been courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other's lives, love, death, and two secrets wait in ambush for them.
By: Shirley Hazzard
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Held
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- By: Anne Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Michaels
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
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Overall
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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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Would give six stars if possible
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You Dreamed of Empires
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One morning in 1519, conquistador Hernán Cortés enters the city of Tenochtitlan – today's Mexico City. Later that day, he will meet the emperor Moctezuma in a collision of two worlds, two empires, two languages, two possible futures.
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Confusing and Difficult to Understand
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Good Material
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Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy. And he can't work out why she stopped. Now he is. . . Without a home Waiting for his stand-up career to take off Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn't looking. Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of his ruined relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him. But Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend's side of the story…
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not what I expected
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David Crader is a has-been. A former child actor from the hit teen drama Rev Beach, he now rotates between his new roles as deadbeat dad, part-time alcoholic, and occasional videogame voice actor. But when David is summoned to Los Angeles by Grace, his ex-wife and former co-star, he suddenly sees an opportunity for a reboot—not just of the show that made him famous, but also of his listless existence.
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Diminishing Rewards
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The Wide Wide Sea
- Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
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On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment? Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration.
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Detailed story of third voyage
- By Sammi on 04-18-24
By: Hampton Sides
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Rejection
- Fiction
- By: Tony Tulathimutte
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- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
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Trigger warning for one chapter, otherwise really creative
- By Amazon Customer on 10-06-24
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The Safekeep
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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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Beautiful. Unexpected.
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Burma Sahib
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing all of this while grappling with his own self-worth, his sense that he was not cut out for this, is soon overwhelming for the young Blair.
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Glorious writing
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By: Paul Theroux
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Wild Houses
- By: Colin Barrett
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The riotous, raucous, and deeply resonant debut novel from “one of the best story writers in the English language today” (Financial Times), Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry.
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Insider look at a small crime
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Enlightenment
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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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Oddly uncompelling
- By mary on 06-16-24
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The Coast Road
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set in 1994, The Coast Road tells the story of two women—Izzy Keaveney, a housewife, and Colette Crowley, a poet. Colette has left her husband and sons for a married man in Dublin. When she returns to her home in County Donegal to try to pick up the pieces of her old life, her husband, Shaun, a successful businessman, denies her access to her children.
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Fabulous
- By Suzanna on 06-13-24
By: Alan Murrin
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Piglet
- A Novel
- By: Lottie Hazell
- Narrated by: Rebekah Hinds
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
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
- By M.A. on 10-07-24
By: Lottie Hazell
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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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Not ideal as an audiobook
- By Kate Liburdi on 04-09-25
By: Dinaw Mengestu
What listeners say about Whale Fall
Highly rated for:
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Roxanne
- 03-29-25
beautiful
Lyrical. Enchanting. Beautiful writing. Narration: Amazing to hear Welsh spoken. This was a rare treat. I enjoyed hearing the tale of ethnographic field work from the perspective of the “other”
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- Hawaiian 54
- 12-16-24
The rhythm of the language matched the storytelling.
The presumption of the mainland researcher telling the main character who she (island dweller) was, what she should do, what she believed, wanted and needed all the while being angry for her need for attention and affection was pretty galling-but unfortunately not unusual when an « elevated » culture meets another they consider less so.
The writing was beautiful, the characters richly described, a very good listrn.
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- Patrick Baeringer
- 01-09-25
Beautiful, Dreary, and Real
I think this was a wonderful novella to listen to, if a bummer. Having an VA who seems to have known Welsh was certainly a benefit!
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- Ninip
- 12-15-24
Unusual, powerful story
The setting of this story, on a small island off Wales in 1938, is fascinating. There are only about 35 or 40 inhabitants, and they lead a spare life, out of date with the mainland. The main character, Manod, is so beautifully and elegantly presented to us. I read this on paper first, but I was enchanted by the Audible version. Hearing all the different voices in Welsh was wonderful, and the narrator’s voice is exactly right. It’s not often that I read a book and then want to reread it (in this case, listen to it) immediately. But this book is extraordinary.
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1 person found this helpful
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- SH
- 08-07-24
Loss of innocence and disillusionment beautifully told
I wouldn’t recommend any other format for this story because the narration brings the Welsh names and songs to life. Beautifully done. Though we could see what the future held for Manod before she did, the way the author wove her loss of innocence and the disillusionment she ultimately experienced from meeting and trusting outsiders with the practices and principles of the islanders was very engaging.
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1 person found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Laura M
- 06-26-24
Compelling story, superbly performed
The performance of this novel is a real work of art. It’s so impressive. The novel itself is beautifully told, with very impactful imagery of the landscape. The way tension is built is subtle and gorgeous. I love that the island life is lamented but not idealized.
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- ROJ
- 08-01-24
Poetic and Musical
Lovely Welsh accents, intriguing historical fiction if a small island and folk ways of life.
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- Lauren Goodsmith
- 01-29-25
Outstanding-- lyrical and evocative
I had planned to read this even before it was identified in the New York Times Book Review as one of the best audiobooks of 2024. I found it striking and original in every regard: the unique and evocative setting; the compelling central figure of Manod, the young woman born and bred on the island, yet imagining a life beyond its shores; the lyrical prose; and the outstanding vocal performances. Highly recommended.
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- Letizia P.
- 09-22-24
Fabulous narration!
Wonderful, atmospheric short novel brought to life by perfect narration! I particularly enjoyed the pronunciation of Welsh and also the singing.
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- S. Blakely
- 07-30-24
Short but powerful
This is one I will revisit again and again. The prose is spare and understated, but the impact is huge. I’m so glad I gave it a chance. Highly recommended.
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