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All the Little Live Things

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About this listen

Joe Allston, the retired literary agent in Stegner’s National Book Award-winning novel The Spectator Bird, returns in this disquieting and keenly observed novel.

Scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s, Allston and his wife, Ruth, have left the coast for a California retreat. And although their new home looks like Eden, it also has its serpents: Jim Peck, a messianic exponent of drugs, yoga, and sex, and Marian Catlin, an attractive young woman whose otherwordly innocence is far more appealing—and far more dangerous.

©1967 Wallace Stegner (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Fiction

Critic reviews

“Timely and timeless....Will hold any reader to its last haunting page.” ( Chicago Tribune)
“A novel of crackling vividness.” ( New York Times Book Review)
All stars
Most relevant
I love the book so much…it powerfully resonated with me, so beautifully read too.

Absolutely heartbreaking but brilliant

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These Audible readings by Edward Herrmann of the brilliant Wallace Stegner have been some of the most rewarding audiobooks I’ve listened to in hundreds of hours of audio. A superb actor voicing the sharp and subtle, cadenced writing of one of California’s greatest writers of the 20th c. Stegner should be much better known than he is. His evocations of a past, semi-rural California are so precise. Highly recommend the predecessor to this, the Spectator Bird, though the two novels stand alone and you needn’t read one before the other. Angle of Repose is one of his masterpieces and also recommended. His non fiction is excellent too.

Bittersweet story beautifully read

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Not a bad book but not for me.

Even at double speed it took me 3 or 4 times as long to finish it than it should have. I found myself almost dreading turning it on.
It's just so very, very BORING!!

I didn't care whatsoever about any of the characters - not the grumpy, sardonic main character nor the supposedly vivacious neighbour ("supposedly" because we're told she is but we don't really see much evidence of it for ourselves).

The problem for me is that while there were a few moments where the language was quite poignant and beautiful, most of the time I found it to be contrived and affected.
Even with the subject matter at hand - something that should really pull on heart strings, it manages to be just massively dull, uninspired and wholly impersonal.
I was constantly aware of the author trying to sound genuine by using emotive and evocative language, but it just felt like exactly that - TRYING so hard to sound genuine rather than naturally being so.


All the Little Live Things

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