Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Freud's Sister cover art

Freud's Sister

By: Goce Smilevski, Christina E. Kramer - translator
Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

I Will Have Vengeance cover art
A Hundred Flowers cover art
Music of the Ghosts cover art
Pig's Foot cover art
The Garden of Letters cover art
Follow Your Heart cover art
Broken Angels cover art
A Well-Tempered Heart cover art
The House by the River cover art
Three Daughters cover art
The Fires of Autumn cover art
Mornings in Jenin cover art
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats cover art
Tuscan Rose cover art
The Blue Between Sky and Water cover art
Judas cover art

Summary

The award-winning international sensation that poses the question: Was Sigmund Freud responsible for the death of his sister in a Nazi concentration camp?

The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund.

Vienna, 1938: With the Nazis closing in, Sigmund Freud is granted an exit visa and allowed to list the names of people to take with him. He lists his doctor and maids, his dog, and his wife's sister, but not any of his own sisters. The four Freud sisters are shuttled to the Terezín concentration camp, while their brother lives out his last days in London.

Based on a true story, this searing novel gives haunting voice to Freud's sister Adolfina - "the sweetest and best of my sisters" - a gifted, sensitive woman who was spurned by her mother and never married. A witness to her brother's genius and to the cultural and artistic splendor of Vienna in the early 20th century, she aspired to a life few women of her time could attain.

From Adolfina's closeness with her brother in childhood, to her love for a fellow student, to her time with Gustav Klimt's sister in a Vienna psychiatric hospital, to her dream of one day living in Venice and having a family, Freud's Sister imagines with astonishing insight and deep feeling the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history.

©2012 Goce Smilevski (P)2012 Penguin Audiobooks

Critic reviews

“Stunning... Bold and unexpected... It dares to provide a kind of shadow biography of Freud that is highly critical of the ‘great man.’... Sure to be provocative.” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books)

Freud’s Sister is that rare artistic achievement that is more than the sum of its parts - informative but also wise, insightful and deeply moving.... Like Tolstoy, Smilevski chooses to use simple words, but to connect them eloquently so that they build to create powerful and complex images, ideas and feelings.... [A] heart-breaking book.” (The Jewish Daily Forward)

“Startling and daring... A book that is ultimately less a Holocaust novel than a celebration of the subtlety and complexity of what comprises every human life... [Adolfina] is gifted with acute perception, deep insight and a grand eloquence, all of which is on rich display through this remarkable book.” (The Jewish Journal)

What listeners say about Freud's Sister

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 2.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 2.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Story
  • 2 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.