Motherless Brooklyn cover art

Motherless Brooklyn

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Motherless Brooklyn

By: Jonathan Lethem
Narrated by: Frank Muller
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £13.68

Buy Now for £13.68

Adolescent Lionel Essrog suffers from Tourette's Syndrome (an uncontrollable urge to shout out nonsense, touch every surface in reach, stroke people and rearrange their collars). He works, with three other orphans from St Vincent's Home for Boys, for the local tough guy and small time mobster Frank Minna.

Frank is preparing them to become the Minna Men, a fly-by-night detective agency and limousine service. When Frank is stabbed to death, Lionel's world is turned upside down. He attempts to become a real detective, while trying to articulate himself, and keep the words straight in his head as he delves into the complex, shadowy web of threats and favours that make up Frank Minna's Brooklyn... Crime Fiction Detective Modern Detectives Mystery Private Investigators Fiction Crime Suspense
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
Loved the story, but the reader has an annoying habit of delivering each sentence with a private detective-style inflection, and draws out the last word of each sentence in the same way every time.

Great book, lousy reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Honestly the reviews on here slamming the Brooklyn noir narration aren't fair. That's what the sample button's for, to try before you buy. For me, the narrator's Sin City esque Brooklyn drawl is part of the charm and adds to a brilliant book. But the best thing about it is the language. The word play and ticks of our tourettes syndrome suffering protagonist is like nothing I've heard before. And a stylistic, poignant and hilarious joy to boot.

This is great, and the narration makes it so

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The way this is read is so distracting you can’t actually concentrate on the story.

What a disappointment

Had to stop after a chapter because of the narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.