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Putney
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From the attic of a dilapidated English country house, she sees them - Cara first: dark and beautiful, clinging to a marble fountain of Cupid, and Peter, an Apollo. It is 1969, and they are spending the summer in the rooms below hers while Frances writes a report on the follies in the garden for the absent American owner. But she is distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she discovers a peephole which gives her access to her neighbours' private lives.
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Brilliant slow burner.
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Ordinary People
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refreshingly original London book, aptly read
- By Raphael on 08-08-18
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Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege.
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It plunges under your skin and invades you.
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Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their 20s. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine.
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Time changes everything
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Duped
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While leading a double life would seem to be the exclusive domain of psychopaths and undercover agents, thousands of 'regular people' keep extraordinary secrets from those closest to them. Duped is an investigation of compulsive liars - and how they fool their loved ones - drawing on Abby Ellin's personal experience. From the day Abby went on her first date with The Commander, she was caught up in a whirlwind. Within five months he'd proposed, and they'd moved in together. But there were red flags: strange stories of international espionage, involving Osama bin Laden and the Pentagon.
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great book
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Fleishman Is in Trouble
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Finally free from his nightmare of a marriage, Toby Fleishman is ready for a life of Tinder dating and weekend-only parental duties. But as he optimistically looks to a future of few responsibilities, his life turns upside down as his ex-wife Rachel suddenly disappears. While Toby tries to find out what happened - juggling work, his kids and his new, app-assisted sexual popularity - his tidy narrative of a spurned husband is his sole consolation.
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Disappointing but maybe just too American
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Bitter Orange
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Overall
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Performance
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From the attic of a dilapidated English country house, she sees them - Cara first: dark and beautiful, clinging to a marble fountain of Cupid, and Peter, an Apollo. It is 1969, and they are spending the summer in the rooms below hers while Frances writes a report on the follies in the garden for the absent American owner. But she is distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she discovers a peephole which gives her access to her neighbours' private lives.
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Brilliant slow burner.
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Ordinary People
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
South London, 2008. Two couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning, on the brink of acceptance or revolution. Melissa has a new baby and doesn’t want to let it change her, but in the crooked walls of a narrow Victorian terrace, she begins to disappear. Michael, growing daily more accustomed to his commute, still loves Melissa but can’t quite get close enough to her to stay faithful. Meanwhile, out in the suburbs, Stephanie is happy with Damian and their three children, but the death of Damian’s father has thrown him into crisis - or is it something, or someone, else?
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refreshingly original London book, aptly read
- By Raphael on 08-08-18
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Normal People
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- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege.
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It plunges under your skin and invades you.
- By Wras on 18-10-18
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Late in the Day
- By: Tessa Hadley
- Narrated by: Abigail Thaw
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their 20s. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach was the sanest and kindest of them all, the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine.
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Time changes everything
- By Rachel Redford on 22-02-19
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Duped
- Compulsive Liars and How They Can Deceive You
- By: Abby Ellin
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While leading a double life would seem to be the exclusive domain of psychopaths and undercover agents, thousands of 'regular people' keep extraordinary secrets from those closest to them. Duped is an investigation of compulsive liars - and how they fool their loved ones - drawing on Abby Ellin's personal experience. From the day Abby went on her first date with The Commander, she was caught up in a whirlwind. Within five months he'd proposed, and they'd moved in together. But there were red flags: strange stories of international espionage, involving Osama bin Laden and the Pentagon.
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great book
- By rikki on 23-04-19
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Fleishman Is in Trouble
- By: Taffy Brodesser-Akner
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
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Performance
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Finally free from his nightmare of a marriage, Toby Fleishman is ready for a life of Tinder dating and weekend-only parental duties. But as he optimistically looks to a future of few responsibilities, his life turns upside down as his ex-wife Rachel suddenly disappears. While Toby tries to find out what happened - juggling work, his kids and his new, app-assisted sexual popularity - his tidy narrative of a spurned husband is his sole consolation.
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Disappointing but maybe just too American
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Educated
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Tara Westover and her family grew up preparing for the End of Days but, according to the government, she didn’t exist. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in hospitals. As she grew older, her father became more radical and her brother more violent. At 16, Tara knew she had to leave home. In doing so she discovered both the transformative power of education, and the price she had to pay for it.
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Wonderful, inspiring book on the value of education
- By David Bowden on 03-03-18
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
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It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.
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Interesting but drags on for too long
- By Sophie on 27-05-19
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An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club)
- A Novel
- By: Tayari Jones
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Eisa Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.
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Great performances...
- By Snowbound on 10-08-18
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What Red Was
- By: Rosie Price
- Narrated by: Eleanor Tomlinson
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Through their four years at university, Kate and Max are inseparable. For him, she breaks her solitude; for her, he leaves his busy circles behind. But loving Max means knowing his family, the wealthy Rippons, all generosity, social ease and quiet repression. Theirs is not Kate’s world. At their London home, just after graduation, her life is shattered apart in a bedroom while a party goes on downstairs. What Red Was is a startling debut novel.
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Powerful
- By Anonymous User on 02-06-19
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Sweet Sorrow
- By: David Nicholls
- Narrated by: Rory Kinnear
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In 1997, Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don't remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it should be the other way round, and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread. Then Fran Fisher bursts into his life and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope. But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he must take on a challenge that could lose him the respect of his friends and require him to become a different person.
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Simply superb.
- By Kindle Customer on 24-07-19
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Expectation
- By: Anna Hope
- Narrated by: Vinette Robinson
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Hannah, Cate and Lissa are young, vibrant and inseparable. Living on the edge of a common in East London, their shared world is ablaze with art and activism, romance and revelry - and the promise of everything to come. They are electric. They are the best of friends. Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question: what does it take to lead a meaningful life?
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Sublime
- By Amazon Customer on 07-11-19
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Lullaby
- By: Leïla Slimani
- Narrated by: Finty Williams
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect caretaker for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite and devoted woman who sings to their children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris' upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint and is able to host enviable birthday parties.
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So many inaccuracies
- By Amelia on 27-07-18
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Girl, Woman, Other
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Girl, Woman, Other, written by Bernardine Evaristo, read by Anna-Maria Nabirye. Teeming with life and crackling with energy, told through many distinctive voices, this novel follows the lives of 12 very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.
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Utterly terrible audio version of a good book
- By EEL on 03-08-19
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After the Party
- By: Cressida Connolly
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the summer of 1938 and Phyllis Forrester has returned to England after years abroad. Moving into her sister's grand country house, she soon finds herself entangled in a new world of idealistic beliefs and seemingly innocent friendships. Fevered talk of another war infiltrates their small, privileged circle, giving way to a thrilling solution: a great and charismatic leader, who will restore England to its former glory. At a party hosted by her new friends, Phyllis lets down her guard for a single moment, with devastating consequences.
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Disappointed
- By Ellen on 22-09-18
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The Confession
- By: Jessie Burton
- Narrated by: Hayley Atwell
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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One winter's afternoon on Hampstead Heath in 1980, Elise Morceau meets Constance Holden and quickly falls under her spell. Connie is bold and alluring, a successful writer whose novel is being turned into a major Hollywood film. Elise follows Connie to LA, a city of strange dreams and swimming pools and late-night gatherings of glamorous people. But whilst Connie thrives on the heat and electricity of this new world where everyone is reaching for the stars and no one is telling the truth, Elise finds herself floundering.
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I loved this.
- By pennyforthem on 08-10-19
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Home Fire
- By: Kamila Shamsie
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London - or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs.
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Gripping
- By Alice on 14-07-18
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Clock Dance
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was 11 and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at 21, the accident that would make her a widow at 41. At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman - and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog - will lead Willa into uncharted territory....
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I wish this book went on forever
- By Victoria on 19-08-18
Summary
In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior.
A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay’s sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund’s beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his nine-year old daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph’s muse.
Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection - clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion. Their bond remains strong even after Ralph becomes a husband and father, and though Ralph worships Daphne, he does not touch her. But in the summer of 1976, when Ralph accompanies thirteen-year-old Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows of their passionate trysts: Daphne’s best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.
Forty years later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend, Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne’s recollections of her childhood and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.
Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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