Showing results for "barbara comyns"

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Barbara Comyns

A young female artist faces poverty, sexism, and a marriage gone awry in this “tragic, comic, and completely bonkers” novel set in Depression-era London (The Observer).“I defy anyone to read the opening pages and not to be drawn in, as I was . . . Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else.” —Maggie O'Farrell, bestselling author of Hamnet“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came f...

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Barbara Comyns

A feminist reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a single mother and an enchanted friendship—from one of most bewitching British writers of the 20th century.“Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . Tragic , comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —The ObserverBella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whos...

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Barbara Comyns, Barbara Comyns

Narrated by

Katherine Press

'A small Gothic masterpiece… I have read it many times, and with every re-read I marvel again at its many qualities - its darkness, its strangeness, its humour, its sadness, its startling images and twists of phrase' - Sarah Waters.Growing up in Edwardian south London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and oppressive; his new girlfriend, brash and lascivious.Alice seeks refuge in...

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Barbara Comyns

A mysterious epidemic strikes an English village in this surreal, irresistible, and darkly funny Barbara Comyns classic, hailed as an “overlooked small masterpiece” (The Rumpus).“So funny, so exact, so twisted.” —PBSThis is the story of the Willoweed family and the English village in which they live. It begins mid-flood, ducks swimming in the drawing-room windows, “quacking their approval” as they sail around the room. “Wh...

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Barbara Comyns, Barbara Comyns

Narrated by

Madeleine Leslay

´I defy anyone to read the opening pages and not to be drawn in, as I was... Quite simply, Comyns writes like no one else.´ - Maggie O'Farrell, author of "Hamnet".Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist's model with an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies (however much loved) and her husband conspire to torment her.Hopin...

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Barbara Comyns, Barbara Comyns

Narrated by

Kristin Atherton

Strange things are afoot in the English village where the Willoweed family live.Unnatural floods usher in dead peacocks and ducks, soon followed by an ominous wave of self-inflicted deaths and a peculiar illness.From their humble Willoweed cottage, sisters Emma and Hattie are helpless spectators to this unfolding chaos, their childhood idyll disintegrating as fear infects their once-familiar world.But as the virus spreads and hysteria grips everyone around them, the...

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Sylvia Townsend Warner

Narrated by

Emma Gregory

A unique novel about life in a fourteenth-century convent by one of England’s most original authorsSylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no...

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Elena Ferrante

Narrated by

Hillary Huber

Translated by

Ann Goldstein

Elena Ferrante is the bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, now an HBO original series. Collected here for the first time are the seeds of future novels, the timely reflections of this internationally beloved storyteller, the abiding preoccupations of a writer who has been called “one of the great novelists of our time” (New York Times).“This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me … I have written as an author of novels, taking on matters that are impo...

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Judith Tick

Narrated by

Carmen Jewel Jones

Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. Historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational artist.Becoming Ella Fitzgerald clears up long-enduring mysteries. Archival research and in-depth family interviews shed new light on the singer's difficult childhood, the tragic death of her mother, and the year she spent in a girls' refor...

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Juhea Kim

Narrated by

Sue Jean Kim

Longlisted for The Story PrizeFrom the acclaimed author of Beasts of a Little Land and City of Night Birds, an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural worldSpanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilario...

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Ariel Courage

Narrated by

Cia Court

“Narrator Cia Court's portrayal of a troubled woman's journey of self-discovery is intriguing and engaging.”—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)Armed with a terminal diagnosis, a grudge, and a rental car, Hester sets out to fulfill her lifelong dream of killing her father in this brilliantly subversive and bleakly funny debut novel.When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do:...

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Helen Oyeyemi

Narrated by

Fleur De Wit

**NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER"Equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart...Her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak." ― The New Yorker“Her weirdest and funniest yet — in the best way possible.” ― Los Angeles Times"Audacious, incisive and very funny." ― Daily MailA masterful story that asks: What if the different sides of your personality had trus...