A Prayer for the Living
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Narrated by:
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Ben Okri
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By:
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Ben Okri
About this listen
Playful, frightening, shocking - these stories from a writer at the height of his power will make you think, or make you laugh. Sometimes they’ll make you want to look away, but they will always hold your gaze.
These are stories set in London, in Byzantium, in the ghetto, in the Andes, and in a printer’s shop in Lagos. Characters include a murderer, a writer, a detective, a man in a cave, a man in a mirror, three little boys, a prison door, and the author himself.
Each one of these 23 stories will make you wonder if what you see in the world can really be all there is....
©2019 Ben Okri (P)2020 W.F. HowesListeners also enjoyed...
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"Booker-winner Okri delivers a sprawling collection that spans continents, centuries, and the border between the real and the supernatural.... This is as an essential reminder of the timeless and vital nature of storytelling." (Publishers Weekly)
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Story
In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early 20s and retrieved from his private papers following his death in 1960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence, it is also a remarkably candid portrait of its author as a young man.
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Camus Secret Masterpiece
- By Samuel Cohen on 08-03-19
By: Albert Camus
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Exile and the Kingdom
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.
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So good!
- By Christopher A. Douglas on 10-24-24
By: Albert Camus
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Elfland
- Aetherial Tales, Book 1
- By: Freda Warrington
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Elfland is an intimate, sensual novel of people—both human and Aetherial—caught between duty and desire. It is a story of families, and of Rose Fox, a woman born to magic but tormented by her place in her adopted world.Led by Auberon Fox, a group of Aetherials—call them the Fair Folk, if you will—live among us, indistinguishable from humans. Every seven years, on the Night of the Summer Stars, Lawrence Wilder, the Gatekeeper, throws open all gates to the Other World. But this time, something has gone wrong.
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Miscommunication is an obnoxious plot device
- By Robin on 05-26-16
By: Freda Warrington
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The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
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Overly ambitious
- By Placeholder on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
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Tender Is the Night
- By: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character - lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative.
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Subtle yet grand
- By jb on 10-12-15
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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Hunters in the Dark
- By: Lawrence Osborne
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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From the novelist the New York Times compares to Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh, and Ian McEwan, an evocative new work of literary suspense. Adrift in Cambodia, Robert Grieve - pushing 30 and eager to sidestep a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher - decides to go AWOL. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future.
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Graham Greene
- By Foxhuntingman on 02-26-16
By: Lawrence Osborne
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Life for Sale
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.
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Book is good - Narration is just terrible
- By Vyacheslav Varlakov on 03-12-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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The Satanic Verses
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Inextricably linked with the fatwa called against its author in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Satanic Verses is, beyond that, a rich showcase for Salman Rushdie’s comic sensibilities, cultural observations, and unparalleled mastery of language. The book begins with two Indians plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their airliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations.
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Use an audiobook to really enjoy Satanic Verses
- By David Edelberg on 11-24-12
By: Salman Rushdie
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Last Evenings on Earth
- By: Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: David Crommett
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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Solid Character based Stories
- By Michael on 06-06-24
By: Roberto Bolano, and others
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What You Have Heard Is True
- A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- By: Carolyn Forché
- Narrated by: Carolyn Forché
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
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Beautiful story
- By Norhilda on 05-09-19
By: Carolyn Forché
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
What listeners say about A Prayer for the Living
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- TimePresentTimePast
- 01-28-23
Exceptional
Stunningly beautiful. My third Ben Okri work. This gem is a moving collection of magical, poetic and relevant short stories that reflect as a mirror back to us the ethos of our wold. I would always suggest the Audible versions of his writing as the author himself reads in his incredible voice.
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