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Narrated by:
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Simon McBurney
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By:
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Ian McEwan
About this listen
Both epic and intimate, the story of one man’s life across generations and historical upheavals: a deeply affecting novel about love, loss, ambition, and resolution from the best-selling author of Atonement.
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
Epic, mesmerizing and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man's lifetime.
©2022 Ian McEwan (P)2022 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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It's all in the performance
- By RueRue on 02-08-19
By: Tessa Hadley
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The Keys to the Street
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
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Mystery with humor and insight
- By Ida Hagman on 10-02-12
By: Ruth Rendell
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The Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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A Narrow Door
- By: Joanne Harris
- Narrated by: Alex Kingston, Steven Pacey
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely 40, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered.
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Optional heading
- By TanyaB on 01-17-22
By: Joanne Harris
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A Pleasure and a Calling
- A Novel
- By: Phil Hogan
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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You won't remember Mr. Heming. He was the estate agent who showed you around your comfortable home, suggested a financial package, negotiated a price with the owner, and called you with the good news. The less good news is that, all these years later, he still has the key. That's absurd, you laugh. Of all the many hundreds of houses he has sold, why would he still have the key to mine? The answer is; he has the keys to them all. William Heming's most at home in a stranger's private things.
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The Invisible Man
- By Janice on 02-05-15
By: Phil Hogan
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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Everywhere I Look
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is an audiobook full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of rereading Pride and Prejudice.
By: Helen Garner
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The Testament of Gideon Mack
- By: James Robertson
- Narrated by: Tom Cotcher
- Length: 15 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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For Gideon Mack, faithless minister, unfaithful husband, and troubled soul, the existence of God, let alone the Devil, is no more credible than that of ghosts or fairies - until the day he falls into a gorge and is rescued by someone who might just be Satan.
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Fantastic
- By Christopher on 07-06-08
By: James Robertson
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Three Daughters of Eve
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Set across Istanbul and Oxford, from the 1980s to the present day, Three Daughters of Eve is a sweeping tale of faith and friendship, tradition and modernity, love and an unexpected betrayal. Peri, a wealthy Turkish housewife and mother, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground - an old polaroid of three young women and their university professor.
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Review 3 daughters of Eve
- By CA on 04-28-18
By: Elif Shafak
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The Lake House
- By: Kate Morton
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 21 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Living on her family’s gorgeous lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, Alice Edevane is a bright, clever, inquisitive, innocent, and precociously talented fourteen-year-old who loves to write stories. But the mysteries she pens are no match for the one her family is about to endure ...One midsummer’s eve, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes discover that their youngest son, Theo, has vanished without a trace.
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Enjoyed the writing, but oy vey, this book
- By Jennifer S on 12-28-18
By: Kate Morton
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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Amsterdam
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.
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Make something, and die.
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
By: Ian McEwan
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A Change of Climate
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Sandra Duncan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
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Beautifully written
- By Patricia S. on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
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New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan's novels have inspired sweeping critical acclaim and won such prestigious awards as the Booker Prize for Amsterdam and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his modern masterpiece, Atonement. With Saturday, McEwan has crafted perhaps his most unique achievement to date.
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Very disappointed.
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War-weary Berlin has much to offer Leonard Markham, a young, naive postal engineer: first the arts of sophisticated intrigue, then the delights of sexual pleasure. But Leonard's new knowledge carries a heavy price, dragging him and the listener into a new type of story that is exhaustively suspenseful and utterly irresistible.
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A little gem
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McEwan has written perfection in this novel.
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Nutshell
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From the best-selling author of Atonement, Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour is just a speck in the universe of possible things?
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The Long Version, and the Short.
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Solar
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Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is fast approaching 60, a mere shell of the academic titan he once was. While his fifth marriage falls apart, Michael suddenly finds himself with an unexpected opportunity to reinvigorate his career and possibly save humankind from the growing threat of global warming.
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What a disappointment
- By SharkHunterSFO on 04-02-10
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Saturday
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Extraordinary
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By: Ian McEwan
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Very disappointed.
- By Tom on 05-25-19
By: Ian McEwan
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The Innocent
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- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
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War-weary Berlin has much to offer Leonard Markham, a young, naive postal engineer: first the arts of sophisticated intrigue, then the delights of sexual pleasure. But Leonard's new knowledge carries a heavy price, dragging him and the listener into a new type of story that is exhaustively suspenseful and utterly irresistible.
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A little gem
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McEwan has written perfection in this novel.
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From the best-selling author of Atonement, Nutshell is a classic story of murder and deceit, told by a narrator with a perspective and voice unlike any in recent literature. A bravura performance, it is the finest recent work from a true master. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavour is just a speck in the universe of possible things?
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The Long Version, and the Short.
- By Ilana on 09-19-16
By: Ian McEwan
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Solar
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Nobel Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard is fast approaching 60, a mere shell of the academic titan he once was. While his fifth marriage falls apart, Michael suddenly finds himself with an unexpected opportunity to reinvigorate his career and possibly save humankind from the growing threat of global warming.
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What a disappointment
- By SharkHunterSFO on 04-02-10
By: Ian McEwan
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Sweet Tooth
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Winner of such prestigious honors as the Booker Prize and Whitbread Award, Ian McEwan is justifiably regarded as a modern master. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth follows Cambridge student Serena Frome, whose intelligence and beauty land her a job with England's intelligence agency, MI5. In an attempt to monitor writers' politics, MI5 tasks Serena with infiltrating the literary circle of author Tom Healy. But soon matters of trust and identity subvert the operation.
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Perfect Book for your Literary Sweet Tooth
- By Susianna on 11-18-12
By: Ian McEwan
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Enduring Love
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On a sunny afternoon, the middle-aged writer Joe Rose and his wife look up from their picnic in the countryside to see an elderly man desperately trying to anchor his giant helium balloon. Running to help, Joe is joined by other bystanders. But from that fateful day, one of them, Jed Parry, will begin to stalk Joe. Driven by religious zeal and misdirected love, the strange young man will slowly unravel each strand of Joe's life.
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Thriller of the minds and relationships
- By EVERETT on 12-28-04
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On Chesil Beach
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It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come.
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One of the best new novels in recent years
- By George on 06-13-07
By: Ian McEwan
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The Cement Garden
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One of the world's most acclaimed novelists, New York Times best-selling author Ian McEwan has earned the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. After their parents die, four children are left alone in the family house. They are free to live however they choose, but they must preserve their terrible secret.
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One of his best
- By Yennta on 04-03-10
By: Ian McEwan
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Atonement
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- Narrated by: Jill Tanner
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- Unabridged
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In Atonement, three children lose their innocence, as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935, and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the housekeeper's son. In their moment of intimate surrender, they are interrupted by Cecilia's hyperimaginative and scheming 13-year-old sister, Briony. And as chaos consumes the family, Briony commits a crime, the guilt of which she shall carry throughout her life.
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An amazing book about complex human perception
- By Amazon Customer on 08-17-04
By: Ian McEwan
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The Child in Time
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Two parents come to appreciate the forces of love and time after the disappearance of their daughter, Kate.
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Not McEwan's Best Effort
- By Charles on 06-07-09
By: Ian McEwan
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This Must Be the Place
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Meet Daniel Sullivan, a man with a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California; a father he loathes in Brooklyn; and a wife, Claudette, who is a reclusive ex-film star given to shooting at anyone who ventures up their driveway. He is also about to find out something about a woman he lost touch with 20 years ago, and this discovery will send him off course, far away from wife and home. Will his love for Claudette be enough to bring him back?
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A good story spoiled
- By White rose on 03-24-17
By: Maggie O'Farrell
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The Cockroach
- By: Ian McEwan
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain - and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way; not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy. In this bitingly funny Kafkaesque satire, Ian McEwan engages with scabrous humor a very recognizable political world and turns it on its head.
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An excellent parody on life during Brexit
- By Kate Juliff on 11-28-19
By: Ian McEwan
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The Daydreamer
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
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- Unabridged
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Internationally best-selling author and Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan presents his first book for children, The Daydreamer. Peter Fortune is unlike most kids his age. In fact, he's different from everybody else in the world. Peter has the amazing ability to make his daydreams come true. A captivating narration from Simon Prebble brings McEwan's imaginative and adventurous story to vivid life for listeners of all ages.
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Charming and Sweet!!!
- By Matthew S. Hill on 03-27-17
By: Ian McEwan
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Amsterdam
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The best-selling author of Atonement and Enduring Love, Ian McEwan is known as one of contemporary fiction’s most acclaimed writers. This Booker Prize-winning novel by McEwan finds two men connecting at the funeral of their ex-lover. Distressed by how she was slowly destroyed by an illness, the two make a pact to save each other from enduring such a fate.
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Make something, and die.
- By Darwin8u on 02-07-17
By: Ian McEwan
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Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
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A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
- By: Shehan Karunatilaka
- Narrated by: Shivantha Wijesinha
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida—war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali.
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Absolutely Splendid...
- By Paul Frandano on 02-07-23
What listeners say about Lessons
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Donna S.
- 11-19-22
Heading
This narrative of a life time, roughly 75 years, hit home with me as I begin to understand how everything has brought me exactly to where I am and that it all has a place in my life.
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- Bill
- 09-27-23
Beautiful
Ian and the narrator turns this work into poetry.
The last three chapters are emotional and worth the price of the book alone. Highly recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- uforic
- 06-02-24
Pleasant surprise.
The beginning did not grab me. I was simply not interested in the story. But as I continued listening I became more involved in the characters. I wanted to know what would happen.
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- Philip Gordon
- 09-20-23
Smart, exciting and heart rending
I liked the nostalgia it invoked in me. The book checked many boxes in my own life’s story. I appreciate the honest and sometimes difficult subjects that didn’t insist the characters be good or evil rather allowed them to be broken people looking for redemption.
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- Mazie P.
- 01-24-23
Took a while
The book was pretty good, but there were some moments where I felt lost. Overall the narration was great and it helped me get through the book.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Cari'anne
- 11-24-22
Great book!
Although I do not agree with his liberal political views, I really love Ian McEwan’s way of weaving his stories and his fascinating characterization. I hope this becomes a movie like Atonement did, and it is one I will read or listen to again.
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2 people found this helpful
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- T. C. Pile
- 04-10-23
Lessons for Life
I approach an Ian McEwan novel with trepidation. “Lessons” is his most recent (number ten for me — I haven’t read all of them) and it’s no different. I know I am in for an intense examination of the way the human mind works, mine included. McEwan looks at human frailties in minute detail and, for me at least, the resonances are powerful. My own limitations are mirrored more often than I want to admit.
The expansive scope of this novel encompasses the decades that span the post-WWII generation in Europe and England in particular from the 1950s to the COVID pandemic. While distinctly British, many of the experiences and perspectives of Roland, the protagonist, are common to my generation — certainly to me. The shadow of nuclear annihilation darkening our childhoods, the restless optimism of youth amid the turmoil of the Sixties, the searching Seventies, the dreams drowning in the Reagan and Thatcher years, the settling for better or worse in the Nineties, the gradual drift toward authoritarianism in the new millennium, the relentless gravity of time and age all are woven together into the tapestry of a life. McEwan illuminates each piece without judgment, pulling them into the light for the reader to turn over and examine.
Shaped by a crime of sexual abuse he suffers as an adolescent, Roland seems to struggle and bumble his way through a series of unfulfilling jobs and relationships, including a marriage to a talented partner who abandons him and a child. She becomes a hugely successful and respected author while Roland eventually becomes successful as a father, surrounded by children and grandchildren and cherished by a woman who has been his life-long friend.
Grief, loss, abandonment, mortality, suffering, acceptance, the struggle to be honest with oneself. These are just the personal topics that singed my brain. Roland’s story is the story of a generation. It encompasses the political, ethical, ecological, and moral challenges that we face as a civilization and puts them into the perspective of daily life, which is the only place and time where one can actually confront those challenges.
And yet, all of this is delivered in a manner that is not heavy. McEwan’s clear-eyed and dispassionate approach to the weight of the world that each of us carries is ultimately human, compassionate, and forgiving. Roland eventually learns to let go of his bitterness and finds some compassion for himself.
Sometimes it takes a lifetime to learn to forgive.
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- Lewis Teeter
- 11-21-22
Beautifully Written
Though not my favorite by Ian McEwan it's certainly his most ambitious and well worth the time to read. Following the lead character's life and it's place throughout historical moments, it reads like a biography. I've read several of McEwan's books multiple times but not sure if I'd read this one again. That's not to say I didn't enjoy every minute.
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- judyw
- 04-24-23
Incredible book
This is very well written, intricate look at a man’s complex life. Being quite close in age to Roland, I was particularly interested to hear a number of historical events that have occurred during my life described from the perspective of a European peer. Not an easy, upbeat, read, but well worth, putting in the effort to understand this story.
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- David
- 12-11-22
Perhaps the best book I have this century, and very possibly a good deal of the past century.
Full of wisdom, mystery, love (of people and existence) and it’s glories as well as its humiliations. A masterwork that offers all of the benefits and reasons we read novels, and a dazzling illustration of why our world would be smaller and more barren without works like this.
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