
My Absolute Darling
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Alex McKenna
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By:
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Gabriel Tallent
About this listen
A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming audiobook about one 14-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.
Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At 14, she roams the woods along the Northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous. Turtle has grown up isolated since the death of her mother, in the thrall of her tortured and charismatic father, Martin. Her social existence is confined to the middle school (where she fends off the interest of anyone, student or teacher, who might penetrate her shell) and to her life with her father.
Then Turtle meets Jacob, a high-school boy who tells jokes, lives in a big clean house, and looks at Turtle as if she is the sunrise. And for the first time, the larger world begins to come into focus: Her life with Martin is neither safe nor sustainable. Motivated by her first experience with real friendship and a teenage crush, Turtle starts to imagine escape, using the very survival skills her father devoted himself to teaching her. The listener tracks Turtle's escalating acts of physical and emotional courage and watches, heart in throat, as she struggles to become her own hero - and, in the process, becomes ours as well.
Shot through with striking language in a fierce natural setting, My Absolute Darling is an urgently told, profoundly moving book that marks the debut of an extraordinary new writer.
©2017 Gabriel Tallent (P)2017 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Why we think it’s a great listen: There’s no gentle way to put this – Frank McCourt’s performance of Angela’s Ashes is just better than the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Frank McCourt shares his sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking story of growing up poor, Irish, and Catholic in the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes.
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Critic reviews
"Alex McKenna's performance of Tallent's disturbing debut novel is likely to incite goose bumps and nightmares." (AudioFile)
"The word 'masterpiece' has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one." (Stephen King)
"My Absolute Darling is a novel that readers will gulp down, gasping.... Tallent [is a] prodigiously talented new writer.” (The Washington Post)
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A new marriage. A perfect home. A machine that says it’s all a lie. Welcome to Silicon Valley, where the weather is perfect, the income is high … and Rowena Snyder is miserable. A transplant from New York, Rowena moved into her husband Jacob’s idyllic childhood home with their new baby. But suburbia isn’t Rowena’s cup of Starbucks. And she’s got serious anxiety and depression to boot. Jacob, worried about their marriage, scores a new product currently in beta testing from his tech job: Maxine, a “digital friend” that bonds with an individual by continually gathering their personal data.
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Praise Maxine
- By Nefertiti on 03-18-25
By: Faith Gardner
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The Other People
- A Novel
- By: C. B. Everett
- Narrated by: Heather Long, Kaffe Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten strangers wake up inside an old locked house. They have no recollection of how they got there. In order to escape, they have to solve the disappearance of a young woman. But a killer also stalks the halls of the house and soon the body count starts to rise. Who are these strangers? Why were they chosen? Why would someone want to kill them? And who—or what—lurks in the cellar?
By: C. B. Everett
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The Mirror House Girls
- By: Faith Gardner
- Narrated by: Raquel Beattie
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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When Winona rents a room at the eccentric Mirror House, she hopes to make new friends. What she gets instead is a “family” led by the charismatic psychologist Simon Spellmeyer. But if she wants to stay at Mirror House, Winona must join in following Simon’s strange protocols for self-improvement. Warning bells chime inside her, but the allure of transformation keeps her hooked. While his methods are disturbing, the results are undeniable.
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Engaging
- By Adrian H. on 04-13-25
By: Faith Gardner
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The Words We Lost
- By: Nicole Deese
- Narrated by: Libby McKnight
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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As a senior acquisitions editor for Fog Harbor Books in San Francisco, Ingrid Erikson has rejected many a manuscript for lack of defined conflict and dramatic irony—two elements her current life possesses in spades. In the months following the death of her childhood best friend and international bestselling author Cece Campbell, Ingrid has not only lost her ability to escape into fiction due to a rare trauma response, but she's also desperate to find the closure she is convinced will come with Cece's missing final manuscript.
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Not my favorite
- By Tina on 07-13-24
By: Nicole Deese
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Rabbit Moon
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Haigh
- Narrated by: Katharine Chin, Yu-Li Alice Shen
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
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That it was mostly set on china.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-17-25
By: Jennifer Haigh
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Just My Luck
- By: Adele Parks
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey, Kristin Atherton
- Length: 12 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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For 15 years, Lexi and Jake have played the same six numbers with their friends. Over drinks, dinner parties and summer barbecues, the three couples have discussed the important stuff — kids, marriages, careers — and they’ve laughed off their disappointment when they failed to win anything.
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Mixed feelings about this one
- By Maria on 06-08-21
By: Adele Parks
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Deathly
- The Dillon Sisters
- By: Brynne Asher
- Narrated by: Desireé Ketchum, Joe Arden
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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I offer advice for a living. I encourage my patients to make wise decisions, and I help them help themselves to walk through life stronger, healthier, happier. Isn’t that the goal; to live our best lives? If only I practiced what I preach. I wasn’t always like this. Every move I make lately is the opposite of smart. These questionable life choices are a new development. They started the day a certain Vitale barged into my life. Brand Vitale might look like a hero to the rest of the world, but looks can be deceiving.
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WOW GUYS YOU DELIVERED BIG
- By CAROLYN 🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹 on 11-23-21
By: Brynne Asher
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Nightwatching
- A Novel
- By: Tracy Sierra
- Narrated by: Emily Ellet
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. She hears a noise—old houses are always making some kind of noise. But this sound is disturbingly familiar: it’s the tread of footsteps, unusually heavy and slow, coming up the stairs. Shrouded in the shadows, she sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall.
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Opening was grabbing
- By Stephen R Smith on 03-05-24
By: Tracy Sierra
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Open Water
- By: Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Narrated by: Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Two young people meet at a pub in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence.
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Second person POV releases poignant perspective
- By Storytellersrus on 09-25-21
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The Amalfi Curse
- By: Sarah Penner
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld, Carlotta Brentan, Chris Andrew Ciulla, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Haven Ambrose, a trailblazing nautical archaeologist, has come to the sun-soaked village of Positano to investigate the mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast. But Haven is hoping to find more than old artifacts beneath the azure waters; she is secretly on a quest to locate a trove of priceless gemstones her late father spotted on his final dive. Upon Haven’s arrival, strange maelstroms and misfortunes start plaguing the town. Is it nature or something more sinister at work?
By: Sarah Penner
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Blood Beneath the Snow
- By: Alexandra Kennington
- Narrated by: Ellie Gossage
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Revna is no stranger to struggle. As the only member of the royal family without a magical ability, she is seen as an embarrassing mistake by her kingdom and a blight on her bloodline. Luckily, Revna has found family in other outcasts in her kingdom. But when her two closest friends’ lives are put in danger, she is determined to save them by any means necessary, no matter the cost. The Bloodshed Trials—a competition where the last sibling in the royal family standing takes the throne—might just be the ultimate price.
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Great listen for romantasy lovers!
- By Katie on 03-22-25
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Broken Country
- By: Clare Leslie Hall
- Narrated by: Hattie Morahan
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.
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Excellent storytelling
- By A.E.C. on 03-15-25
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The Reformatory
- A Novel
- By: Tananarive Due
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 20 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory.
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Worth a listen
- By LadyLove on 11-07-23
By: Tananarive Due
What listeners say about My Absolute Darling
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Katherine S.
- 01-13-18
Precious meets Misery meets Die Hard
I bought this book on Stephen King’s much touted endorsement: “a masterpiece,” he called it. Overall an enjoyable but dark read which loses its way in the last quarter of the book when it moves from a tight psychological thriller to basically Die Hard 3 in an instant. I think the author was aiming to secure a film option — over-the-top machine-gun violence at a prom on a beach. Really?
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17 people found this helpful
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- Cherilyn Parsons
- 10-09-17
Wow... And excellent audio
This book was difficult to listen to at times because the story was so intense and dark, but it was so worthwhile. I could hardly stop listening. The writing is superb. I’ve read about the controversy around this male author writing a story from the perspective of an abused girl, but I found the novel to be sophisticated, insightful, and deeply compassionate — all that a novel should be around a topic that should be explored in fiction much more than it is. (Besides, writers should be able to explore any topic and point of view that appeals to their imagination, especially when done with such care as was the case here.) I applaud the writer for taking on such an important topic and doing it so well. Full, rich, highly nuanced worlds were created in this novel, both psychological and physical worlds.
I also must comment on the narrator for the audiobook. I could hardly imagine a more perfect voice, and the delivery was flawless. I highly recommend this book in the audio version, and I think I may also buy the hardcover version to have a copy of this fine novel for my library and to enjoy the language at a slower pace than by listening.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Gail
- 09-07-17
Compelling
Beautifully written and narrated. Kept me reading. I think this book could have been stronger without all the in depth gun descriptions that were likely lost and over the top for the average reader. Also, there was a bit too much circular and repetitive dialog between the characters. which got annoying. Perhaps a tad more editing would have made this an epic tale. All in all this book got to me .I found myself wanting to throttle Julia into action. I look forward to more from this author.
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2 people found this helpful
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- KLH
- 09-23-17
A Book of Firsts
First 1st. I've never hated a character as much as I hated one of the main characters. Second 1st. I've never shouted at the characters in an audible book. Third 1st. I've never had such mixed feelings about a book.
This book is gritty, brutal, beautifully written, and at times heartbreaking. The characters are not like any people you know in your life. Maybe because of that you can remove yourself from the violence of the narrative.
If violence and enough swearing to make your ears bleed make you queasy, then pass on this one. If you want to listen to a book unlike anything you've read/listened to before, then dive in.
Alex McKenna has a raspy voice befitting the story. Listen to a sample to decide if her voice annoys you. I happen to love her voice but many of the reviewers do not. She narrated "Sweetbitter" so I was familiar with her voice.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amanda Turner
- 11-10-18
interesting read
If you can look past some of the more gruesome details in this book, the story is a great tale of survival at all costs. I enjoyed it.
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- J. Martin
- 09-13-19
Not agreeing with the negative reviews!
This is a brutally harsh story. Not for the faint of heart. If you are not looking for a touchy feel good book, and for a story with a serious troubling edge, this is a great book. Hopeful, shocking and traumatic all the way through. I had to go back and re listen to earlier chapters at the end. Narrator is excellent. If you dont think so in the beginning you will very quickly.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-29-17
Amazing story beautifully written and told
Story is gripping and spell binding from the first. Characters come to life. Narration is wonderful. Highly recommend this.
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- Cynthia laduca
- 11-04-18
Horrific
As awful a story it was and I wanted to stop reading it I had to keep listening to see just how sad and horrific this story was. It will stay with me for a long time
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- KentuckyWoman
- 07-02-22
Troubling
I couldn't stop listening. it was horrible and heart wrenching and I couldn't stop listening. I am a social worker. I did child abuse investigations then worked with children in foster care for 35 years. It's a tough field. I found this story to be spot on with feelings, emotions, skewed thinking and a profound love for a parent even through horrific fear and abuse. The ending was not what I wanted, but it was so appropriate because the road to healing is a continuous journey.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-26-22
Masterful
This book is a must-read, but only if you can stomach it. Brilliant and visceral.
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