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My Name Is Lucy Barton
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
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Publisher's summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the tender relationship between mother and daughter in this extraordinary novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The New York Times Book Review • NPR • BookPage • LibraryReads • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.
Praise for My Name Is Lucy Barton
“A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe
“It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra, if a very down-to-earth and unpretentious one.”—Newsday
“Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way. It is both a book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—Lily King, The Washington Post
“An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People
Critic reviews
"This story of family, poverty, aspirations, and obstacles is immediately gripping, thanks to the combination of Strout's high-quality prose and Kimberly Farr's nearly flawless performance." (AudioFile)
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When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself - an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook - in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can't bring himself to force her from the home both treasure - the place where his father's voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict...
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Title Should Be Georgeville-It's All About George
- By Sara on 10-08-15
By: George Hodgman
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Forbidden Sister
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Overall
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Emmie Wilcox was only six when her sister, Roxy, was thrown out of their New York City apartment. Their stern father's military style left no room for rebellion, and Roxy was continually defiant and rebellious. Emmie is obedient, respectful. Two sisters, total opposites - yet Emmie is secretly obsessed with the mystery and imposed silence surrounding Roxy. She wants excitement, and being a good girl all the time is harder than it seems. Finally, Emmie goes behind her father's back to track down and spy on the sister she can't help but be fascinated with.
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I love VC Andrews series !
- By Grace R. on 02-05-18
By: V. C. Andrews
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Love Walked In
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Award-winning poet Marisa de los Santos crafts an irresistibly touching debut novel. Love Walked In is a contemporary tale, steeped in nostalgic, cinematic charm, of love in all its forms. Unapologetically idealistic about love, Cornelia Brown appears to catch the break of a lifetime when the dashing Martin Grace, her own personal Cary Grant, comes strolling into her life. But it is Martin's connection to 11-year-old Clare Hobbes that touches Cornelia's heart in ways she never imagined.
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Dreadful audio quality
- By Marenghi on 09-16-11
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty - the opposite of the life she' s left behind in New York. She marries a local widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she' d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy' s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white.
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For Literary Lovers
- By M. Shipe on 04-25-14
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Disgruntled
- By: Asali Solomon
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Kenya Curtis is only eight years old, but she knows that she's different, even if she can't put her finger on how or why. It's not because she's black - most of the other students in the fourth-grade class at her West Philadelphia elementary school are, too. Maybe it's because she calls her father - a housepainter-slash-philosopher - "Baba" or because her parents' friends gather to pour out libations "from the Creator, for the Martyrs" and discuss "the community".
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Loved It!!!
- By ayodele higgs on 05-20-15
By: Asali Solomon
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The Wednesday Sisters
- By: Meg Waite Clayton
- Narrated by: Julie Dretzin
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For 35 years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967.
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Loved it!
- By Denise Wallace on 06-26-09
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To See the Moon Again
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- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
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The first step to letting go of the past is forgiving it …Every day of her life Julia Rich lives with the memory of a horrible accident she caused long ago. In the years since, she has tried to hide her guilt in the quiet routine of teaching at a small South Carolina college, avoiding close relationships with family and would-be friends. But one day a phone call from Carmen, a niece she has never met, disrupts her carefully controlled world.
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Beautiful Story of Forgiveness and Selfless Love
- By sharon on 09-20-14
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Find Me Unafraid
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- Narrated by: Korey Jackson, Mandy Siegfried, P.J. Ochlan (foreword)
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Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.
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A difficult and rewarding listen
- By R. MCRACKAN on 08-23-18
By: Kennedy Odede, and others
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Finding Grace
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Finding Grace is the powerful, often humorous, and deeply moving story of one woman's journey of broken dreams. It is the story of how a painful legacy of the past is confronted and met with peace. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires---even the simplest ones---are sometimes denied or who has questioned where God is when we need Him most. This story is about one woman's unlikely road to motherhood. Finally, it's a book about the "undeserved gift which is life itself."
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Finding Grace... and joy, delight, and camaraderie
- By WeRLoved on 02-02-17
By: Donna VanLiere
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One True Thing
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- Narrated by: Christina Moore
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Story
A young woman sits in jail, accused of the mercy killing of her dying mother. She didn't do it, but she thinks she knows who did. In the last months of her life, Ellen Gulden's mother revealed startling secrets that challenged everything Ellen believed about her family. Now, in jail, Ellen believes those secrets will tell her who had the courage to end her mother's suffering.
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Quindlen's writing skills shine in One True Thing.
- By Bonny on 08-26-13
By: Anna Quindlen
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Ordinary Light
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Performance
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Story
Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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One Amazing Thing
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Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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The Rest of Her Life
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- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
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Overall
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Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy, the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community.
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Obnoxious musical interludes ruin the story
- By Joan on 12-25-11
By: Laura Moriarty
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What listeners say about My Name Is Lucy Barton
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- lucien
- 02-27-16
Exceptional
Well well-written account of a troubled life when even success can't erase the years of hurt, rejection and desire to be loved by the only ones that matter, family.
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- Maria Herrera
- 10-11-20
A story of all the places loves resides in
I didn't think I would like this story. Too domestic, too seeming to tug at the sleeve of sentimentality, I thought. Then in came the sullen mother, or was she hiding / mulling something she couldn't utter? Then came the daughters, little girls, who appeared to be so brave beyond their years. Still, and furthermore came the unnameable disquieting spells which sneak up on one on a rainy day and between all these elements (events and situations) of life I found myself listening intently to the narrative as it led me to the mirror. The mirror where you see yourself and if you look closer many other faces too. A universal story to me. A story full of truths, not all pleasant but necessary to confront. Layers falling away as life unfolds. A deliberate effort to see what is happening, to avoid the distraction. A deeper understanding of what life is, what it can be perhaps.
The language is simple and hence uncomplicated. Complicated enough is the inference of the longing to belong, to mean something to another - ones place even - and all this the author manages with simplicity and composure. Dignity.
Does this story have gravitational pull for me because here is a woman addressing her life with no fear for the eventual judgement? She realizes she is being judged and measured (like the encounter with a male figure while away in school, to name but one instance) but we see her lose her fear of this and in this she is a modern hero. Afterall, are not the vast swathes of Instagram culture an appeal to be seen in the favorable light, curated and varnished so that the judgement won't lead to being cancelled, or cast aside?
The performance allowed me to believe I was hearing the authors voice and that to me is in this type of literature a plus.
A real story.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-04-16
Good storyline
Interesting story, I found that I could relate to it; always searching for that approval or love from a distant parent.
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- Rocco Priore
- 04-14-16
If you like depressing stories
Very dark and depressing but does provide a view regarding some lives that remain unfulfilled.
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- Jethel Ellison
- 07-07-21
A story for writers of stories
I liked the way Strout explored the ambiguity of relationship with her imperfect mother. There were one or two aspects of the story that stretched credulity. I feel like I missed something about the hospitalization, about her failed marriage, the incompleteness of her mentor’s story. I learned a thing or two about fiction and that is a valuable lesson.
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- Wendy E. Lamson Collier
- 08-04-17
Poignant and beautiful
I was captivated by this story. Elizabeth Strout is one of my favorite authors. Her understanding of the diversity of human characters and personalities, her compassion, her truth stating about life through those characters.
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- Bonny
- 01-15-16
Because we all love imperfectly.
A character in My Name is Lucy Barton says "I like writers who try to tell you something truthful," and Elizabeth Strout has done just that. This book feels almost like the reader is being told a once-upon-a-time recounting of Lucy's life and relationships, in a personal, intimate conversation with her. It begins to feel like we are sitting at Lucy's bedside, along with her mother, as she recovers in the hospital. This experience is heightened by listening to the audiobook, with the excellent narration by Kimberly Farr.
“I write because I want the reader to read the book when they may need it,” Strout wrote in an email. “For example, when I first read ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ I thought: ‘Wow, I really need this book!’ So I always hope that a reader will find the book when they need it, even if they didn’t know they needed it.”
And I did. I felt like Elizabeth Strout, through Lucy Barton, articulated and explained things I knew but couldn't express myself. The complexity of familial love, how things we wish we could hear from our loved ones just may not be possible for them to say, how we all love imperfectly, how we are all products of our background and experiences. I loved Olive Kitteridge, and My Name is Lucy Barton is even better.
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40 people found this helpful
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- Janna Wong Healy
- 04-19-16
Exquisitely Written...but Undeniably Sad
3.5 Stars. Beautifully written (Strout's gift with language is exquisite) but unstintingly sad, this rumination on life, love and family is almost painful to sit through. Oh, how I wanted Lucy Barton to have one (just one) moment of pure, unadulterated happiness. But, no.
Lucy Barton narrates her life by focusing on memories. She tells us how she grew up poor (so poor), how she was locked in her father's truck all day because she was too young to go to school and they had no one to watch her, how her parents refused to accept her husband because he was German, how her mother comes to visit her while she's in the hospital for an unexplained illness (Lucy is happy about this but then her mother leaves, which makes her sad all over again). Through these stories, we get a glimpse of Lucy's life, from child to adult.
I found the book almost oppressive in its sadness, despite the beautiful words created by Strout.
The narrator did a very nice job. She was clear and easy to understand and really worked hard on bringing emotion to the story.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Meeze
- 02-18-17
My least favorite Elizabeth Strout book.
The story dragged on and on. I did finish it and am not sorry that I read it, but I have loved lol her other books.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Elizabeth Boe Aarestad Luster
- 01-29-16
A beautiful story with unforgettable characters.
in her latest, Elizabeth Strout returns to the style of Olive Kitteridge for another incredibly complex , beautiful novel of family life.
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1 person found this helpful