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The Rooster House
- A Ukrainian Family Memoir
- Narrated by: Amrita Acharia
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
'Wild Swans for Ukraine ... rich and magnificent' Bookseller
'A paean to hope and home. I loved it and it will haunt me'
HELEN MACDONALD
'Marvellously vivid and often heartbreaking... I read it in a single enthralled sitting'
MIRANDA SEYMOUR
'An instant classic: an essential book in these darkening times'
SOPHY ROBERTS
'Compelling, beautifully written... an insight into the complexity of Ukraine's history'
MERIEL SCHINDLER
In the Ukrainian city of Poltava stands a building known as the Rooster House, an elegant mansion with two voluptuous red roosters flanking the door. It doesn't look horrifying. And yet, when Victoria was a girl growing up in the 1980s, her great-grandmother would take pains to avoid walking past it.
In 2014, while the Russian state was annexing Crimea, Victoria visited her grandmother in Bereh, the hamlet near Poltava that was a haven in her childhood. Just before the trip she came across her great-grandfather's diary, one page scored deep with the single line: 'Brother Nikodim, vanished in the 1930s fighting for a free Ukraine.' She had never heard of this uncle and no one - especially her grandmother - seemed willing to tell her about him.
Victoria became obsessed with recovering his story, and returned to her birth country again and again in pursuit of it. In the end, after years of sifting through Ukraine's post-Soviet bureaucracy, after travelling to tiny, ruined villages and speaking to the wizened survivors of that era, her winding search took her back to the place she had always known it would - to the Rooster House, and the dark truths contained in its basement.
Inspired by the author's love for her family, and peopled by warm, larger-than-life characters who jostle alongside the ghostly absences of others, The Rooster House is at once a riveting journey into the complex history of a wounded country and a profoundly moving tribute to hope and the refusal of despair.
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Story
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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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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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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House of Trelawney
- By: Hannah Rothschild
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The seat of the Trelawney family for over 700 years, Trelawney Castle was once the jewel of the Cornish coast. Each successive Earl spent with abandon, turning the house and grounds into a sprawling, extravagant palimpsest of wings, turrets, and follies. But as the centuries passed the Earls of Trelawney, their ambition dulled by generations of pampered living, failed to develop other skills.
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Really fun read
- By Ruthi on 04-12-20
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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
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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The Library of Legends
- A Novel
- By: Janie Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, 19-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than 100 students, faculty, and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.
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Wonderful and Umique!
- By D. Fields on 02-18-22
By: Janie Chang
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When Time Stopped
- A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains
- By: Ariana Neumann
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in war-torn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew.
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yesterday as fresh as today
- By reader mother on 02-17-20
By: Ariana Neumann
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
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Street Without a Name
- Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
- By: Kapka Kassabova
- Narrated by: Emily Gray
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and grew up under the drab, muddy, gray mantle of one of communism’s most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka’s childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
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Good start, but ended up not liking the author
- By Giselle on 11-02-21
By: Kapka Kassabova
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Inge's War
- A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler
- By: Svenja O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in Paris, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. In this transporting and illuminating audiobook, the award-winning journalist vividly reconstructs the story of her grandmother Inge's life from the rise of the Nazis through the brutal postwar years, from falling in love with a man who was sent to the Eastern Front just after she became pregnant with his child, to spearheading her family's flight as the Red Army closed in, her young daughter in tow.
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Ordinary German Citizens Caught Up
- By Hinterlander on 08-22-23
By: Svenja O'Donnell
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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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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A Woman's Story
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Annie Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to “capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.” She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love.
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Beautiful Tribute, Beautiful Writing
- By Amazon Customer on 07-07-23
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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Summer
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Juliette Burton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
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terrific book, beautifully read.
- By Sasha on 02-07-21
By: Ali Smith
What listeners say about The Rooster House
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M. T. P.
- 06-16-23
Our heritage.
Hearing this audiobook was as seeing the struggles, traumas, life of my family in Poland, Hungary, Germany and Russia, what they went through in the 20th century and it’s consequences. We cannot forget that our own history starts long before our birth and ends the moment the memory of our existence cease to be remembered. How life and peace can be so ephemeral.
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