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The Islanders
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
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In January 2014 I was informed that I had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death and destruction but about what it means to be human. I have undertaken a journey from my childhood to the man I am today, writing about the key events in my life and about the people who have given me new perspectives. About men and women I have never met but wish I had. I write about love and jealousy, about courage and fear. And about what it is like to live with a potentially fatal illness.
By: Henning Mankell, and others
Publisher's summary
A tale of murder, artistic rivalry and literary trickery; a Chinese puzzle of a novel where nothing is quite what it seems; a narrator whose agenda is artful and subtle; a narrative that pulls you in and plays an elegant game with you. The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society. Hot winds blow across the archipelago and a war fought between two distant continents is played out across its waters. The Islanders serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands, an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator. It shows Christopher Priest at the height of his powers and illustrates why he has remained one of the country's most prized novelists.
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- Narrated by: Bill Paterson
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.
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From hatred to forgiveness
- By 9S on 05-04-12
By: Eric Lomax
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Life and Death in the Andes
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- By: Kim MacQuarrie
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Andes Mountains are the world's longest mountain chain, linking most of the countries in South America. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and author Kim MacQuarrie takes us on a historical journey through this unique region, bringing fresh insight and contemporary connections to such fabled characters as Charles Darwin, Pablo Escobar, Che Guevara, and many others.
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Another Great by Kim MacQuarrie
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By: Kim MacQuarrie
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Full Circle
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- By: Michael Palin
- Narrated by: Michael Palin
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Abridged
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Following the hugely popular and successful Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole, Michael Palin set off to meet another challenge: an anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the world's largest ocean, the Pacific.
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Excellent, per usual
- By Enroute8 on 06-03-07
By: Michael Palin
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Headhunters on My Doorstep
- A True Treasure Island Ghost Story
- By: J. Maarten Troost
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Entertainment Weekly calls acclaimed author and essayist J. Maarten Troost a "funny, candid, and down-to-earth travel companion". Both witty and poignant, Headhunters on My Doorstep follows Troost as he retraces Robert Louis Stevenson’s path through the South Pacific. Somewhere between AA meetings in Tahiti and discovering how the Island of Merrymaking got its name, Troost reconnects with himself, his family, and the beauty of life.
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Another great South Pacific Book from Mr. Troost
- By Michael on 08-29-13
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Salmon Fishing In The Yemen
- By: Paul Torday
- Narrated by: Paul Torday
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Author Paul Torday makes his debut with this clever absurdist novel. Fisheries scientist Dr. Alfred Jones is approached by an extravagantly wealthy sheik with a novel plan. To foster goodwill, the sheik would like to introduce salmon fishing to Yemen - the same Yemen that is largely a desert - and politicians think it's a great idea.
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Distracted by the British bureaucracy/philosophy
- By Will on 08-01-12
By: Paul Torday
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The Bedlam Detective
- By: Stephen Gallagher
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Sebastian Becker, a former Pinkerton man, lives in England and investigates wealthy eccentrics who may be too insane to care for their own affairs. He is asked to investigate rich landowner Sir Owain, but arrives to discover two young girls have been murdered, and it is not the first time children have come to harm in this small town.
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Satisfying!
- By Margaret on 03-26-12
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Beautiful Animals
- A Novel
- By: Lawrence Osborne
- Narrated by: Tim Campbell
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On a hike during a white-hot summer break on the Greek island of Hydra, Naomi and Samantha make a startling discovery: a man named Faoud, sleeping heavily, exposed to the elements, but still alive. As the two women learn more about the man, a migrant from Syria and a casualty of the crisis raging across the Aegean Sea, their own burgeoning friendship intensifies. But when their seemingly simple plan to help Faoud unravels, all must face the horrific consequences they have set in motion.
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please offer more of this author's books
- By S. Liskey on 07-20-17
By: Lawrence Osborne
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The Great Quake
- How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet
- By: Henry Fountain
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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A riveting narrative about the biggest earthquake in North American recorded history - the 1964 Alaska earthquake that demolished the city of Valdez and swept away the island village of Chenega - and the geologist who hunted for clues to explain how and why it took place.
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Fascinating to hear the full story
- By Debby A Davis on 08-18-17
By: Henry Fountain
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Ghosts of the Tsunami
- Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone
- By: Richard Lloyd Parry
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.
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Riveting True Story You Didn't Hear On The News
- By Kathy in CA on 07-05-18
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Last Train to Paradise
- Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad That Crossed an Ocean
- By: Les Standiford
- Narrated by: Del Roy
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The paths of the great American robber barons were paved with riches, and though ordinary citizens paid for them, they also profited. Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century.
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A Pleasant Surprise
- By Roy on 04-05-09
By: Les Standiford
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One of a Kind.
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An odd return to the Dream Archipelago...
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Shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Dawn breaks over Vancouver and no-one has slept the night before, or almost no one. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand can still sleep, and they've all shared the same strange, golden dream. A handful of children still sleep as well, but what they're dreaming remains a mystery. After six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis will set in.
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Reading this book is more devastating than listening to it.
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After her husband is killed, Teresa joins a virtual-reality company, where she finds relief from her grief in other worlds and personalities. Then she enters the mind of Gerry Grove, the town's assassin. As she explores Grove's virtual existence, Teresa is terrified by what she discovers.
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Unlistenable
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What listeners say about The Islanders
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ryan
- 11-14-13
An intriguing, enigmatic trip
I hadn't read anything by Christopher Priest before (though I liked the film The Prestige). I really enjoyed The Islanders, which is an elegant, enigmatic work of imagination and literary creation. The book is set in an world not too unlike our own in terms of culture and technology, but on a planet where much of the land takes the form of a giant archipelago. A few powerful states exist on a single continent in the north, and engage in wars there and elsewhere, but most of the planet's inhabitants live and go about their familiar lives on the myriad, more-or-less-independent islands. Well, "familiar" except for the fantastically lethal insects, the temporal anomalies that make mapping the islands very difficult, and the weird psychic phenomena that occur in certain places.
The "story" here is presented in a cryptic manner, with the initial narrator purporting to be writing the introduction to a travel guide to the islands of the Dream Archipelago. From the start, there are reliability issues: he claims never to have left his home island and that the whole task is pointless anyway, since the temporal vortices and the confusion of place names make mapping nigh impossible. Also, what we later learn about this character makes it seem rather unlikely that he could have put his name to any of what follows.
Such are the puzzles and incongruities that fill this intriguing, sometimes frustrating book. The chapters that follow sometimes adhere to the "gazetteer" format, describing the geographic and historical features of different islands, but others dispense with that, giving us vignettes about certain select inhabitants or even first person narratives by those people.
Gradually, we get pieces of several underlying stories, each of which raises its own mysteries and insinuates a sense of their being linked somehow to the mysteries of other stories. A famous mime is murdered, but the person convicted might not have been the one truly responsible. A reclusive writer might have something to do with the crime -- and is the social activist who has an affair with him quite what she claims to be? Meanwhile, a rogue installation artist drills tunnels through islands, turning them into gigantic wind instruments (look for a hilarious email exchange when another guerrilla artist suggests a creative partnership). A young woman pines for her lover, who has been drafted by one of the warring militaries (which seem to have presences throughout the archipelago, in spite of how often the gazetteer emphasizes its neutrality) and is stationed incommunicado on an island that doesn’t officially exist. Elsewhere, a young man falls for a friend who is investigating ancient, mysterious towers, but an encounter with a ghost changes their relationship. Some characters have a long chapter devoted to them, others, such as a philandering painter, reappear in different contexts throughout the book.
If there are straightforward answers to the puzzles, they remain oblique to me, even after a second reading, but if you're familiar with writers like Murakami or Borges, you'll know that straightforward answers aren't always the point. Here, the ambiguity seems deliberate, an invitation to readers to fill in the blanks with their own interpretations.
To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this sort of game playing, and found a few threads to be a little too open-ended (what was going on with the drones?) Still, Priest writes with such self-assurance and grasp of meaningful human detail, that the complex, shifting topography of the Dream Archipelago, however imperfectly mapped, is well worth exploring.
In sum, an enjoyable introduction to Priest for me, though possibly not the best one for everyone. I look forward to reading more of his work.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Bigby Wolfman
- 01-17-20
A dream
This novel, as all of Priest's works, is about the unseen. The secrets lie at odd angles, behind mirrors of perception, of what's obscured rather than revealed, like a kaleidoscope of truths and half truths and lies. Do not rush through this book. Listen, and most importantly, imagine.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Tezby
- 08-28-19
Deliberately fragmented, a story in many parts
Masquerading as a guide book to the many islands of the Dream Archipelago, this fragmented story is told from many angles and by many voices, and slowly builds to a narrative of murder and deception. And jokes about mime artists. Many of Priest's jokes don't work, or are so dry as to escape this listener, and there is a cumbersome narrative about a death in a theatre [an archetypal scene often revisited by Priest in other works] which strains credulity and feels wholly contrived. Yet it's the other stories within 'The Islanders' that are the real delight - the artists, travellers, lovers and strangers who cross paths among the far flung island groups, waylaid by bureaucracy, entranced by ancient towers, cut adrift in time warps. In many ways this is an exasperating book, but as it moves to its conclusion, all the parts have come together to give the listener an insight into one of the most sustained, and weirdest, alternative world fictions ever written. Also, Michael Maloney is a superb reader of Priest's work.
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- john
- 02-07-16
weird and complex,
The Islanders sneaks in compelling lessons on living life to the fullest while the reader is trying to parse a plot out of the seemingly disjointed chapters. Beautifully written and superbly read, after the initial frustration of not following the narrative train through the first several chapters, a true pleasure to the very end.
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- Andreas Henriksson
- 07-06-13
Narrator making the very best of a difficult story
Would you try another book from Christopher Priest and/or Michael Maloney?
I have read several books by Priest in print and like them. The Islanders is one of his more complicated narratives however and I realized belatedly that it is one of those books that should really be read in print to enjoy all of its nuances. The audio version simply does not give listeners the possibility of going back in the text and dwelling longer on some more significant passage. That is not to say that there are no coherent narratives in the novel; there are quite a few. The point is however that the book has additional dimensions when readers start to compare these narratives. In any case, Maloney really makes a good job with a difficult material. So, despite my reservations about the audiobook, I would easily recommend Priest's novel in print, and Maloney's performance in general.
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