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The Little Friend
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 25 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
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Critic reviews
2003, Orange Prize for Fiction, Nominated
"This extraordinary book [has] a main character, a twelve-year-old girl named Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, who ranks up there with Huck Finn, Miss Havisham, Quentin Compson, and Philip Marlowe, fictional characters who don't seem in the least fictional.... To Kill a Mockingbird If is the childhood that everyone wanted and no one really had, The Little Friend is childhood as it is, by turns enchanting and terrifying." (Malcolm Jones, Newsweek)
"Breathtaking... A sublime tale rich in religious overtones, moral ambiguities, and violent, poetic acts... From its darkly enticing opening, we are held spellbound." (Lisa Shea, Elle)
"Languidly atmospheric...psychologically acute...A rich novel that takes you somewhere worth going." (The New Yorker)
"It is an exceptionally suspenseful, flawlessly written story." (Booklist)
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
- By Jerry on 12-06-14
By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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Gathering of Waters
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Gathering of Waters is a deeply engrossing tale narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi - a site both significant and infamous in our collective story as a nation. Money is personified in this haunting story, which chronicles its troubled history following the arrival of the Hilson and Bryant families. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was brutally murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit
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Loved it!!
- By Naima on 07-26-16
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The Fireman
- A Novel
- By: Joe Hill
- Narrated by: Kate Mulgrew
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies - before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
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GOD'S WAITING ROOM; AKA FLORIDA
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-25-17
By: Joe Hill
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The Stand
- By: Stephen King
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 47 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen.
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My First Completed Stephen King Novel
- By Meaghan Bynum on 02-20-12
By: Stephen King
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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Bleeding Violet
- By: Dia Reeves
- Narrated by: Suzy Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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With a head plagued by hallucinations, a medicine cabinet full of pills, and a closet stuffed with frilly, violet dresses, Hanna's tired of being the outcast, the weird girl, the freak. So she runs away to Portero, Texas, in search of a new home. But Portero is a stranger town than Hanna expects. She discovers secrets that would terrify any normal soul. Good thing for Hanna, she's far from normal. As this crazy girl meets an even crazier town, only two things are certain: Anything can happen, and no one is safe.
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Didn't like it. Sorry, not sorry
- By Cii'Em on 02-15-16
By: Dia Reeves
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Shadow Show
- All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
- By: Sam Weller - editor, Mort Castle - editor
- Narrated by: George Takei, Edward Herrmann, Kate Mulgrew, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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THE MAN WHO FORGOT RAY BRADBURY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-27-17
By: Sam Weller - editor, and others
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Our Story Begins
- New and Selected Stories
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.
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Great
- By chris on 04-11-08
By: Tobias Wolff
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In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu in search of a rumored lost tribe. They succeed, finding not only that tribe but also a group of forest dwellers they dub "The Dreamers", who turn out to be fantastically long-lived but progressively more senile. Perina suspects the source of their longevity is a hard-to-find turtle; unable to resist the possibility of eternal life, he kills one and smuggles some meat back to the States.
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The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
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What listeners say about The Little Friend
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Fiammetta Rey
- 03-27-21
The bleakest book I have ever read.
I feel like this is a book everyone should read, because of the way it portrays uneducated society and what that does to people, what it’s like to be trapped in that setting that’s honestly like quicksand. Honestly, in the end of the book, a character gets trapped in a water tower for two whole days, desperately keeping his head above the dirty water, and really, that could be taken as a metaphor for what life is like in that environment.
But I feel like the majority of people wouldn’t be able to see anything but the racism, that the white characters are all terrible people and that the author is terrible for showing them in any sort of sympathetic light.
But that’s part of the point — the racism is horrible, the narrative understands that it’s horrible, so why do these otherwise decent people do it? Why can’t they see that it’s wrong? And why do they beat their kids, etc.?
The main character, 12, thinks at one point in the novel that every adult she knows seems like they had the life and energy sucked out of them at some point. That they all just accept that life is terrible and everyone’s out to get you, so you just have to toughen up and accept it. Some put a religious spin on it, “it’s in god’s plan” etc.
This is the point — people do those terrible things, those things that we can see are wrong, because those things are normal to them. Kids, like the protagonist, will point out the obvious injustice and inconsistency, the same way she points out and asks how scientists know what dinosaurs looked like. And adults will beat the kids and silence them and tell them it’s not their place to ask such things. And the kids will eventually break and stop asking and accept, and that’s what it means to be an adult in a society.
I want people to read this book, but I don’t want them to look at those people and feel superior for not sharing all of their faults. I want you to look at the things that you do that are normal in your life, in your micro-society, your town, your office, your neighborhood, your friend group, and ask “but why?”. That’s what people should take away from this.
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- G.D.
- 12-12-18
just the best
first of all the narrator is awesome and second of all this is one of the most entertaining books I've ever read! I love the setting I love the plot and most of all I love the characters. The narrator does a great job in bringing everyone to life and me being from the south myself so many of these names and sayings ring a bail of remembrance
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- Fred Wilson
- 03-01-20
Been There, Experienced That
Having grown up in Georgia during the 1950’s and 60’s, I have experienced most of the people depicted in the book, except for the meth folks. The author really knows Southern families and white trash.
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- Edward Chow
- 08-31-20
Long and unsatisfying
There are glimpses of her future brilliance but overall it was long and meandering and ultimately not satisfying.
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- hillcountrybooks
- 10-21-19
Not one of my favorites
I loved The Goldfinch so I thought I would try another one of her books. It seemed to move at a slow pace. Parts were exciting but overall I found it disappointing. I couldn't wait to finish it so I could move on to the next book.
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- Lauren
- 10-02-19
Try speeding up narration to 1.25
I loved the story, the characters and the descriptions. Had it not been for the very disappointing non-ending, this would be my favorite book ever. Initially, I had a hard time with the narration and found my mind wandering. I sped it up to 1.25 and was immediately pulled in. It made a huge difference. The narration was wonderful at a faster pace.
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Overall
- Holly loux
- 09-25-15
What??????
The goldfinch was my first read by Donna Tartt, and I should have relished in that instead of rushing to read all of Donna Tartts work. This was so disappointing toward the end. It didn't tie up any loose ends, not offer much closure. Beautifully written, and amazing detail, but I felt it needed another few chapters.
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- mary
- 11-29-18
Extraordinary
Donna Tart is a high wire act! The Little Friend needs to be read and reread as it contains worlds. I've finally figured out who did it. The clues are in the first chapter, so pay attention. Figure it out or not, all in all it does not matter if you are a lover of literature. Her Goldfinch is a masterpiece, and I'm about to read The Secret History. She carries the Dickens' mantle (from the American south) and her descriptions take you deep into the psyches of her characters. There are ten years between the publishing of her novels and that, in itself, says a lot.
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Overall
- Lois
- 12-11-04
Whodunit?
I really enjoyed listening to this book but felt that it needed another few chapters. Left me hanging for closure
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10 people found this helpful
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- Helen
- 02-25-21
Alas!
This book was a painful indulgence by the author to show off her talents as a character builder and flowery scene setter, forgetting completely to tell the story. It seemed that telling the story was the annoying part for her as she only cared about overwhelmingly descriptive passages. Enough already!1 .
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