-
Marlena
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Emma Galvin
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $24.47
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Three Women
- By: Lisa Taddeo
- Narrated by: Tara Lynne Barr, Marin Ireland, Mena Suvari, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, the homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, the 17-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down.
-
-
Not what it’s portrayed and not worth your time
- By Cora on 01-08-20
By: Lisa Taddeo
-
Writers & Lovers
- A Novel
- By: Lily King
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she has been writing for six years. At 31, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.
-
-
An absorbing listen
- By Barbara S on 03-08-20
By: Lily King
-
Sankofa
- A Novel
- By: Chibundu Onuzo
- Narrated by: Sara Powell
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anna is at a stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother - the only parent who raised her - is dead. Searching through her mother's belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president - some would say dictator - of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive.
-
-
Not my favorite
- By Diana Swiatkowski on 11-12-21
By: Chibundu Onuzo
-
Just an Ordinary Family
- By: Fiona Lowe
- Narrated by: Rebecca Macauley
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alice Hunter is smarting from the raw deal life has thrown her way: suddenly single, jobless and forced to move home to her parents' tiny seaside town. And now she faces an uncomfortable truth. She wants her twin sister Libby's enviable life. Libby's closest friend Jess Dekic has been around the Hunter family for so long she might as well be blood. She's always considered herself a sister closer to Libby than Alice ever could be.
-
-
Just started book
- By ShannonP. Ehly on 02-26-21
By: Fiona Lowe
-
A Calling for Charlie Barnes
- By: Joshua Ferris
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises, and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.
-
-
the best book I've read this year
- By Brent & Marie on 10-07-21
By: Joshua Ferris
-
Wolfsong
- By: TJ Klune
- Narrated by: Kirt Graves
- Length: 18 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ox was 23 when murder came to town and tore a hole in his head and heart. The boy chased after the monster with revenge in his blood red eyes, leaving Ox behind to pick up the pieces. It's been three years since that fateful day and the boy is back. Except now he's a man, and Ox can no longer ignore the song that howls between them.
-
-
Heartbreakingly beautiful
- By Meg on 10-08-16
By: TJ Klune
-
Three Women
- By: Lisa Taddeo
- Narrated by: Tara Lynne Barr, Marin Ireland, Mena Suvari, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In suburban Indiana we meet Lina, the homemaker and mother of two whose marriage, after a decade, has lost its passion. Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, the 17-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down.
-
-
Not what it’s portrayed and not worth your time
- By Cora on 01-08-20
By: Lisa Taddeo
-
Writers & Lovers
- A Novel
- By: Lily King
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she has been writing for six years. At 31, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life.
-
-
An absorbing listen
- By Barbara S on 03-08-20
By: Lily King
-
Sankofa
- A Novel
- By: Chibundu Onuzo
- Narrated by: Sara Powell
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anna is at a stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother - the only parent who raised her - is dead. Searching through her mother's belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president - some would say dictator - of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive.
-
-
Not my favorite
- By Diana Swiatkowski on 11-12-21
By: Chibundu Onuzo
-
Just an Ordinary Family
- By: Fiona Lowe
- Narrated by: Rebecca Macauley
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alice Hunter is smarting from the raw deal life has thrown her way: suddenly single, jobless and forced to move home to her parents' tiny seaside town. And now she faces an uncomfortable truth. She wants her twin sister Libby's enviable life. Libby's closest friend Jess Dekic has been around the Hunter family for so long she might as well be blood. She's always considered herself a sister closer to Libby than Alice ever could be.
-
-
Just started book
- By ShannonP. Ehly on 02-26-21
By: Fiona Lowe
-
A Calling for Charlie Barnes
- By: Joshua Ferris
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises, and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.
-
-
the best book I've read this year
- By Brent & Marie on 10-07-21
By: Joshua Ferris
-
Wolfsong
- By: TJ Klune
- Narrated by: Kirt Graves
- Length: 18 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ox was 23 when murder came to town and tore a hole in his head and heart. The boy chased after the monster with revenge in his blood red eyes, leaving Ox behind to pick up the pieces. It's been three years since that fateful day and the boy is back. Except now he's a man, and Ox can no longer ignore the song that howls between them.
-
-
Heartbreakingly beautiful
- By Meg on 10-08-16
By: TJ Klune
-
If I Had Your Face
- A Novel
- By: Frances Cha
- Narrated by: Frances Cha, Sue Jean Kim, Ruthie Ann Miles, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
If I Had Your Face is a riveting debut novel set in contemporary Seoul, South Korea, about four young women making their way in a world defined by impossible standards of beauty, after-hours room salons catering to wealthy men, ruthless social hierarchies, and K-pop mania. Together, their stories tell a gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal, in which their tentative friendships may turn out to be the thing that ultimately saves them.
-
-
incredibly enlightening
- By Barbara S on 01-01-21
By: Frances Cha
-
Build Your House Around My Body
- A Novel
- By: Violet Kupersmith
- Narrated by: Quyen Ngo
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion.
-
-
Epic, Horrifying & Mystical
- By Jonathan T. Jefferson on 07-20-21
-
The Goldfinch
- By: Donna Tartt
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 32 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling force and acuity. It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
-
-
One ruinous moment
- By Jessica on 01-02-14
By: Donna Tartt
-
The Liar's Club
- A Memoir
- By: Mary Karr
- Narrated by: Mary Karr
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mary Karr's biography looks back through a child's eyes to sort through dark household secrets. She witnesses an inheritance squandered, endless bottles emptied, and guns leveled at both the deserving and the undeserving. In a voice stripped of self-pity and charged with brilliant energy, she introduces us to a family ravaged by lies and alcoholism, yet redeemed by the revelation of truth.
-
-
Please Remake this Unabridged!
- By A. Potter on 02-05-16
By: Mary Karr
-
The Vanishing Half
- A Novel
- By: Brit Bennett
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern Black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: Their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for White, and her White husband knows nothing of her past.
-
-
Soap opera material
- By Sheila S on 06-06-20
By: Brit Bennett
-
The Family
- By: Naomi Krupitsky
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sofia Colicchio is a free spirit, loud and untamed. Antonia Russo is thoughtful, ever observing the world around her. Best friends since birth, they live in the shadow of their fathers’ unspoken community: the Family. Sunday dinners gather them each week to feast, discuss business, and renew the intoxicating bond borne of blood and love. But the disappearance of Antonia’s father drives a whisper-thin wedge between the girls as they grow into women, wives, mothers, and leaders. One fateful night, their loyalty to each other and the Family will be tested.
-
-
Another Hyped up Book Club Pick that didn’t deliver
- By steven testasecca on 11-14-21
By: Naomi Krupitsky
-
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
- A Novel
- By: Gail Honeyman
- Narrated by: Cathleen McCarron
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office.
-
-
Hard to understand with the accent
- By Amy on 06-19-19
By: Gail Honeyman
-
The Netanyahus
- An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family
- By: Joshua Cohen
- Narrated by: Joshua Cohen, David Duchovny, Ethan Herschenfeld
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive comedy of blending, identity, and politics.
-
-
Phillip Roth would certainly listen!
- By Martin on 01-17-22
By: Joshua Cohen
-
Cat
- By: Freya North
- Narrated by: Phoebe James
- Length: 15 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cat McCabe is a budding sports journalist who's just been offered the chance of a lifetime - to cover the Tour de France for the Guardian. But, recently dumped by her boyfriend, she's feeling a little on the fragile side and lacking confidence. How will she survive the testosterone-fuelled cycling race? Will she succumb to the muscular thighs of the cyclists - and they to her English gorgeousness? Will her ex show up? How will she survive as one of only a handful of women in the 1,000-strong press corps?
By: Freya North
-
A Little Life
- A Novel
- By: Hanya Yanagihara
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 32 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This transcendent story follows four college friends who move to New York City, buoyed by ambition: Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, an artist; Malcolm, an architect; and, at the center, Jude, a withdrawn, brilliant attorney haunted by an unspeakable past. Through decades of shared and separate lives, Jude’s suffering - and its impact on those who love him - raises questions about the limits of human endurance, the possibility for redemption, and the meaning of friendship.
-
-
Waaaaaay too long for what it is
- By Sharon on 09-12-17
By: Hanya Yanagihara
-
Dark Places
- A Novel
- By: Gillian Flynn
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in "The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas". As her family lay dying, little Libby fled their tiny farmhouse into the freezing January snow. She lost some fingers and toes, but she survived, and famously testified that her 15-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, Ben sits in prison, and troubled Libby lives off the dregs of a trust created by well-wishers who've long forgotten her.
-
-
Riveting but brutal
- By Gray on 12-09-12
By: Gillian Flynn
-
She's Come Undone
- By: Wally Lamb
- Narrated by: Linda Stephens
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly-up.
-
-
A Rollicking Roll Through Dysfunction
- By J. Simonton on 06-11-13
By: Wally Lamb
Publisher's Summary
An electric debut novel about love, addiction, and loss; the story of two girls and the feral year that will cost one her life and define the other's for decades.
Everything about 15-year-old Cat's new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena's orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts - first drink, first cigarette, first kiss - while Marlena's habits harden and calcify. Within the year Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby.
Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try to forgive herself and move on, even as the memory of Marlena keeps her tangled in the past.
Alive with an urgent, unshakable tenderness, Julie Buntin's Marlena is an unforgettable look at the people who shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.
More from the same
Narrator
What listeners say about Marlena
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Sudi
- 06-06-17
A Brilliant, Agonizing Portrait of a Young Woman
When first listening, I thought I would not be able to relate to Buntin's characters because I am so far beyond (in years,) in trying to figure out my teen years and because Buntin's antagonist is much more into drugs than anyone I ever knew. That character would be Marlena, a vibrantly limned but frenetic young woman who befriends and is befriended by a new, younger, neighbor, Cat.
Marlena is on the road to destruction and because of recent family transformations in Cat's life, Cat is drawn into Marlena's orbit of uncentered living -- which has few boundaries but much potential for dissolution.
In short, this is a well written book (told from Cat's viewpoint,) about what it's like to grow into adulthood when your best friend is spiraling into oblivion... while you are simultaneously dealing with the trials which just about every teen girl confront's about self esteem, "coolness" and body image. Not to mention how to relate meaningfully to guys.
Buntin is a very skillful and talented writer. Cat becomes very real and her observations are fully fleshed out, three dimensional and bring all her relationships to life.
As far as being drawn into the book...It seems everyone has a "Marlena" of some sort in their maturing, early years. Someone who pushes boundaries and doesn't care about consequences but whose core of "self" is somehow either so protected and sealed away because of prior abuse that they never let you really "know" them -- or their real self has been damaged into emptiness and you never think you can know them for who they are.
But through your friendship, you grow to love them, despite feeling like they are always trapped beyond you, beneath glass or ice.
This is a well written portrait of two young women and it will grab you... I promise.
PS The narration by Emma Galvin is perfect.
41 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Kristina Tascher
- 09-29-17
Marlena
So like The Goldfinch but from a female character experience. Dark and beautiful. Not for everyone but I loved!
22 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- lolo610
- 05-06-17
Love this book
I requested this book to be on audible. So glad I did. It's a great coming of age story about friendship and addiction. Loved it!
15 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- B. Black
- 11-28-17
Beautifully written
There is so much beautiful writing in this book: descriptive, catching feelings in words. Stream of consciousness is not my favorite style, however. I did not care for the performance by the reader - too flat. I wish I had read the book!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Rochelle
- 10-27-17
Stunningly Beautiful Writing
Marlena is so much more than a coming-of-age novel. From the beginning, I was swept into Cat's story of friendship, family, connection, guilt and loss. Julie Buntin's prose is pure beauty which would be worth listening to as poetry, even if the story weren't as compelling as this one is. Expect emotional complexity with moments of euphoria and heartbreak, as occurs in real life. Rarely am I compelled to buy the book version of an audiobook, but I will with Marlena so I can read and re-read it and will gift it to those whom I think will love it. Thank you for making this an Audible deal of the day.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- RC
- 10-26-17
Gritty, raw, good.
Gritty and bleak, but also hopeful. I liked the contrast between the grown-up Cat and the adolescent Cat who was enveloped in Marlena's world. That is, I liked reading of Cat's reflections on that brief time with Marlena, that so defined the rest of her life. The book was not mawkish. A good read (listen).
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Sharey
- 10-15-17
Loved It!
This book was very good and so was the narration. I'll be looking forward to another collaboration of theirs in hopefully the near future!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- marlena215
- 07-17-17
It was pretty good
the narrator was hard to listen to at first, but I got used to her.
9 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- J. Steidel
- 10-13-17
struggled to finish
the story never really grabbed me so I listen until the end but will probably never listen to again.
14 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Amazon Customer
- 09-03-21
great story teller
I really enjoyed this book, it was very believable. The Audible reading was also excellent.