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On Beauty
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 48 mins
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Publisher's Summary
In this loose retelling of Howard's End, Zadie Smith considers the big questions: Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?
Set in New England mainly and London partly, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kippses - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some searching questions about what life does to love. For the Belseys and the Kippses, the confusions - both personal and political - of our uncertain age are about to be brought close to home: right to the heart of family.
Critic Reviews
2006 Orange Prize for Fiction
2005 Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award, Fiction
"[A] thoroughly original tale about families and generational change, about race and multiculturalism in millennial America, about love and identity and the ways they are affected by the passage of time. Ms. Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice - at once authoritative and nonchalant, and capacious enough to accommodate high moral seriousness, laid-back humor and virtually everything in between - and in these pages, she uses that voice to enormous effect, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane." (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
"Oh happy day when a writer as gifted as Zadie Smith fulfills her early promise with a novel as accomplished, substantive and penetrating as On Beauty. It's a thing of beauty indeed. In tackling grown-up issues of marriage, adultery, race, class, liberalism and aesthetics, she thrillingly balances engaging ideas with equally engaging characters. As good as she is with big ideas, Smith is even stronger at capturing family dynamics, the heartbreak of broken trust as well as the lovely connections between siblings. (The Los Angeles Times Book Review)
"In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." (Kirkus Reviews)
More from the same
Author
Narrator
What listeners say about On Beauty
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Sarah DeFeo
- 11-23-07
two thumbs up
I thoroughly enjoyed this-- the experience was greatly enhanced by the narration, which was truly outstanding. Great characters & portrait of marriage, family life, the personal and political.
7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Ciara
- 03-12-07
Only if you're a fan of Smith
I only recommend this if you're a fan of Zadie Smith. The narration is excellent, but like many of her books her characters are the main focus rather than an entralling plot.
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Amazon Customer
- 01-23-08
listening better than reading?
I really enjoyed this audio book -- it's very long, though, so is a major time commitment. I liked it more than friends who read the book liked it, leading me to believe that when you can be carried along by the good performance you can overlook some clunky plot stuff.
5 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Jolinda
- 06-15-07
Don't Make it End!
This book is so fabulously written, with rich and poignant metaphor and simile, humor and a
BIG HEART and observant eye for life, that I
find myself listening in the car on the whole
5 minute trip to the high school and back. The
narration is almost as remarkable as the writing! Don't miss this one...and waiting to
find White Teeth and anything else Smith has ever written available on Audible soon!!
5 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Janis
- 11-01-05
Well done
This book is marvelous, in part due to the fantastic reading by the narrator. He captures each character's voice and makes them come alive. The book is engrossing, funny and an extremely well done audiobook.
11 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Davina
- 02-14-09
Fabulous in every way!
Not only was this a deeply engaging story and the characters astutely drawn but the narration was absolutely superb! So few readers actually manage to create distinct and authentic voices for each character but this narrator had AMAZING range across gender, nationality, age, etc. You will absolutely not be disappointed by this listening experience.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- R. CASEY
- 09-02-08
great book
interesting characters, very well written. thoroughly enjoyed this book. if you like high quality fiction, you'll love this book.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- David E. Corbin
- 06-07-06
Terrific read
The writing is captivating and the story is intriguing. it is a good illustration of how people exhibit double standards. It is a revealing commentary on academe and is sometimes erotic and sometimes enlightening.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Jennifer
- 12-13-05
Excellent
On Beauty is beautifully written and excellently narrated - I think I heard about fifteen different well-done accents. I loved the plot delving into the academic world and revealing the surprisingly normal and flawed humans residing in it. I couldn't stop listening and will look for the author and narrator again.
4 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Maryjo
- 11-04-05
I loved it!
this is a great book by a great author...at times laugh out loud funny, at other times poignant, with uncomfortably familiar human situations...it's great
8 people found this helpful
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Story
Two brown girls dream of being dancers - but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: About rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
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Enthralling and instructive. A novel of the highest caliber
- By Richmond Surrey on 07-27-17
By: Zadie Smith
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Early Decision
- Based on a True Frenzy
- By: Lacy Crawford
- Narrated by: Erin Moon
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A delightful and salacious debut novel about the frightful world of high school, SATs, the college essay, and the Common Application - and how getting in is getting in the way of growing up. Tiger mothers, eat your hearts out. Anne the "application whisperer" is the golden ticket to success. Working one-on-one with burned-out, helicopter-parented kids, she can make Harvard a reality. Her phone number is a national secret. Her students end up at the best of the best.
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Not for your hs senior
- By Michelle W. on 11-30-18
By: Lacy Crawford
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White Teeth
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By james on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
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Wonderful Town
- New York Stories from The New Yorker
- By: Woody Allen, John Cheever, E. B. White, and others
- Narrated by: Tyne Daly, Timothy Jerome, Joe Morton, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Abridged
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New York City is not only The New Yorker magazine's place of origin and its sensibility's lifeblood, it is the heart of American literary culture. Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the 75-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of 44 of its best stories from (so to speak) home.
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Great stories and readers, but technically sloppy
- By Alison on 09-08-04
By: Woody Allen, and others
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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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Beautiful Stories Great Voices
- By Christine Currie on 02-07-16
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Boy, Snow, Bird
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Susan Bennett, Carra Patterson
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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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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The Great Believers
- By: Rebecca Makkai
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.
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A story for all time
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-18
By: Rebecca Makkai
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Blanche on the Lam
- Blanche White Series, Book 1
- By: Barbara Neely
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Blanche White is a plump, feisty, middle-aged African-American housekeeper working for the genteel rich in North Carolina. But when an employer stiffs her, and her checks bounce, she goes on the lam, hiding out as a maid for a wealthy family at their summer home. That plan goes awry when there's a murder and Blanche becomes the prime suspect. So she's forced to use her savvy, her sharp wit, and her old-girl network of domestic workers to discover the truth and save her own skin.
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Beautifully read, and probably provocative to some
- By Mary M. Campbell on 05-14-18
By: Barbara Neely
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The Book of Essie
- A Novel
- By: Meghan MacLean Weir
- Narrated by: Robbie Daymond, Tara Sands, Erin Spencer
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Esther Ann Hicks - Essie - is the youngest child on Six for Hicks, a reality television phenomenon. She's grown up in the spotlight, both idolized and despised for her family's fire-and-brimstone brand of faith. When Essie's mother, Celia, discovers that Essie is pregnant, she arranges an emergency meeting with the show's producers: Do they sneak Essie out of the country for an abortion? Do they pass the child off as Celia's? Or do they try to arrange a marriage - and a ratings-blockbuster wedding?
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Hope for the future 💗
- By Amazon Customer on 06-23-18
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Falling Together
- A Novel
- By: Marisa de los Santos
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s been six years since Pen Calloway watched her best friends walk out of her life. And through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them. Pen, Cat, and Will met on their first day of college and formed what seemed like a magical and lifelong bond, only to see their friendship break apart amid the realities of adulthood. When, after years of silence, Cat - the bewitching, charismatic center of their group - e-mails Pen and Will with an urgent request to meet at their college reunion, they can’t refuse.
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Narrator's breathy voice a turn off
- By Amy on 10-16-11
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The Precious One
- A Novel
- By: Marisa de los Santos
- Narrated by: Abby Craden, Arielle DeLisle
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In all her life, Eustacia "Taisy" Cleary has given her heart to only three men: her first love, Ben Ransom; her twin brother, Marcus; and Wilson Cleary - professor, inventor, philanderer, self-made millionaire, brilliant man, breathtaking jerk, her father. Seventeen years ago Wilson ditched his first family for Caroline, a beautiful young sculptor. In all that time, Taisy's family has seen Wilson, Caroline, and their daughter, Willow, only once.
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Another hit
- By Tina on 04-03-15
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The Leftovers
- By: Tom Perrotta
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What if - whoosh, right now, with no explanation - a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down? That’s what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out. Because nothing has been the same since it happened - not marriages, not friendships, not even the relationships between parents and children.
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The title is the best part
- By Pamela Harvey on 09-03-11
By: Tom Perrotta
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How I Paid for College
- A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater
- By: Marc Acito
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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From syndicated humor columnist Marc Acito comes a wildly inventive and hysterically funny novel that is equal parts Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fame, Risky Business, Dead Poets Society, and The Catcher in the Rye.
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Funny funny funny
- By Lee on 10-06-04
By: Marc Acito
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The Nest
- By: Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a 19-year-old waitress as his passenger.
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Couldn't get through it.
- By E. Bullock on 05-19-16