
How the Light Gets In
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Joyce Maynard
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By:
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Joyce Maynard
About this listen
From New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard comes the eagerly anticipated follow-up to her beloved novel Count the Ways—a complex story of three generations of a family and its remarkable, resilient, indomitable matriarch, Eleanor.
Following the death of her former husband, Cam, fifty-four-year-old Eleanor has moved back to the New Hampshire farm where they raised three children to care for their brain-injured son, Toby, now an adult. Toby’s older brother, Al, is married and living in Seattle with his wife; their sister, Ursula, lives in Vermont with her husband and two children. Although all appears stable, old resentments, anger, and bitterness simmer just beneath the surface.
How the Light Gets In follows Eleanor and her family through fifteen years (2010 to 2024) as their story plays out against a uniquely American backdrop and the events that transform their world (climate change, the January 6th insurrection, school violence) and shape their lives (later-life love, parental alienation, steadfast friendship). With her trademark sensitivity and insight, Joyce Maynard paints an indelible portrait of characters both familiar and new making their way over rough, messy, and treacherous terrain to find their way to what is, for each, a place to call “home.”
©2024 Joyce Maynard (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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good
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Overall
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Performance
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good
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Loved this Book!
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Loved this book!
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Appearances, words and actions can be deceiving
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By: Joyce Maynard
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The Bird Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Joyce Maynard
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After a childhood filled with heartbreak, Irene, a talented artist, finds herself in a small Central American village where she checks into a beautiful but decaying lakefront hotel called La Llorona at the base of a volcano.
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-
Review of ‘The Bird Hotel’.
- By g. marks on 11-13-23
By: Joyce Maynard
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The Best of Us
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- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Joyce Maynard
- Length: 12 hrs and 36 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 2011, when she was in her late 50s, beloved author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn't mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of. Then, just after their one-year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
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Endearing and Heartbreaking Sister Bond
- By tooonce72 on 09-21-13
By: Joyce Maynard
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The Usual Rules
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Amanda Friday
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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It's a Tuesday morning in Brooklyn - a perfect September day. Wendy is heading to school, eager to make plans with her best friend, worried about how she looks, mad at her mother for not letting her visit her father in California. An hour later comes the news: A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center - her mother's office building. Through the eyes of Wendy, we gain entrance to the world rarely shown by those who documented the events of that one terrible day: a family's slow and terrible realization that Wendy's mother has died, and their struggle to go on with their lives.
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Narration ruined a good book
- By Susie Q on 05-17-23
By: Joyce Maynard
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To Die For
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Piper Goodeve, Carly Robins, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Local weather reporter Suzanne Maretto craves nothing more than to transcend life at her suburban cable television news station and follow in the footsteps of her idol: Barbara Walters. When she concludes that her unglamorous husband is getting in the way of her dream of stardom, the solution seems obvious: Get rid of him. She seduces a 15-year-old admirer, Jimmy, and persuades him to do her dirty work. Mission accomplished, Suzanne takes to the airwaves in her new role as grieving widow, in search of a TV deal. If that means selling Jimmy down the river, she’s ready.
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Great movie, even better book
- By RueRue on 12-19-23
By: Joyce Maynard
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The Cloud Chamber
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Joel Johnstone
- Length: 5 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The minute the school bus carrying Nate Chance and his little sister, Junie, pulls up in front of his family's farmhouse, Nate can tell something's terribly wrong: Somehow his father has been wounded by a gunshot. Nate sees him stagger across the yard, then watches as the police take him away.
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good
- By Steven on 11-10-05
By: Joyce Maynard
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Internal Combustion
- The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Janey Ivey
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On Mother's Day night, 2004, award-winning fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left the Tudor home she shared with her husband of 32 years in the gated community of Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer.
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Gripping account of a gruesome murder in an average middle class neighborhood
- By NRo on 10-30-24
By: Joyce Maynard
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Looking Back
- A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties
- By: Joyce Maynard
- Narrated by: Joyce Maynard
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Joyce Maynard was 18 years old when her 1972 New York Times Magazine cover story catapulted her to national prominence. Published one year later, Looking Back is her remarkable follow-up—part memoir, part cultural history, and part social critique. She wrote about diving under her desk for air-raid practice during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and catching the first glimpse (on the cover of Life magazine) of a human fetus in utero.
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The Story of My Life!
- By Sharlotte on 02-26-24
By: Joyce Maynard
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Left on Tenth
- A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir
- By: Delia Ephron
- Narrated by: Delia Ephron
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She’d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry’s death, she decided to make one small change in her life - she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell.
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Cover to cover in a day
- By Ginny Kubek on 04-24-22
By: Delia Ephron
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The Coast Road
- A Novel
- By: Alan Murrin
- Narrated by: Jessica Regan
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in 1994, The Coast Road tells the story of two women—Izzy Keaveney, a housewife, and Colette Crowley, a poet. Colette has left her husband and sons for a married man in Dublin. When she returns to her home in County Donegal to try to pick up the pieces of her old life, her husband, Shaun, a successful businessman, denies her access to her children.
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Fabulous
- By Suzanna on 06-13-24
By: Alan Murrin
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The Champagne Letters
- By: Kate MacIntosh
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Jackie Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In present day Chicago, broken from her divorce, Natalie Taylor runs away to Paris. In a book stall by the Seine, Natalie finds a collection of the Widow Clicquot’s published letters and uses them as inspiration to step out of her comfort zone and create a new, empowered life for herself. But when her Parisian escape takes a shocking and unexpected turn, she’s forced to make a choice. Should she accept her losses and return home, or fight for the future she’s only dreamed about? What would the widow do?
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Stunning
- By Erryn Barratt on 12-21-24
By: Kate MacIntosh
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Rabbit Moon
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Haigh
- Narrated by: Katharine Chin, Yu-Li Alice Shen
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
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That it was mostly set on china.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-17-25
By: Jennifer Haigh
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We All Live Here
- A Novel
- By: Jojo Moyes
- Narrated by: Jenna Coleman
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Lila Kennedy has a lot on her plate. A broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart, and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in. Her career is in freefall and her love life is . . . complicated. So when her real dad—a man she has barely seen since he ran off to Hollywood thirty-five years ago—suddenly appears on her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But it turns out even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you: about love, and what it actually means to be family.
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Sad
- By C. J. Kromminga on 02-12-25
By: Jojo Moyes
What listeners say about How the Light Gets In
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- Elizabeth Ratner
- 02-09-25
Perfection!
Until this profoundly beautiful novel, the prequel - Count the Ways - was one of my all time favorite books. It is possible that When the Light Gets In is even better. Joyce Maynard presents an inspirational, yet human, mother in the character of Eleanor. As in Count the Ways, Eleanor is a creative, loving mother with talents ranging from canning tomatoes and making spaghetti Carbonara to writing and illustrating children’s books all while energetically raising her 3 children who are adults in this novel. There is a daughter who is estranged from Eleanor, a son who was brain injured in childhood, and a brilliant and kind transgender son. There is a love affair with a narcissistic climate activist who cannot accept that, at her core, Eleanor is a mother. I was in awe of this mother. Her sweet son, Toby, has a large role in the story. For this I was so grateful as he is a purely good soul. The story is read with perfect sensitivity by the author herself. This usually worries me as such narrations often strike me as inherently arrogant. Not so with Joyce Maynard. She could be a trained narrator of Audible books! My only complaint- and it was somewhat substantial until I was more fully immersed — was the amount of time spent catching the reader/listener up on all that occurred in the prequel. So don’t listen to When the Light Gets In until a period of time has passed since finishing Count the Ways. Eventually, though, I was so in love with this beautiful book and its characters that I wanted it to never end.
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- Nancy E. Reuben, MD
- 09-02-24
Breathtaking
I loved everything about this book: the writing, the story, the timeline including true events, the narration.
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- Robyn Som
- 07-14-24
Many interesting characters
Though at times I felt the book became a bit repetitive the story always brought me back. There was always a turn or a twist to make me want to keep listening to see what would happen in the life of one or another of the people. The book is long but I do highly recommend it.
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- Scarlett O'Hara
- 10-29-24
Fully developed, touchingly human characters.
In brief, I loved the metaphor of light filtering through the broken places in the lives of most of the characters. Loss, grief, perseverance, quiet contentment, moments of joy: all pieces that somehow cohere. The glue is love. This is truly an uplifting book.
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- Susie Q
- 10-12-24
I never miss a Joyce Maynard book!
This was a beautiful story and I agree with others who said that while it is a sequel it could be a stand alone book as well.
I always love her characters and she's a great narrator. She creates people so real that you feel you really know them. I loved it.
There is some political stuff in it but since I agree with everything she said it didn't bother me. However, I'm not sure it's a good idea because most people who read fiction want to get away from the real world. I get it. But I'm not a writer so I don't know.
I adore Joyce Maynard! A huge fan here, thank you!
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- Sorenson
- 10-20-24
the will touch your heart.
wonderful...will reread..love this on so many levels.
look forward to giving this to a friend.
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- Jill Wayne
- 07-06-24
Loved this book!
Count the Ways was a fabulous read—but I don’t think you need to read it before this one. Wonderful story and the weaving in of real current events during the story was a plus. Love her books!
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- Beth
- 07-29-24
Powerful as always
Maynard has this magical way of pulling you into her story and never letting you go. She captures the tiny details of life with absolute perfection! As always she reads her books with a rhythm and cadence that is intimate and engrossing.
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- Teanut
- 07-12-24
Exceeded my expectations!
Loved, loved the narration by the author, Joyce Maynard! Loved the story and how it flowed so beautifully from her previous novel. Read it… you won’t be disappointed.
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- Mrs S
- 07-24-24
Rewarding sequel
I loved Joyce Maynard’s novel Count the Ways. And this sequel continues to follow Eleanor as she moves into middle age… the challenges of mothering her grown children, finding her footing in her career and romantic relationships, all within the backdrop of social and political events of recent decades.
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