
The Beginning Place
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Narrated by:
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Rob Inglis
About this listen
Tembreabrezi is like Eden - a beginning place. There, Hugh and Irena assume they have merely discovered an escape from the dull monotony, even the terrors of their regular lives.
But Tembreabrezi has a secret, a dark fear that is threatening the very life-blood of the kingdom. Hugh and Irena were led there for a purpose, selected for an impossibly hopeless mission.
If they accept the challenge, they may lose everything - their new-found paradise, and possibly their lives.
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Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother - her only family - is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life.
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Not a case of Franzenfreude
- By Mel on 09-13-15
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Talon
- The Talon Saga, Book 1
- By: Julie Kagawa
- Narrated by: Caitlin Davies, MacLeod Andrews, Chris Patton
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Long ago, dragons were hunted to near extinction by the Order of St. George, a legendary society of dragon slayers. Hiding in human form and growing their numbers in secret, the dragons of Talon have becomestrong and cunning, and they're positioned to take over the world with humans none the wiser. Ember and Dante Hill are the only sister and brother known to dragonkind. Trained to infiltrate society, Ember wants to live the teen experience and enjoy a summer of freedom before taking her destined place in Talon.
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Doctor's Notes Review
- By Doctor's Notes on 12-28-14
By: Julie Kagawa
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Solar Express
- By: L. E. Modesitt Jr.
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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You can't militarize space. This one rule has led to decades of peaceful development of space programs worldwide. However, increasing resource scarcity and a changing climate on Earth's surface is causing some interested parties - namely India, the North American Union, and the Sinese Federation - to militarize. The discovery of a strange artifact by Dr. Alayna Wong precipitates a crisis. What appears to be a hitherto undiscovered comet is soon revealed to be an alien structure on a cometary trajectory toward the sun.
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I Really Enjoyed This -- Far More Than Expected
- By C. Hartmann on 11-11-15
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A Memoir of My Former Self
- A Life in Writing
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Anne Enright, Aurora Dawson-Hunte, Ben Miles, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.
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The writing. I would read the phone directory if Mantel wrote it. wonderful collection.
- By Anonymous User on 09-22-24
By: Hilary Mantel
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Index, a History of The
- A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age
- By: Dennis Duncan
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find "Butchers, to be avoided", or "Cows that shite Fire", or even catch "Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne". Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.
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Maybe a book that should be read rather than listened to
- By Amazon Customer on 11-09-22
By: Dennis Duncan
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Wind/Pinball
- Two Novels
- By: Haruki Murakami, Ted Goossen - translator
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1978, a young Haruki Murakami sat down at his kitchen table and began to write. The result: two remarkable short novels—Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973—that launched the career of one of the most acclaimed authors of our time. These powerful, at times surreal, works about two young men coming of age—the unnamed narrator and his friend the Rat—are stories of loneliness, obsession, and eroticism. They bear all the hallmarks of Murakami’s later books, and form the first two-thirds, with A Wild Sheep Chase, of the trilogy of the Rat.
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FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY: Extra Ball at 600,000 points
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-15
By: Haruki Murakami, and others
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Of Bone and Thunder
- A Novel
- By: Chris Evans
- Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn
- Length: 16 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In this strange, new world deep among the shadows under a triple-canopy jungle and plagued by dangers real and imagined, soldiers strive to fulfill a mission they don’t understand and are ill-equipped to carry out. And high above them, the heavy rush of wings slashing through the humid air herald a coming wave of death and destruction, and just possibly, salvation.
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Vietnam in Fantasyland
- By Michael D. Stuart on 04-19-25
By: Chris Evans
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The Lost for Words Bookshop
- A Novel
- By: Stephanie Butland
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Loveday Cardew prefers books to people. If you look carefully, you might glimpse the first lines of the novels she loves most tattooed on her skin. But there are some things Loveday will never, ever show you. Into her hiding place - the bookstore where she works - come a poet, a lover, and three suspicious deliveries. Someone has found out about her mysterious past. Will Loveday survive her own heartbreaking secrets?
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I thoroughly enjoyed this story.
- By Tammy on 11-09-18
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Middlegame
- By: Seanan McGuire
- Narrated by: Amber Benson
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story. Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math. Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realize it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet. Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan.
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Couldn't Finish
- By Amy Ferrantino on 05-22-19
By: Seanan McGuire
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La estirpe de Lilith [Lilith's Brood]
- Trilogía Xenogénesis [Xenogenesis Trilogy]
- By: Octavia E. Butler, Luis García Vigil - translator
- Narrated by: Juanita Delgado Jaramillo
- Length: 32 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Treinta años después de su primera publicación en castellano, La estirpe de Lilith, título que reúne la Trilogía Xenogénesis en un solo volumen, vuelve a las librerías dispuesta a reivindicar a Octavia E. Butler como la gran pionera que deslumbró en ciencia ficción siendo una mujer negra. Hoy se la considera la primera escritora afroamericana de género en incorporarse al canon de la literatura norteamericana.
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Excelente Voz y Narración
- By Silvia R. Arregoyte on 01-26-23
By: Octavia E. Butler, and others
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Zero Gravity
- By: Woody Allen
- Narrated by: Woody Allen
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Zero Gravity is the fifth collection of comic pieces by Woody Allen, a hilarious prose stylist whose enduring appeal has been savored since his classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, Side Effects, and Mere Anarchy. This new work combines pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker along with 11 written exclusively for this book, each a comic inspiration.
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Where’s the rest of the book?
- By Brett Dewing on 12-26-22
By: Woody Allen
What listeners say about The Beginning Place
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kara
- 10-20-24
Odd
It's a fantasy "coming of age" and "working through a traumatic past" style story. Not bad, but a bit awkward at times. Excellent narration.
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- Gayle Smoak Gibbs
- 10-08-23
The beginning place review
I love this story and although its not really typical of LeGuin, its a really good adventure story. I liked both the main characters, especially the boy, and I like the way the story ended. I would have liked a little more explanation of where the beginning place was and more details about the people. They’re not very nice to send two kids into danger without explaining anything to them. The atmosphere of the place is well established, the low light, the forests and the mountains.
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- starling01
- 03-09-21
Really needed an editor and some clear point
When I read this in 1979 I loved it (the magic I guess). I just reread it through audible and now have a completely different opinion. It's so seriously flawed that I can't understand why she wrote it except to publish something for some reason. The characters stumble on a magic town but have no curiosity about it. They have serious flaws and engage in unbelievable behavior. REALLY unbelievable behavior. Laughable and ridiculous. At least half the book is spent describing scenery. The big moment is rapidly discarded for more descriptions of scenery. Maybe she could have written it as a short story, limited the scenery to a few shrubs and some trees and included it in one of her collections. Maybe. I'm still a huge fan. Her prose and creativity are wonderful even when they're buried under the scenery. The narration was wonderful! Three stars because of the quality of the narration. Two stars because her prose is beautiful.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Marie
- 06-08-20
Not your typical LeGuin
An interesting story, spanning two worlds. Its different from most of LeGuin , but I enjoyed it. The reading was wonderful.
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2 people found this helpful
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- DP
- 08-15-23
An alright story with poor narration
The story here isn't one of the author's better works - it's not terrible, more just mediocre. The setup in the first half is the better material, unfortunately the latter half doesn't really pay off, and it falls into too many cliched story tropes.
Another issue is in the audio production, with a somewhat baffling choice of a British narrator for an American story, and in particular, one with an extremely dry, even stodgy delivery. It just feels completely unsuited for this particular story.
So, a mediocre story brought down by the narration choice, not a strong recommend.
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- Mark
- 03-25-24
not worth the time
Inglis is a great narrator, and the story is mildly interesting at the beginning but stopped not far into it because of unnecessary, inappropriate sexual content. Can't recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- J. Scott
- 10-21-23
I don’t get it
I don’t get this book. The overall plot ends up being nonsense. The themes in the book are simplistic, boring, and hammered home with a sledgehammer.
There are times when the prose is fine and times when it’s extremely awkward. The world is simple and hollow.
I can’t recommend.
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