
The Cookbook Collector
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Ariadne Meyers
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By:
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Allegra Goodman
About this listen
Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times best-selling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.
Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, 23-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much - as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.
Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: Love that stays.
©2010 Allegra Goodman (P)2010 Random HouseListeners also enjoyed...
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On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.
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Reese Witherspoon choice
- By L. T. Gerhardt on 07-06-24
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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
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After Annie
- A Novel
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Gilli Messer
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Annie Brown dies suddenly, her husband, her children, and her closest friend are left to find a way forward without the woman who has been the lynchpin of all their lives. Bill is overwhelmed without his beloved wife, and Annemarie wrestles with the bad habits her best friend had helped her overcome. And Ali, the eldest of Annie’s children, has to grow up overnight, to care for her younger brothers and even her father and to puzzle out for herself many of the mysteries of adult life. Over the course of the next year what saves them all is Annie.
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Quindlen’s latest
- By Anonymous User on 03-03-24
By: Anna Quindlen
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Broken Country
- By: Clare Leslie Hall
- Narrated by: Hattie Morahan
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.
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Excellent storytelling
- By A.E.C. on 03-15-25
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Black Woods, Blue Sky
- A Novel
- By: Eowyn Ivey
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature. Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for.
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Loved it!
- By MissPitt on 04-18-25
By: Eowyn Ivey
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Last Twilight in Paris
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- Narrated by: Thérèse Plummer, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she discovers a necklace in a box at a secondhand shop. The box is marked with the name of a department store in Paris, and she is certain she has seen the necklace before, when she worked with the Red Cross in Nazi-occupied Europe—and that it holds the key to the mysterious death of her friend Franny during the war. Following the trail of clues to Paris, Louise seeks help from her former boss Ian, with whom she shares a romantic history.
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Not Her Best!
- By M. Ryder on 02-20-25
By: Pam Jenoff
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Wild Dark Shore
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- Unabridged
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Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.
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Please speak up!
- By Sarah on 03-12-25
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Magical Midlife Madness
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- Narrated by: Nicole Poole
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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"Happily Ever After" wasn't supposed to come with a do-over option. But when my husband of 20 years packs up and heads for greener pastures, and my son heads away to college, that's exactly what my midlife becomes. A do-over. This time, though, I plan to do things differently. Age is just a number, after all, and at 40 I'm ready to carve my own path. Eager for a fresh start, I make a somewhat unorthodox decision and move to a tiny town in the Sierra foothills.
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NOoOOooo! It's Over
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By: K.F. Breene
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Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
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- Narrated by: Jesse Vilinsky
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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For much of her life, Sally Holt has been mystified by the things her older sister, Kathy, seems to have been born knowing. Kathy has answers for all of Sally’s questions about life, about love, and about Billy Barnes, a rising senior and local basketball star who mans the concession stand at the town pool. The girls have been fascinated by Billy ever since he jumped off the roof in elementary school, but Billy has never shown much interest in them until the summer before Sally begins eighth grade.
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Mom said, dad said, Billy said
- By A. Thompson on 03-02-25
By: Alison Espach
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The Life Impossible
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- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.
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I LOVE this book!
- By Heidi M. Funk on 09-09-24
By: Matt Haig
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Famous Last Words
- A Novel
- By: Gillian McAllister
- Narrated by: Emilia Fox
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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It is June 21st, the longest day of the year, and new mother Camilla’s life is about to change forever. After months of maternity leave, she will drop her infant daughter off at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. Finally. But, when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note. Then it starts. Breaking news: there's a hostage situation developing in London. The police arrive, and tell her Luke is involved. But he isn't a hostage. Her husband—doting father, eternal optimist—is the gunman.
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Not my favorite
- By Brian D Loeffler on 03-13-25
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The Booklover's Library
- By: Madeline Martin
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots’ Booklover’s Library to take a chance on her with a job.
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excellent & historically accurate.
- By Kindle Customer on 10-19-24
By: Madeline Martin
What listeners say about The Cookbook Collector
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ivi Robonson
- 10-11-19
Wonderful , and Captivating
loved it.! very detailed. loved the narrator. wasn't what I thought but loved the book anyway
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- Debra Johnson
- 08-04-12
I really wanted to like this book.
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
I enjoyed the plot, although the climax of the novel can be seen from many miles away.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Ariadne Meyers?
The narration had a negative effect on my enjoyment of this book. To be specific, it was the voices for the male characters. The vocal placement was unnecessarily dropped and scratchy for one character, while Emily's friend with a degree from MIT sounded like a surfer dude.
Was The Cookbook Collector worth the listening time?
Sadly, not really. Parts are extremely engaging.
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- Birdy
- 12-10-22
Predictable
Every single character felt like a trope, predictable and with just enough character depth to thing “oh the author googled that.”
Despite that I did enjoy the story!
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- Anonymous User
- 07-17-12
Loved this story!
This book has a cast of very contrasting characters with opposite stories and lives that eventually interweave and come together for a very satisfying read. I had a very hard time getting used to the narrator as she made the lead female characters sound like they were whiney thirteen year olds. Enjoyable from start to finish.
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- D. Evans
- 09-28-11
Enjoyed the story, the narrator - not as much
I enjoyed the story overall. It was a story of love and loss. It also included a fictionalized history of the dot com boom and crash, and it's a love letter to antique books. As a computer person and lover of antique and classic books myself, it kept my interest. The description of the books made me want to find an antique book store!
The narrator was ok. She did a pretty good job creating different voices for the characters, however her voice sounded somewhat young girlish, and it was distracting to me at some points.
It's always a little strange when a male narrator tries to create a female character and a female tries to create a male, but in this case, it was a bit more annoying because of her voice in general.
She wasn't as good as Martin Jarvis when he reads Dickens, but she wasn't terrible either.
I'd recommend this audiobook to anyone interested in a good love story
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- gwt80
- 01-17-13
Slight & souless, although well witten
Is there anything you would change about this book?
While there are important themes touched upon here, there is almost nothing at stake for the characters, minimal interesting conflict (even between distinctly different sisters) and virtually no memorable insights.
Could you see The Cookbook Collector being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?
It would play best in animation, a Saturday morning cartoon of "lost girls finds themselves."
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 08-16-10
Just MAHvelous!
I remember Allegra Goodman from "Intuition", which I thought was a darker, more deeply layered novel than "The Cookbook Collector". I thought Goodman's first novel had more mystery and more seriously conflicted characters, and the core group was science-based instead of the technology startup boom in 2000, not that the latter observation is enough in itself to blame or praise a novel. However, I found this novel overdone with "stuff" - overstuffed? - just way too filled up with things: technology, money, cars, rare books, clothes, food, "happiness", whatever that means, and of course all the brand names that go with all the stuff. The pairing of the "hot" old wealthy guy (loaded with brilliance, musical and culinary talent in addition to dollars) with the naive young girl with no visible means of support is just another 2010 version of an old, tired cliche. I also thought the old guy seemed a bit shallow - and of course he's toned and fit because of his daily runs - in spite of his diverse interests. The only thing that really saves the ending from terminal triteness is that no-one ends up pregnant to celebrate their new romance. But I could not give the book anything less than a five just because reading it felt like eating too much chocolate cake, despite the story line that deals sensitively with the pain and losses of 9/11. It's still really well-done. I just liked "Intuition" better.
The narrator has a quirk which takes some getting used to. I guess in an effort to add authenticity to dialogue, she pauses a bit, hesitates after reading the first word of a spoken sentence, as though the person is unsure of what he/she is saying, or is thinking out loud. It seems that too many of the characters speak this way, and after I noticed it, of course it bothered me even more. There is one character with severe anxiety and here perhaps the tic is appropriate, but for the most part the verbal patterns did not need to be there.
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17 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Freida
- 08-19-10
An engaging read
I have never taken time to review an Audible selection, but The Cookbook Collector really kept me listening and as the end approached it left me wanting more. Ms. Goodman interweaves multiple storylines with luminous writing. Well worth the expenditure of a credit and the investment of time to listen.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Beatriz
- 09-01-10
Love the book... nice written and read
Love the book.., although it was sometime predictable.., the characters and the story are well written.., a lot of romance and computers but it also reflects the dot com era that was lived by my generation
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2 people found this helpful
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- Brooks Smith
- 08-19-12
Good story; TERRIBLE "male" voices by female reade
What did you like best about this story?
characters; antiquarian book context.
If you could take any character from The Cookbook Collector out to dinner, who would it be and why?
George and Jess
Any additional comments?
The female reader's voice was very good for female characters; but was HORRIBLE for male characters!! This detracted from getting to know the male characters.
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