André Alexis has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2,066 ratings. The most-rated is Fifteen Dogs.
Fifteen Dogs
Summary
"I wonder," said Hermes, "what it would be like if animals had human intelligence." "I'll wager a year's servitude," answered Apollo, "that animals - any animal you like - would be even more unhappy than humans are if they were given human intelligence." And so it begins: a bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old dog ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks. André Alexis' contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.
©2015 André Alexis (P)2016 ECW Press
Days by Moonlight
Summary
Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold indigenous parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches. Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf”, that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?
©2019 André Alexis (P)2019 Coach House Books
The Hidden Keys
Summary
Although the Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and solve the puzzle. A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, an aquavit bottle, a framed poem, and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before he can begin, he presses on. As he tracks down the treasure, however, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Wurfel, esteemed copyist, and fend off Willow's heroin dealers, a young albino named Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund 'Freud' Luxemburg, a clubfooted psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their paws on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend. Based on an interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honorable and what it means to be faithful.
©2016 André Alexis (P)2016 Coach House Books
Pastoral
Summary
Shortlisted for the Writers' Trust of Canada Fiction Prize One of The Globe and Mail's Globe 100: Best Books of 2014 There were plans for an official welcome. It was to take place the following Sunday. But those who came to the rectory on Father Pennant's second day were the ones who could not resist seeing him sooner. Here was the man to whom they would confess the darkest things. It was important to feel him out. Mrs. Young, for instance, after she had watched him eat a piece of her macaroni pie, quietly asked what he thought of adultery. André Alexis brings a modern sensibility and a new liveliness to an age-old genre, the pastoral. For his very first parish, Father Christopher Pennant is sent to the sleepy town of Barrow. With more sheep than people, it is sleepily bucolic - too much Barrow Brew on Barrow Day is the rowdiest it gets. But things aren't so idyllic for Liz Denny, whose fiancé doesn't want to choose between Liz and his more worldly lover Jane, or for Father Pennant himself, whose faith is profoundly shaken by the miracles he witnesses - a mayor walking on water, intelligent gypsy moths, and a talking sheep.
©2014 André Alexis (P)2017 Coach House Books
Ingrid and the Wolf
Summary
Like all of us, Ingrid wants to belong, especially to a family. Now, she does have parents whom she loves very much, but she has a sense that there is more to her past than she's been told. When the opportunity presents itself for her to visit Hungary, Ingrid takes it despite her parents' objections. What she finds in the old country is enchanting, gorgeous, and terrifying. Her legacy is nothing like she expected. It is a creature that is, by turns, loving and vicious. It is a wolf. Ingrid realizes that she is the caretaker of her unusual inheritance, like it or not. Award-winning author André Alexis delivers his storytelling skills to a new generation of readers and listeners in this, his first children's book.
©2005 Andre Alexis (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada
The Night Piece
Summary
A career-spanning collection of stories from the author of Fifteen Dogs, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and Canada Reads. Vivid, profound, moving, and with moments of sly humor, the stories in The Night Piece reveal worlds both familiar and deeply strange. Drawing from Alexis' acclaimed debut collection, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and the highly original Beauty and Sadness, and including previously uncollected stories, here is the surreal and brilliant short fiction of André Alexis - one of Canada's most extraordinary writers. With an afterword by Madeleine Thien
©1999 Andre Alexis (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada