Ann Packer has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 12 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is The Dive from Clausen's Pier.
The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Summary
The Dive from Clausen's Pier reminds us how fragile our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after. It begins with a disaster that could happen in anybody's life, and leaves us to asking what we know about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen's Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.
©2002 Ann Packer (P)2002 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
The Children's Crusade
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling, award-winning author of The Dive From Clausen's Pier, a sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family over the course of five decades. Bill Blair finds the land by accident - three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems compelling and answerable, and they marry and have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife at a time when women chafed at the conventions imposed on them. She finds salvation in art, but the cost is high. Thirty years later the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family's future. One by one the siblings take turns telling the story - Robert, a doctor like their father; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; Ryan, a schoolteacher; and James, the malcontent, the problem child, the only one who hasn't settled down - their narratives interwoven with portraits of the family at crucial points in their history. Reviewers have praised Ann Packer's "brilliant ear for character" (The New York Times Book Review), her "naturalist's vigilance for detail, so that her characters seem observed rather than invented" (The New Yorker), and the "utterly lifelike quality of her book's everyday detail" (The New York Times). Her talents are on dazzling display in The Children's Crusade, an extraordinary study in character, a rare and wise examination of the legacy of early life on adult children attempting to create successful families and identities of their own. This is Ann Packer's most deeply affecting book yet.
©2015 Ann E. Packer, Trustee of the Ann E. Packer Living Trust U/A/D 7/28/03. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster
Swim Back to Me
Summary
From Ann Packer, author of the New York Times best-selling novels The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and Songs Without Words, a collection of burnished, emotionally searing stories, framed by two unforgettable linked narratives that express the transformation of a single family over the course of a lifetime. A wife struggles to make sense of her husband’s sudden disappearance. A mother mourns her teenage son through the music collection he left behind. A woman shepherds her estranged parents through her brother’s wedding and reflects on the year her family collapsed. A young man comes to grips with the joy - and vulnerability - of fatherhood. And, in the masterly opening novella, two teenagers from very different families forge a sustaining friendship, only to discover the disruptive and unsettling power of sex. Ann Packer is one of our most talented archivists of family life, with its hidden crevasses and unforeseeable perils, and in these stories she explores the moral predicaments that define our social and emotional lives, the frailty of ordinary grace, and the ways in which we are shattered and remade by loss. With Swim Back to Me, she delivers shimmering psychological precision, unfailing intelligence, and captivating drama: her most enticing work yet.
©2011 Ann Packer (P)2011 Random House Audio
The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Summary
A riveting novel about loyalty and self-knowledge and the conflict between who we want to be to others and who we must be for ourselves. Carrie Bell has lived in Wisconsin all her life. She's had the same best friend, the same good relationship with her mother, the same boyfriend - Mike, now her fiancé - for as long as anyone can remember. It's with real surprise she finds that, at age 23, her life has begun to feel suffocating. She longs for a change, an upheaval, a chance to begin again. That chance is granted to her, terribly, when Mike is injured in an accident. Now Carrie has to question everything she thought she knew about herself and the meaning of home. She must ask: How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or of weakness to walk away from someone in need? The Dive from Clausen's Pier reminds us how precarious our lives are and how quickly they can be divided into before and after, whether by random accident or by the forces of our own desires. It begins with a disaster that could happen out of the blue in anybody's life, and it forces us to ask how we would bear up in the face of tragedy and what we know, or think we know, about our deepest allegiances. Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen's Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.
©2002 Ann Packer (P)2015 Random House Audio