Elizabeth Berg has 29 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 12 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 17 ratings. The most-rated is The Story of Arthur Truluv.
The Story of Arthur Truluv
Summary
A life-affirming novel about an unforgettable character, a wise and loving man whose humor and unconditional love create for himself and others second chances at happiness. Three people find their way back from loss and loneliness to a different kind of belonging in this deeply moving novel. Arthur, an old widower struggling to overcome his grief, meets Maddy, a troubled teenage girl who avoids school by hiding out where Arthur goes every day for lunch. The two strike up a friendship that draws them out of isolation. Maddy gives Arthur the name Truluv for his positive responses to every outrageous thing she says or does. When Arthur's nosy neighbor Lucille horns in on their friendship, they create an unconventional family, sometimes bickering but most often believing that life's most precious moments are sweeter when shared.
©2017 Elizabeth Berg (P)2017 Recorded Books
Night of Miracles
Summary
A delightful novel about surprising friendships, community, and the way small acts of kindness can change a life, from the best-selling author of The Story of Arthur Truluv. Lucille Howard is getting on in years, but she stays busy. Thanks to the inspiration of her dearly departed friend Arthur Truluv, she has begun to teach baking classes, sharing the secrets to her delicious classic Southern yellow cake, the perfect pinwheel cookies, and other sweet essentials. Her classes have become so popular that she's hired Iris, a new resident of Mason, Missouri, as an assistant. Iris doesn't know how to bake, but she needs to keep her mind off a big decision she sorely regrets. When a new family moves in next door and tragedy strikes, Lucille begins to look out for Lincoln, their son. Lincoln's parents aren't the only ones in town facing hard choices and uncertain futures. In these difficult times, the residents of Mason come together and find the true power of community - just when they need it the most. A heartwarming novel that reminds us that the people we come to love are often the ones we don't expect.
©2018 Elizabeth Berg (P)2018 Recorded Books
Open House
Summary
Samantha Morrow's husband has left her, and now she must strive to reconstruct a life for herself and her 11-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tries to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. A new friend suggests that Samantha get out, get going, get work. But her real work is this: In order to emerge from grief and the past, she has to learn how to make her own happiness. And in order to know who she is, she has to remember - and reclaim - the person she used to be, long before she became someone else in an effort to save her marriage. Open House is the unforgettable story of how a woman re-creates her life after divorce by opening her house to strangers and her heart to the simple miracle of possibility.
©2000 Elizabeth Berg (P)2000 HighBridge Company
The Confession Club
Summary
An uplifting novel about friendship, surprising revelations, and a second chance at love, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Story of Arthur Truluv. When a group of friends in Mason, Missouri, decide to start a monthly supper club, they get more than they bargained for. The plan for congenial evenings - talking, laughing, and sharing recipes, homemade food, and wine - abruptly changes course one night when one of the women reveals something startlingly intimate. The supper club then becomes Confession Club, and the women gather weekly to share not only dinners but embarrassing misdeeds, deep insecurities, and long-held regrets. They invite Iris Winters and Maddy Harris to join, and their timing couldn't be better. Iris is conflicted about her feelings for a charming but troubled man, and Maddy has come back home from New York to escape a problem too big to handle alone. The club offers exactly the kind of support they need to help them make some difficult decisions. The Confession Club is charming, heartwarming, and inspiring. And as in the previous books that take place in Mason, listeners will find friendship, community, and kindness on full display.
©2019 Elizabeth Berg (P)2019 Recorded Books
I'll Be Seeing You
Summary
The beloved New York Times best-selling author tells the moving love story of caring for her parents in their final years in this beautifully written memoir. Elizabeth Berg’s father was an Army veteran who was a tough man in every way but one: He showed a great deal of love and tenderness to his wife. Berg describes her parents’ marriage as a romance that lasted for nearly 70 years; she grew up watching her father kiss her mother upon leaving home, and kiss her again the instant he came back. His idea of when he should spend time away from her was never. But then her father developed Alzheimer’s disease, and her parents were forced to leave the home they loved and move into a facility that could offer them help. It was time for their children to offer practical advice, emotional support, and direction, to the best of their abilities - to, in effect, parent the people who had for so long parented them. It was a hard transition, mitigated at least by flashes of humor and joy. The mix of emotions on everyone’s part could make every day feel like walking through a minefield. Then came redemption. I’ll Be Seeing You charts the passage from the anguish of loss to the understanding that even in the most fractious times, love can heal, transform, and lead to graceful - and grateful - acceptance.
©2020 Elizabeth Berg (P)2020 Recorded Books
Home Safe
Summary
The best-selling author of The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted and The Year of Pleasures returns with a wonderful novel about a woman, a daughter, and a surprising change in life.Beloved author Elizabeth Berg tells the story of the recently widowed Helen Ames and of her 27-year-old daughter Tessa. Helen is shocked to discover that her mild-mannered and loyal husband had been leading a double life. The Ames's had saved money for a happy retirement, planned in minute detail, but that money has disappeared in several big withdrawals, spent by Helen's husband before he died. What could he possibly have been doing? And what is Helen to do now? Why does Helen's daughter object to her mother's applying for a job, and why doesn't Tessa meet a nice man and get married?What Helen's husband did with all their money turns out to be provocative, revelatory, and leads Helen and her daughter to embark on new adventures, and change.
©2009 Elizabeth Berg (P)2009 Random House
Talk Before Sleep
Summary
What do you say when you know you don’t have forever? Ruth has been Ann’s closest friend for years - her confidante, her solace, her comic relief, her tutor in life’s mysterious ways. So when Ruth becomes ill, Ann is there for her without question. After all, it is Ruth who encouraged Ann to become who she is, Ruth whose rebellious, eccentric spirit provided the perfect counterpoint to Ann’s conventional, safe outlook. And so the friends go on as they always have…gossiping, consoling, and sharing intimate secrets - but with the knowledge that each shared evening could be their last.
©2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.; 2011 Elizabeth Berg
The Year of Pleasures
Summary
Betta Nolan moves to a small town after the death of her husband to try to begin life anew. Though still dealing with her sorrow, Betta nonetheless is determined to find pleasure in her simple daily routines. Among those who help her in both expected and unexpected ways are the ten-year-old boy next door, three wild women friends from her college days with whom she reconnects, a young man who is struggling to find his place in the world, and a handsome widower who is ready for love. Elizabeth Berg's The Year of Pleasures is about acknowledging the solace found in ordinary things: a warm bath, good food, the beauty of nature, music, and art. Above all, The Year of Pleasures is about the various kindnesses people can provide one another. Betta's journey from grief to joy is a meaningful reminder of what is available to us all, regardless of what fate has in store. This exquisite book suggests that no matter what we lose, life is ready to give bountifully to those who will receive.
©2006 Elizabeth Berg (P)2005 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Ordinary Life
Summary
In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into pivotal moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change. In “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together — and, no, she isn’t contemplating a divorce. She just needs some time to think, to take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion. In “White Dwarf” and “Martin’s Letter to Nan,” the secrets of a marriage are revealed with sensitivity and “brilliant insights about the human condition” (Detroit Free Press) that have become a trademark of Berg’s writing. The Charlotte Observer has said, “Berg captures the way women think as well as any writer.” Those qualities of wisdom and perception are everywhere present in Ordinary Life.
©2002 Elizabeth Berg (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
We Are All Welcome Here
Summary
It is the summer of 1964. In Tupelo, Mississippi, tensions are mounting over civil-rights demonstrations occurring ever more frequently - and violently - across the state. But in Paige Dunn's small, ramshackle house, there are more immediate concerns.
Challenged by the effects of the polio she contracted during her last month of pregnancy, Paige is nonetheless determined to live as normal a life as possible and to raise her daughter, Diana, in the way she sees fit - with the support of her tough-talking black caregiver, Peacie.
Diana is trying in her own fashion to live a normal life. As a 14-year-old, she wants to make money for clothes and magazines, to slough off the authority of her mother and Peacie, to figure out the puzzle that is boys, and to escape the oppressiveness she sees everywhere in her small town.
What she can never escape, however, is the way her life is markedly different from the lives of others. Nor can she escape her ongoing responsibility to assist in caring for her mother. Paige Dunn is attractive, charming, intelligent, and lively, but her needs are great - and relentless.
As the summer unfolds, hate and adversity will visit this modest home. Despite the difficulties thrust upon them, each of the women will find her own path to independence, understanding, and peace. And Diana's mother, so mightily compromised, will end up giving her daughter an extraordinary gift few parents could match.
©2006 Elizabeth Berg (P)2006 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Make Someone Happy
Summary
This is a collection of Elizabeth Berg's most-loved Facebook posts. She was asked by many to put these short essays into book form, to create something to "take to the beach, or bed, or on an airplane". Elizabeth and her friend, Phyllis Florin, happily complied, and they hope that their offering will be as welcome as flowers in a mailbox.
©2016 Elizabeth Berg (P)2017 Recorded Books
Range of Motion
Summary
"A simple but intensely moving story about the redemptive power of love…. [Elizabeth Berg is] a writer whose luminous prose is likely to stay with you a long, long time." —Chicago Tribune In this exquisite, emotionally rich novel, New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Berg offers a deeply satisfying story about the bonds of love and the balm of friendship. A young man named Jay lies in a coma after suffering a freak accident, and his wife, Lainey, is the only one who believes he will recover. She sits at his bedside, bringing him reminders of the ordinary life they shared: fragrant flowers, his children's drawings, his own softly textured shirt. When Lainey's faith in his recovery falters, she is sustained by two women, Alice and Evie, who teach her about the endurance of friendship - and the genuine power of hope. Filled with beautiful writing and truths about life, Range of Motion is compelling and impossible to forget.
©1995 Elizabeth Berg (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Still Happy
Summary
Still Happy is Elizabeth's second collection of Facebook posts. Her first, Make Someone Happy, did indeed make many people happy, and so, due to popular demand, she has put together a second volume, which includes "The Book of Homer", a tribute to her beloved dog who recently died. Still Happy, like Make Someone Happy, exemplifies Berg's gift, as the Boston Globe said, "in her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday."
©2017 Elizabeth Berg (P)2017 Recorded Books
Say When
Summary
Griffin is a happy man. Settled comfortably in a Chicago suburb, he adores his eight-year-old daughter, Zoe, and his shy wife, Ellen. Ellen is as dependable as she is dependent on him for his stability and his talent for gently controlling the world they inhabit. But when he wakes one morning to hear of his wife's love affair with another man and her request for a divorce, Griffin's view of life is irrevocably altered.
Overnight, he goes from being Ellen's husband to being her roommate, from a lover to a man denied passion and companionship. Now he must move on or fight for his marriage, forgive his wife or condemn her for her betrayal, deny or face up to his part in the sudden undoing of his seemingly perfect life.
From the New York Times best-selling author of Open House and True to Form comes a brilliant novel that charts the days and nights of a family whose normalcy has been shattered. With startling clarity and a trademark blend of humor and poignancy, Say When follows a man on an emotional journey to redefine his notions about love and happiness and asks questions relevant to any contemporary couple: when is a relationship worth saving and when is it better to let it go? Might a man and a woman define betrayal differently? How honest are we with those to whom we are ostensibly closest?
©2004 Elizabeth Berg (P)2004 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted
Summary
Exhilarating short stories of women breaking free from convention. Every now and then, right in the middle of an ordinary day, a woman rebels, kicks up her heels, and commits a small act of liberation. What would you do, if you were going to break out and away? Go AWOL from Weight Watchers and spend an entire day eating every single thing you want - and then some? Start a dating service for people over 50 to reclaim the razzle-dazzle in your life - or your marriage? Seek comfort in the face of aging, look for love in the midst of loss, find friendship in the most surprising of places? Imagine that the people in these wonderful stories - who do all of these things and more - are asking you, "What would you do, if nobody was looking?"
©2008 Elizabeth Berg (P)2008 Random House, Inc.
The Pull of the Moon
Summary
“Reading The Pull of the Moon is like sitting down for a long, satisfying chat with a best girlfriend... pleasantly encourages readers to recover a little life-embracing enthusiasm themselves.” (Orlando Sentinel) In the middle of her life, Nan decides to leave her husband at home and begin an impromptu trek across the country, carrying with her a turquoise leather journal she intends to fill. The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. In her journal, Nan addresses the thorniness - and the allure - of marriage, the sweet ties to children, and the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters with strangers, including a handsome man appearing out of the woods and a lonely housewife sitting on her front porch steps. Most of all, Nan writes about the need for the self to stay alive. In this luminous and exquisitely written novel, Elizabeth Berg shows how sometimes you have to leave your life behind in order to find it. "This is not a novel about a woman leaving home but rather about a human being finding her way back." (Chicago Tribune) “When was the last time you thought about running away? In The Pull of the Moon, Berg shares her strength, the wonderful widening of her soul so that we, too, can take the journey in the ease of our chair." (Greensboro News & Record) "Berg’s gift as a storyteller lies most powerfully in her ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, the remarkable in the everyday." (The Boston Globe)
©2010 Elizabeth Berg (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Durable Goods
Summary
On the hot Texas army base she calls home, Katie spends the lazy days of her summer waiting: waiting to grow up; waiting for Dickie Mack to fall in love with her; waiting for her breasts to blossom; waiting for the beatings to stop. Since their mother died, Katie and her older sister, Diane, have struggled to understand their increasingly distant, often violent father. While Diane escapes into the arms of her boyfriend, Katie hides in her room or escapes to her best friend’s house - until Katie’s admiration for her strong-willed sister leads her on an adventure that transforms her life. Written with an unerring ability to capture the sadness of growth, the pain of change, the nearly visible vibrations that connect people, this beautiful novel by the best-selling author of Open House reminds us how wonderful - and wounding - a deeper understanding of life can be.
©1993 Elizabeth Berg (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
The Last Time I Saw You
Summary
From the beloved best-selling author of Home Safe and The Year of Pleasures comes a wonderful new novel about women and men reconnecting with one another - and themselves - at their 40th high-school reunion. To each of the men and women in The Last Time I Saw You, this reunion means something different - a last opportunity to say something long left unsaid, an escape from the bleaker realities of everyday life, a means to save a marriage on the rocks, or an opportunity to bond with a slightly estranged daughter, if only over what her mother should wear. As the one-time classmates meet up over the course of a weekend, they discover things that will irrevocably affect the rest of their lives. For newly divorced Dorothy Shauman, the reunion brings with it the possibility of finally attracting the attention of the class heartthrob, Pete Decker. For the ever self-reliant, ever left-out Mary Alice Mayhew, it's a chance to reexamine a painful past. For Lester Heseenpfeffer, a veterinarian and widower, it is the hope of talking shop with a fellow vet - or at least that's what he tells himself. For Candy Armstrong, the class beauty, it's the hope of finding friendship before it is too late. As Dorothy, Mary Alice, Lester, Candy, and the other classmates converge for the reunion dinner, four decades melt away: Desires and personalities from their youth reemerge, and new discoveries are made. For so much has happened to them all. And so much can still happen. In this beautiful novel, Elizabeth Berg deftly weaves together stories of roads taken and not taken, choices made and opportunities missed, and the possibilities of second chances.
©2010 Elizabeth Berg (P)2010 Random House
The Dream Lover
Summary
A passionate and powerful novel based on the scandalous life of the French novelist George Sand, her famous lovers, untraditional Parisian lifestyle, and bestselling novels in Paris during the 1830s and 40s.
This major departure for bestseller Berg is for listeners of Nancy Horan and Elizabeth Gilbert.
George Sand was a 19th century French novelist known not only for her novels but even more for her scandalous behavior. After leaving her estranged husband, Sand moved to Paris where she wrote, wore men's clothing, smoked cigars, and had love affairs with famous men and an actress named Marie. In an era of incredible artistic talent, Sand was the most famous female writer of her time. Her lovers and friends included Frederic Chopin, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Liszt, Eugene Delacroix, Victor Hugo, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and more.
In a major departure, Elizabeth Berg has created a gorgeous novel about the life of George Sand, written in luminous prose, with exquisite insight into the heart and mind of a woman who was considered the most passionate and gifted genius of her time.
©2015 Elizabeth Berg (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Dream When You're Feeling Blue
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth Berg takes us to Chicago at the time of World War II in this wonderful story about three sisters, their lively Irish family, and the men they love. As the novel opens, Kitty and Louise Heaney say good-bye to their boyfriends Julian and Michael, who are going to fight overseas. On the domestic front, meat is rationed, children participate in metal drives, and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller play songs that offer hope and lift spirits. And now the Heaney sisters sit at their kitchen table every evening to write letters: Louise to her fiancé, Kitty to the man she wishes fervently would propose, and Tish to an ever-changing group of men she meets at USO dances. In the letters the sisters send and receive are intimate glimpses of life both on the battlefront and at home. For Kitty, a confident, headstrong young woman, the departure of her boyfriend and the lessons she learns about love, resilience, and war will bring a surprise and a secret, and will lead her to a radical action for those she loves. The lifelong consequences of the choices the Heaney sisters make are at the heart of this superb novel about the power of love and the enduring strength of family.
©2007 Elizabeth Berg (P)2007 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.