Gail Godwin has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 13 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Grief Cottage.
Grief Cottage
Summary
The haunting tale of a desolate cottage, and the hair-thin junction between this life and the next, from best-selling National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin. After his mother's death, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to live on a small South Carolina island with his great aunt, a reclusive painter with a haunted past. Aunt Charlotte, otherwise a woman of few words, points out a ruined cottage, telling Marcus she had visited it regularly after she'd moved there 30 years ago because it matched the ruin of her own life. Eventually she was inspired to take up painting so she could capture its utter desolation. The islanders call it 'Grief Cottage', because a boy and his parents disappeared from it during a hurricane 50 years before. Their bodies were never found, and the cottage has stood empty ever since. During his lonely hours while Aunt Charlotte is in her studio painting and keeping her demons at bay, Marcus visits the cottage daily, building up his courage by coming ever closer, even after the ghost of the boy who died seems to reveal himself. Full of curiosity and open to the unfamiliar and uncanny given the recent upending of his life, he courts the ghost boy, never certain whether the ghost is friendly or follows some sinister agenda. Grief Cottage is the best sort of ghost story, but it is far more than that - an investigation of grief, remorse, and the memories that haunt us. The power and beauty of this artful novel wash over the listener like the waves on a South Carolina beach.
©2017 Gail Godwin (P)2017 Audible, Ltd
First Words
Summary
Most kids write stories. Only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. But before there was Carrie, there was Johnathan and the Witchs. And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota Dealer, there was Manuel Cirarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia? Here is a funny and surprisingly informative gathering of childhood creations by today's most celebrated writers - those who are amused by and happy to share their own early efforts. These young writers are the same people who now dominate the best seller lists and occupy the most celebrate spots on bookshelves in our stores, libraries and homes. Authors include Margaret Atwood, Roy Blount Jr., Pat Conroy, Gail Godwin, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, Amy Tan, John Updike, Gore Vidal, and Paul Mandelbaum (editor).
©2009 Phoenix (P)2009 Phoenix
Publishing
Summary
Publishing is a personal story of a writer's hunger to be published, the pursuit of that goal, and then the long haul - for Gail Godwin, 45 years of being a published writer and all that goes with it. A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1958, Godwin met with Knopf scouts who came to campus every spring in search of new talent. Though her five pages of Windy Peaks were turned down and the novel never completed, she would go on to publish two story collections and 14 novels, three of which were National Book Award finalists, five of which were New York Times best sellers. Publishing reflects on the influence of her mother's writing hopes and accomplishments, and recalls Godwin's experiences with teachers Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Coover at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; with John Hawkins, her literary agent for five decades; with John Irving and other luminaries; and with her editors and publishers. Recollecting her long and storied career, Godwin maps the publishing industry over the last 50 years, a time of great upheaval and ingenuity. There have been memoirs about writing and memoirs about being an editor, but there is no other book quite like Publishing for aspiring writers and book lovers everywhere.
©2015 Gail Godwin (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Evenings at Five
Summary
Every evening at five o'clock, Christina and Rudy stopped work and began the ritual commonly known as Happy Hour. Rudy mixed Christina's drink with loving precision, the cavalier slosh of Bombay Sapphire over ice shards, before settling across from her in his Stickley chair with his glass of Scotch. They shared a love of language and music (she is an author, he a composer, after all), a delight in intense conversation, a fascination with popes, and nearly 30 years of life together. What did I think, that we had forever? muses Christina, seven months after Rudy's unexpected death. While coming to terms with her loss, and with the space that Rudy once inhabited, Christina reflects on their vibrant bond - with all its quirks, habits, and unguarded moments - as well as her passionate sorrow and her attempts to reposition herself and her new place in the very real world they shared. In this literary jewel, a bittersweet novella of absence and presence and the mysterious gap between them, Gail Godwin has performed a small miracle. In essence, Evenings at Five is a grief sonata for solo instrument transposed into words. Interwoven with meditations and movements, full of aching truths and a wicked sense of humor, it exquisitely captures the cyclical nature of commitment - and the eternal quality of a romance completed.
©2004 Gail Godwin (P)2012 Random House Audio
Old Lovegood Girls
Summary
Bloomsbury presents Old Lovegood Girls by Gail Godwin, read by Rosemary Benson. From the best-selling, award-winning author of Flora and Evensong comes the story of two remarkable women and the complex friendship between them that spans decades. When the dean of Lovegood Junior College for Girls decides to pair Feron Hood with Merry Jellicoe as roommates in 1958, she has no way of knowing the far-reaching consequences of the match. Feron, who has narrowly escaped from a dark past, instantly takes to Merry and her composed personality. Surrounded by the traditions and four-story Doric columns of Lovegood, the girls - and their friendship - begin to thrive. But underneath their fierce friendship is a stronger, stranger bond, one comprised of secrets, rivalry and influence - with neither of them able to predict that Merry is about to lose everything she grew up taking for granted and that their time together will be cut short. Ten years later, Feron and Merry haven’t spoken since college. Life has led them into vastly different worlds. But, as Feron says, once someone is inside your “reference aura”, she stays there forever. And when each woman finds herself in need of the other’s essence, that spark - that remarkable affinity, unbroken by time - between them is reignited, and their lives begin to shift as a result. Luminous and masterfully crafted, Old Lovegood Girls is the story of a powerful friendship between talented writers, two college friends who have formed a bond that takes them through decades of a fast-changing world, finding and losing and finding again the one friendship that defines them.
©2020 Gail Godwin (P)2020 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Flora
Summary
Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life. This darkly beautiful audiobook about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin's memorable novel of growing up, The Finishing School. With its house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can't undo.
©2013 Gail Godwin (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Queen of the Underworld
Summary
Here at last is the eagerly awaited new novel from New York Times best-selling author Gail Godwin. Queen of the Underworld is sweeping and sultry literary fiction, featuring a memorable young heroine and engaging characters whose intimate dramas interconnect with hers. In the summer of 1959, as Castro clamps down on Cuba and its first wave of exiles flees to the States to wait out what they hope to be his short-lived reign, Emma Gant, fresh out of college, begins her career as a reporter. Her fierce ambition and belief in herself are set against the stories swirling around her, both at the newspaper office and in her downtown Miami hotel, which is filling up with refugees. Emma's avid curiosity about life thrives amid the tropical charms and intrigues of Miami. While toiling at the news desk, she plans the fictional stories she will write in her spare time. She spends her nights getting to know the Cuban families in her hotel, and rendezvousing with her married lover, Paul Nightingale, owner of a private Miami Beach club. As Emma experiences the historical events enveloping the city, she trains her perceptive eye on the people surrounding her: a newfound Cuban friend who joins the covert anti-Castro training brigade, a gambling racketeer who poses a grave threat to Paul, and a former madam, still in her 20s, who becomes both Emma's obsession and her alter ego. Emma's life, like a complicated dance that keeps sweeping her off her balance, is suddenly filled with divided loyalties, shady dealings, romantic and professional setbacks, and, throughout, her adamant determination to avoid "usurpation" by others and remain the protagonist of her own quest.
©2006 Gail Goodwin (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
A Southern Family
Summary
This engrossing best-seller from Gail Godwin is a profound portrait of family life, rich in insight and psychological entanglements. Godwin takes us inside the hearts and minds of members of the Quick family, whose raw-edged emotions are stirred up by a visit home. An inexplicably violent death and painful confrontations leave every family member forever changed, but their pain ultimately leads to healing, understanding, and wisdom.
©1988 Gail Godwin (P)1988, 2014 Dove Audio, Phoenix Books
Unfinished Desires
Summary
From Gail Godwin, three-time National Book Award finalist and acclaimed New York Times best-selling author of Evensong and The Finishing School, comes a sweeping new novel of friendship, loyalty, rivalries, redemption, and memory. It is the fall of 1951 at Mount St. Gabriels, an all-girls school tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina. Tildy Stratton, the undisputed queen bee of her class, befriends Chloe Starnes, a new student recently orphaned by the untimely and mysterious death of her mother. Their friendship fills a void for both girls but also sets in motion a chain of events that will profoundly affect the course of many lives, including the girls' young teacher and the school's matriarch, Mother Suzanne Ravenel. Fifty years on, the headmistress relives one pivotal night, trying to reconcile past and present, reaching back even further to her own senior year at the school, where the roots of a tragedy are buried. In Unfinished Desires, a beloved author delivers a gorgeous new novel in which thwarted desires are passed on for generations and captures the rare moment when a soul breaks free.
©2010 Gail Godwin (P)2010 Random House
Selected Shorts
Summary
The cast of characters in this compilation is a menagerie of animals: cats, dogs, birds, even a dragon - and their owners. These stories look at the myriad of experiences, and adventures, that pet ownership can bring. Join a medieval scholar who discovers that not all mythical creatures are extinct, stalk the night with the Cat of Frankenstein, kick that caffeine habit with a class of kindergartners, dance along with a divorcée and her dog, and more!
©2007 Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2007 Symphony Space, Inc.