Marina Endicott has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 29 ratings. The most-rated is Good to a Fault.
Good to a Fault
Summary
Marina Endicott's critically and commercially beloved novel, published for the first time by Anchor Canada.
In a moment of self-absorption, Clara Purdy's life takes a sharp left turn when she crashes into a beat-up car carrying an itinerant family of six. The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident. Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband, and horrible grandmother into her own house - then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.
What, exactly, does it mean to be good? When is sacrifice merely selfishness? What do we owe in this life and what do we deserve? Marina Endicott looks at life and death through the compassionate lens of a born novelist: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.
©2010 Marina Endicott (P)2018 Anchor Canada
The Difference
Summary
2020 City of Edmonton Book Prize 2020 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction 2020 Georges Bugnet Award for Novel From one of our most critically acclaimed and beloved storytellers comes a sweeping novel set on board the Morning Light, a Nova Scotian merchant ship sailing through the south pacific in 1912. Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost 20 years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea returns to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay too embarks on a life-changing voyage to the other side of the world. At the heart of The Difference is a crystallizing moment in Micronesia: Thea, still mourning a miscarriage, forms a bond with a young boy from a remote island and takes him on board as her own son. Over time, the repercussions of this act force Kay, who considers the boy her brother, to examine her own assumptions - which are increasingly at odds with those of society around her - about what is forgivable and what is right. Inspired by a true story, Endicott shows us a now-vanished world in all its wonder, and in its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty, too. She also brilliantly illuminates our present time through Kay's examination of the idea of "difference" - between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs, and species. The Difference is a breathtaking novel by a writer with an astonishing ability to bring past worlds vividly to life while revealing the moral complexity of our own.
©2019 Marina Endicott (P)2019 Knopf Canada
The Little Shadows
Summary
Here is the eagerly anticipated new novel from a brilliant writer whose last book, Good to a Fault, was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is 16 when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous headstrong sprite Bella, who is 13. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but Marina Endicott’s genius is to show how the three girls slowly and steadily evolve into true artists even as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters - some of them charming charlatans, some of them unpredictable eccentrics, and some of them just ordinary-seeming humans with magical gifts. Using her gorgeous prose and extraordinary insight, Endicott lures us onto the brightly lit stage and then into the little shadows that lurk behind the curtain, and reveals how the art of vaudeville - in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity, and sorrow - echoes the art of life itself. A Globe and Mail Best Book
©2011 Marina Endicott (P)2018 Anchor Canada
Close to Hugh
Summary
This witty and compassionate national best seller shows us how two generations in a seemingly ordinary small town navigate extraordinary rites of passage during a single, fateful week in autumn.
Close to Hugh is a glorious, exuberant, poignant comic novel about youth and age, art and life, love and death - and about losing your mind and finding your heart's desire over the course of seven days one September.
As the week opens, 50-something Hugh Argylle, owner of the Argylle Art Gallery, has a jarring fall from a ladder - a fall that leaves him with a fractured off-kilter vision of his own life and the lives of his friends, who are going through crises (dying parents; disheveled marriages; wilting businesses) that leave them despairing, afraid, one half-step from going under emotionally or financially. Someone's going to have to fix all that, thinks Hugh - and it will probably be him.
With exquisite insight and surefooted mastery, Endicott manages something surprising: to show us, with an unerring ear for the different cadences and concerns of both generations, two sets of friends on the cusp of simultaneous reinvention. And, as always in Endicott's wonderful fictional worlds, underpinning the sharp comedy and keenly observed drama is something more profound: a rare and rich perspective on what it means to rise and fall and rise again, and what in the end we owe those we love.
©2015 Marina Endicott (P)2019 Anchor Canada