Michele Hutchison - translator has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is The Discomfort of Evening.
The Discomfort of Evening
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize A stark and gripping tale of childhood grief from one of the most exciting new voices in Dutch literature Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother’s hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of “blush words” that aren’t in the Bible. One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family’s life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents’ suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of “the other side” and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her. A bestseller in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s radical debut novel The Discomfort of Evening offers listeners a rare vision of rural and religious life in the Netherlands. In it, they ask: In the absence of comfort and care, what can the mind of a child invent to protect itself? And what happens when that is not enough? With stunning psychological acuity and images of haunting, violent beauty, Rijneveld has created a captivating world of language unlike any other.
©2018 Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Translation © 2020 by Michele Hutchison. Epigraph quotations appear on: a statue of Maurice Gilliams in Antwerp (source unknown); from ‘Spring’ in The Collected Poems of Jan Wolkers, published as Verzamelde gedichten in 2008 by De Bezige Bij. (P)2020 Audible Ltd., all rights reserved.
An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew
Summary
A Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestseller. Two-time Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel names An American Princess as one of her favorite books of the year: “light and gracefully written, it dances through a century of history...” (The Guardian) Born to a pioneering family in Upstate New York in the late 1800s, Allene Tew was beautiful, impetuous, and frustrated by the confines of her small hometown. At eighteen, she met Tod Hostetter at a local dance, having no idea that the mercurial charmer she would impulsively wed was heir to one of the wealthiest families in America. But when he died twelve years later, Allene packed her bags for New York City. Never once did she look back. From the vantage point of the American upper class, Allene embodied the tumultuous Gilded Age. Over the course of four more marriages, she weathered personal tragedies during World War I and the catastrophic financial reversals of the crash of 1929. From the castles and châteaus of Europe, she witnessed the Russian Revolution and became a princess. And from the hopes of a young girl from Jamestown, New York, Allene Tew would become the epitome of both a pursuer and survivor of the American Dream.
©2015 Annejet van der Zijl (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2018 by Michele Hutchison.