Nell Zink has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.2★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is Doxology.
Doxology
Summary
A recommended book of 2019 from Vulture and Esquire. Pam, Daniel, and Joe might be the worst punk band on the Lower East Side. Struggling to scrape together enough cash and musical talent to make it, they are waylaid by surprising arrivals - a daughter for Pam and Daniel, a solo hit single for Joe. As the ‘90s wane, the three friends share in one another’s successes, working together to elevate Joe’s superstardom and raise baby Flora. On September 11, 2001, the city’s unfathomable devastation coincides with a shattering personal loss for the trio. In the aftermath, Flora comes of age, navigating a charged political landscape and discovering a love of the natural world. Joining the ranks of those fighting for ecological conservation, Flora works to bridge the wide gap between powerful strategists and ordinary Americans, becoming entangled ever more intimately with her fellow activists along the way. And when the country faces an astonishing new threat, Flora’s family will have no choice but to look to the past - both to examine wounds that have never healed and to rediscover strengths they have long forgotten. At once an elegiac takedown of today’s political climate and a touching invocation of humanity’s goodness, Doxology offers daring revelations about America’s past and possible future that could only come from Nell Zink, one of the sharpest novelists of our time.
©2019 Nell Zink (P)2019 HarperAudio
Mislaid
Summary
Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start - she's a lesbian, he's gay - but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind. Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African-American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African-American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee's children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie must deal with his father's compulsive honesty while Karen struggles with her mother's lies - she knows neither her real age nor that she is white nor that she has any other family. Years later a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long-lost sibling will go, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.
©2015 Nell Zink (P)2015 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Nicotine
Summary
The "wonderfully talented" (Dwight Garner, New York Times) author of Mislaid returns with a fierce and audaciously funny novel of families - both the ones we're born into and the ones we create, a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership centered around a young woman who inherits her late bohemian father's childhood home. Recent business school graduate Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life - by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cultlike deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic "healing center". And she's never felt particularly close to her much older half-brothers from Norm's previous marriage - one wickedly charming and obscenely rich (but mostly just wicked), one a photographer on a distant tropical island. But all that changes when her father dies, and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming and who have renamed the property "Nicotine". The Nicotine residents (united in defense of smokers' rights) possess the type of passion and fervor Penny feels she's desperately lacking, and the other squatter houses in the neighborhood provide a sense of community she has never felt before. She soon moves into a nearby residence, becoming enmeshed in the political fervor and commitment of her fellow squatters. As the Baker family's lives begin to converge around the fate of the house now called Nicotine, Penny grows ever bolder and more desperate to protect it - and its residents - until a fateful night when a reckless confrontation between her old family and her new one changes everything. Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between baby boomer idealism and millennial pragmatism, between the have-nots and want-mores, in a riotous yet tender novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.
©2016 Nell Zink (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers