Peter Cameron has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.
Andorra
Summary
For mysterious reasons, a man forsakes his American life and arrives in a strange country called Andorra. He settles into the grand - and only - hotel in its seaside capital and gradually makes the acquaintance of this tiny city's most prominent residents: the ancient Mrs. Reinhardt, who has a lifetime lease on the penthouse in the hotel; Sophonsobia Quay, the kayaking matriarch of an Andorran dynasty; and the Ricky Dents, an Australian couple who share a first name, a gigantic dog, and a volatile secret. As the stranger reveals himself to his new friends and becomes entangled in their lives, the mystery of his own origin deepens. What is he hiding, and why? And when a mutilated dead body appears in the harbor, everyone is a suspect, including our narrator. Part thriller, part comedy of manners, part surrealistic dream, Andorra is "a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination...a nearly perfect book" (Robert Drake, The Philadelphia Inquirer).
©1997 Peter Cameron (P)2017 Random House Audio
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
Summary
James Sveck, 18-year-old New Yorker, charming, precocious, confused, doesn't quite fit in (doesn't really want to).... If his future (i.e., college) seems completely meaningless, not to mention terrifying.... Then: he'll start anew (move to the Midwest?). James Sveck is misunderstood by a capricious mother, a self-absorbed father, a mordant older sister, his Teutonic therapist, his D-list celebrity grandmother, his unnervingly attractive art gallery colleague.... If: What one wants is enigmatic.... Then: Life can be hell. But: as the summer gets hotter, James comes to recognize the wrenching truth of his emotions. James archly comic bravado fuels this sharply observed novel of a teen adrift in an adult world, struggling to make sense of the problems of love and of lack. The engaging voice of our idiosyncratic antihero is deftly captured by the adroit prose of Peter Cameron. Often hilarious, deeply compassionate, smart, and lyrical, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is every bit as sui generis as James Sveck himself.
©2008 Peter Cameron (P)2008 Listening Library
What Happens at Night
Summary
This atmospheric, suspenseful story of a couple staying in a fading, grand European hotel as they struggle to adopt a baby "finds its home among the mid-twentieth-century classics of psychological realism, as brutal, in its way, as The Sheltering Sky, and just as memorable, just as peopled with the deep human mysteries" (Rick Moody). In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child. The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open, the restaurant serves thirteen-course dinners from centuries past, and the doors of the guest rooms have been salvaged from demolished opera houses. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavored schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself. What Happens at Night is a "masterpiece" (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by "an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).
©2020 Peter Cameron. (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Coral Glynn
Summary
Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House, an isolated manse in the English countryside, early in the very wet spring of 1950, to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart. Hart House is also inhabited by a perpetually disgruntled housekeeper and Major Clement Hart, Mrs. Hart's war-ravaged son, who is struggling to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. When a child's game goes violently awry in the woods surrounding Hart House, a great shadow - love, perhaps - descends upon its inhabitants. Like the misguided child's play, other seemingly random events propel Coral and Clement into the dark thicket of marriage. Coral Glynn explores how quickly need and desire can blossom into love, and just as quickly transform into something less categorical.
©2012 Peter Cameron (P)2012 Dreamscape Media, LLC