Allen Lewis Rickman has narrated 5 audiobooks on Listento.it by 9 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is Good Citizens Need Not Fear.
Good Citizens Need Not Fear
Summary
"Bright, funny, satirical and relevant.... A new talent to watch" (Margaret Atwood) "These immersive linked stories grapple with Ukrainian history through the waning years of the USSR and birth pangs of democracy.... Reva's characters spark off the page as they confront a brutal bureaucratic past with the only tool they possess - hope." (O, The Oprah Magazine) A brilliant and bitingly funny collection of stories united around a single crumbling apartment building in Ukraine. A bureaucratic glitch omits an entire building, along with its residents, from municipal records. So begins Reva's "darkly hilarious" (Anthony Doerr) intertwined narratives, nine stories that span the chaotic years leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. But even as the benighted denizens of 1933 Ivansk Street weather the official neglect of the increasingly powerless authorities, they devise ingenious ways to survive. In "Bone Music", an agoraphobic recluse survives by selling contraband LPs, mapping the vinyl grooves of illegal Western records into stolen X-ray film. A delusional secret service agent in "Letter of Apology" becomes convinced he's being covertly recruited to guard Lenin's tomb, just as his parents, not seen since he was a small child, supposedly were. Weaving the narratives together is the unforgettable, chameleon-like Zaya: a cleft-lipped orphan in "Little Rabbit", a beauty-pageant crasher in "Miss USSR", a sadist-for-hire to the Eastern Bloc's newly minted oligarchs in "Homecoming". Good Citizens Need Not Fear tacks from moments of intense paranoia to surprising tenderness and back again, exploring what it is to be an individual amid the roiling forces of history. Inspired by her and her family's own experiences in Ukraine, Reva brings the black absurdism of early Shteyngart and the sly interconnectedness of Anthony Marra's Tsar of Love and Techno to a "bang-on brilliant" (Miriam Toews) collection that is "fearless and thrilling" (Bret Anthony Johnston), and as clever as it is heartfelt. "You've never read anything like them" (Elizabeth McCracken)
©2020 Maria Reva (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Kitchen Boy
Summary
Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia, Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinating story of the final days of Nicholas and Alexandra Romanov as seen through the eyes of their young kitchen boy, Leonka. Now an ancient Russian immigrant, Leonka claims to be the last living witness to the Romanovs' brutal murders and sets down the dark secrets of his past with the imperial family. Does he hold the key to the many questions surrounding the family's murder? Historically vivid and compelling, The Kitchen Boy is also a touching portrait of a loving family that was in many ways similar to yet so different from any other.
©2003 Robert Alexander (P)2018 Penguin Audio
Last Witnesses
Summary
"A masterpiece" (The Guardian) from the Nobel Prize-winning writer, an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II across Russia Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the 20th century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre," describing her work as "a history of emotions...a history of the soul." Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded - a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war. Alexievich gives voice to those whose memories have been lost in the official narratives, uncovering a powerful, hidden history from the personal and private experiences of individuals. Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Last Witnesses is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the 20th century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war. Praise for Last Witnesses "There is a special sort of clear-eyed humility to [Alexievich’s] reporting." (The Guardian) "A bracing reminder of the enduring power of the written word to testify to pain like no other medium.... Children survive, they grow up, and they do not forget. They are the first and last witnesses." (The New Republic) "A profound triumph." (The Big Issue) "[Alexievich] excavates and briefly gives prominence to demolished lives and eradicated communities.... It is impossible not to turn the page, impossible not to wonder whom we next might meet, impossible not to think differently about children caught in conflict." (The Washington Post)
©2019 Svetlana Alexievich (P)2019 Random House Audio
Blessing on the Moon
Summary
At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim’s troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim’s afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose consequences are far greater than he realizes. Not since Art Spiegelman’s Maus has a work so powerfully evoked one of the darkest moments of the 20th century with such daring originality.
©1997 Original material © 1997 Joseph Skibell. Recorded by arrangement with Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing Company, Inc. (P)2010 (P) 2010 HighBridge Company
Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted
Summary
A middle-aged Jewish man who fantasizes about being a cowboy goes on an eccentric quest across Europe after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lithuania in this wild and witty yet heartrending novel from the best-selling author of Yiddish for Pirates, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish, and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May - novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. In his dreams, Motl is a fast-talking, rugged, expert gunslinger capable of dealing with the Nazi threat. But only in his dreams. As friends and neighbors are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins. But they immediately risk everything to try rescue relatives they hope are still alive. With death all around him, Motl decides that a Jew's best revenge is not only to live, but to procreate. In order to achieve this, though, he must relocate those most crucial pieces of his anatomy lost to him in a glacier in the Swiss Alps in the previous war. It's an absurd yet life-affirming mission, made even more urgent when he's separated from his mother and isn't sure whether she's alive or dead. Joining forces, and eventually hearts, with Esther, a Jewish woman whose family has been killed, Motl ventures across Europe, a kaleidoscope of narrow escapes and close encounters with everyone from Himmler, to circus performers, double agents, quislings, fake "Indians", and real ones. Motl at last figures out that he has more connection to the Indigenous characters in Western novels than the cowboys. An imaginative and deeply felt exploration of genocide, persecution, colonialism, and masculinity - saturated in Gary Barwin's sharp wit and perfect pun-play - Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a one-of-a-kind novel of sheer genius.
©2021 Gary Barwin (P)2021 Penguin Random House Canada