All the Secrets of the World, Steve Almond
All the Secrets of the World, Steve Almond
List: $26.00 | Sale: $18.20
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All the Secrets of the World

Author: Steve Almond

Narrator: Roxanne Hernandez

Unabridged: 13 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/03/2022


Synopsis

Who pays for the secrets we keep? For the lies we tell ourselves?

Lorena Saenz has just been paired with Jenny Stallworth for a school project by a teacher hoping to unite two girls from starkly different backgrounds. Jenny is pretty and popular, and Lorena is quickly drawn into the family’s picture-perfect suburban lifestyle. Jenny’s mother, Rosemary, is glamorous, but needy―she treats Lorena like a friend, if only to break up the monotony of lonely afternoons. Jenny’s father, Marcus, spends his days teaching and his nights wandering the desert, absorbed in his research on the scorpions of Death Valley. Outwardly, they are the perfect family, poised for success in 1981 Sacramento at the dawn of a glorious American decade. Lorena finds her access intoxicating and alluring, a far cry from her life in the small apartment she shares with her single mother.

But the veneer is shattered when Marcus disappears. The prime suspect: Lorena’s troubled older brother, Tony.

To uncover the truth, Lorena must embark on an unforgiving odyssey into the desert, into the secrets and lies of the Stallworth family, and the dark heart of America’s criminal justice system. A shape-shifting social novel, All the Secrets of the World is a propulsive tour de force from a writer at the height of his powers.

About The Author

Steve Almond is the author of a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including All The Secrets of The World and the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have been published in venues ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Ploughshares to Poets & Writers, and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Mysteries, and Best American Erotica. Almond is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and co-hosted the Dear Sugars podcast with Cheryl Strayed for four years. He teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and lives outside Boston with his family, his debt, and his anxiety.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy on January 16, 2023

I’m a Steve Almond fan from two short story anthologies, his insightful political nonfiction, Bad Stories, and our common reverence for John Williams’s Stoner (expressed so eloquently by Almond and many other writers, a so-called group of “Stoners,” in the documentary The Act of Becoming). S......more

Goodreads review by Stella on May 19, 2022

I’m sure it’s an unpopular opinion, but the first 50 pages will not be excused in my eyes. The author visited my school, and the chapter he read as well as his interesting demeanor encouraged me to give this book a go. From the beginning, I could sense that something was wrong with how the relations......more

Goodreads review by Dorothy on April 26, 2022

I spent two entire days, and most of two nights reading ALL THE SECRETS OF THE WORLD. I couldn’t put it down. This is a seriously crazy and intense book. There’s the backdrop of Sacramento in the 1980s and the Reagan presidency, the Fabulous Forties, the politics of the Sacramento police department,......more

Goodreads review by luxie ♡ on March 02, 2022

All the Secrets of the World sucked me in like a Hoover! It was complex, riddled me with anxiety, and had me staying up all hours of the night dying to know what happens next. It begins like an unraveling teen girl drama: we see the world through Lorena’s eyes as she visits the sprawling Stallworth......more

Goodreads review by Michael on December 06, 2021

All the Secrets of the World by Steve Almond As I was reading this book, I asked myself: Why do I read? The answers I came up with are: (1) to become informed or better informed on a topic (2) escape to another world (3) solving a mystery and (4) coming back to a writer whose books I have enjoyed in......more