Blackbird House

Name: Blackbird House
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Author: Alice Hoffman
ISBN: 9781483021072

Author: Alice Hoffman

Narrator: various narrators, John Lee, Xe Sands, Amy Rubinate, Richard Powers, Bernadette Dunne, Tavia Gilbert, Cassandra Campbell, Hillary Huber, Laura Hicks, Kate Reading, Carrington MacDuffie, Kirsten Potter

Unabridged: 5 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 07/01/2014

Categories: Fiction

Synopsis

With "incantatory prose" that "sweeps over the reader like a dream" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future with an evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family after family's lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.From the writer that Time has said tells "truths powerful enough to break a reader's heart" comes a glorious travelogue through time and fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

About Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including the Practical Magic series and the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, among others. Eight of her novels have made the New York Times bestsellers list.

About John Lee

John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays.

About Xe Sands

Xe Sands has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, including recordings of the Nightwalkers series from Jaquelyn Frank. She has received several honors, including AudioFile Earphones Awards and a coveted Audie Award, and she was named Favorite Debut Romance Narrator of 2011 in the Romance Audiobooks poll.

About Amy Rubinate

Amy Rubinate has narrated over 250 audiobooks and won multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards. Her books have been selected for AudioFile’s Best Romance of 2016 list; Booklist’s Top 10 Romance, Top 10 Historical Fiction, Editor’s Choice Media; and YALSA’s Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults. She has a degree in oral interpretation of literature and won state and national awards for poetry reading. A voice actor and singer for over a decade, Amy has narrated many interactive children’s books and provided character voices for toys and video games. Amy’s work has been featured in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, AudioFile magazine, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal.

About Richard Powers

Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, and Bewilderment was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

About Bernadette Dunne

Bernadette Dunne is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway.

About Tavia Gilbert

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.

About Cassandra Campbell

Original bio sent from Cassandra: Cassandra Campbell began doing voice overs as the voice for Calvin Klein’s Italian commercials. This was followed by commercial and documentary recording in both English and Italian. She has recorded many audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie® Award nomination. As an actress and director, she has worked at the Public, the Mint, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stagewest, Theatreworks, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Millmountain Theatre, the National Shakespeare Company, and the New York Fringe Festival.

About Hillary Huber

Hillary Huber is one of the most successful voice talents in Los Angeles. Recent books read for Blackstone Audio include Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him by Patricia Marx, A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read, and A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart.

About Laura Hicks

Laura Hicks is an Obie Award–winning actress who has appeared on Broadway, off Broadway, and in regional theater, film, and television. A native New Yorker and a Juilliard graduate, she has performed throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, Austria, Italy, and Ireland.

About Kate Reading

Kate Reading, named an AudioFile Golden Voice, has recorded hundreds of audiobooks across many genres, over a thirty–year plus career and won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. Among other awards, she has been recognized as an AudioFile Magazine Voice of the Century, Narrator of the Year, Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and winner of an Publisher’s Weekly’s Listen-Up Award. She records at her home studio, Madison Productions, Inc., in Maryland.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Will

Places have much greater permanence than people. Land exists for eons (now don’t get picky about ocean fronts migrating and the Big Island expanding. You know what I mean) whereas people last mere generations, and often much less. On the surface at least, Blackbird House is a novel of place, in whic......more

Goodreads review by Dani

I have to be honest, I read this book months ago but was unable at the time to find the words to describe this novel. I just have to start by saying that it is one of the best novels I have ever read in my life (and I clearly read a lot). Previous to reading Blackbird House, I had never picked up an......more

Goodreads review by Rachel

I have been thinking a lot about this book and why I felt the way I did about it. I write short stories so this book should have resonated with me. I enjoyed the first of the short stories. Honestly, it was the best one and I wish she had continued on with it or at least with the descendants of the......more

Quotes

“Alice Hoffman’s writing is spellbinding and not simply because of her touches of magic realism: Her unembellished prose and primary-colored descriptions recall the directness of fairy tales.” Wall Street Journal

“The stories of Blackbird House are sharp and imbued with magic. Hoffman peels away layers of time, painstakingly sifting through two centuries to expose all that can occur by one field of pink sweet peas at the end of the world.” USA Today

“The landscape Alice Hoffman displays in Blackbird House is its own world altogether…Here the relationship of the characters to their surroundings is seen as a kind of magical bond, expressed in language that is both eerie and beautiful.” New York Times Book Review

“Sweet, sad, touching, and most of all, vibrantly real…Each tale stays true to Hoffman’s form, infused with descriptions of nature, rich emotion, and life’s complexity—each, like a fairy tale, mysterious, bewitching, and wonderful.” Elle

“Riveting…haunting…masterful.” Los Angeles Times

“Blackbird House is filled with symbols of the strongest human emotions—hope, devotion, anger, pain. And these are described as beautifully and simply as nature itself.” San Jose Mercury News

“Lush, figurative language evokes epics, ballads, odes, and fairy tales. Human destiny is determined less by individual initiative or moral choice than by fate. To survive and thrive, one must pay heed, one must be attentive to season, history, spirit.” Boston Globe

“A New England historical patchwork, a literary museum…Hoffman creates many charming and intriguing people and events to carry her tale.” San Francisco Chronicle

“[Hoffman’s] prose can cast a spell upon even the most stoic of souls, pulling them into [her] reality as easily as the tides claiming unwary swimmers…Storytelling doesn’t get any better.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Complex and intriguing…Hoffman’s blend of myth and local history is beguiling and uplifting.” Baltimore Sun