The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

Name: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
Brand: Harper Audio
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Author: Andrew Sean Greer
ISBN: 9780062283511

Author: Andrew Sean Greer

Narrator: Orlagh Cassidy

Unabridged: 7 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 06/25/2013

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Psychological, Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the breakup with her longtime lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she'd been born in different eras. During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and alternate lives in 1918, where she is a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, which transforms her into a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta's three lives are remarkably similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.As her final treatment looms, questions arise: What will happen once each Greta learns how to remain in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to stay in which life?Magically atmospheric, achingly romantic, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells beautifully imagines ""what if"" and wondrously wrestles with the impossibility of what could be.

About Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was a Today book club selection and received a California Book Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ron on June 17, 2017

Andrew Sean Greer has been fiddling with the hands on his watch again. His novels are often preoccupied with how we interact with time. That immensely clever bestseller “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” featured a 70-year-old narrator who aged backward. His debut novel, “The Path of Minor Planets,” sy......more

Goodreads review by Josephine on July 23, 2013

Just finished The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. A nice (but unoriginal) concept for a book - a woman searches for emotional balance after experiencing loss via time/space travel. The niceness pretty much stops there. The focus of the novel was on the fact that there’s times when we feel our souls......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on August 12, 2013

I wanted to like this so much more than I did! The premise is just so cool, but so undelivered on? I think my biggest problem was the pacing but mainly the characters. None of them felt like real people to me! Especially Greta. Oh buddy. There were just parts of this book where all I could think is,......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on November 01, 2020

Greer's work contains much devious magic. Hypotheticals become real, & then the realness becomes too real. It's eating the metaphorical cake, and suffering the gastrointestinal implications. "Less" may be his masterpiece; "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" an experimentation on the Benjamin Button Grea......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on July 14, 2013

Another time travel novel by Greer. This time, it’s in the voice of a woman, Greta. Greta just lost her twin brother, who she was very close to, at the age of 31. To add to that, her lover Nathan leaves her. She seeks psychiatric treatment for her depression, and nothing works. Her shrink suggests s......more