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A Calling for Charlie Barnes (read by Nick Offerman) Audiobook
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Publisher Description
From a National Book Award Finalist comes a novel about an American family and one man's attempt to understand the many lives of his father.
Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.
Then, against all odds, something goes right for a change: Charlie is granted a second act. With help from his storyteller son, he surveys the facts of his life and finds his true calling where he least expects it—in a sacrifice that redounds with selflessness and love—at last becoming the man his son always knew he could be.
A Calling for Charlie Barnes is a profound and tender portrait of a man whose desperate need to be loved is his downfall, and a brutally funny account of how that love is ultimately earned.
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“Funny and sweet…[A] colorful, life. So many failed business ideas. Many, many ex-wives. A cancer diagnosis. A second act. Love, death, and family? We’re in.”
— CNN
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“This charming and witty novel tells a wholly inventive modern American story.”
— Entertainment Weekly -
“It’s a touching, thought-provoking story about family, duty, and the difficult ways in which we all shape our own history.”
— Town & Country -
“A compassionate, metafictional portrait of a flawed father and his crumbling notion of the American dream…The story is often quite funny.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review) -
“Utterly compelling…Ferris brilliantly channels the suburban angst of Yates and Cheever for the new millennium.”
— Booklist -
“A poignant, bitingly funny exploration of how a life that’s riddled with defeat may turn out, after all, to be profoundly meaningful.”
— BookPage -
“Arresting, ground-shifting, beautiful and tragic. This is the book a new generation of writers will answer to. No one in America writes like this.”
— Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author -
“A moving portrait of father and son to rival the best of Roth.”
— Teddy Wayne, National Endowment for the Arts fellow
Awards
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A New York Times Notable Book of 2021
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About Joshua Ferris
Joshua Ferris is the author of three previous novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed, and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and a collection of stories, The Dinner Party. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of the New Yorker's “20 Under 40” writers in 2010. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour won the Dylan Thomas Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.
About Nick Offerman
Nick Offerman is an actor, humorist, woodworker, and narrator who has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration as well as numerous Earphones Awards. He has appeared in the television shows Will & Grace, Parks & Recreation, and Children’s Hospital, the movies Somebody Up There Likes Me, Kings of Summer, Infinity Baby, and Smashed, and the comedy tour Summer of 69: No Apostrophe.