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Forty Rooms Audiobook
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Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women’s identity—of women’s choices—that no modern novel has explored so deeply.
“Forty rooms” is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. They form her biography, from childhood to death. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family’s Moscow apartment. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. She seems to have made her choice. But one day she runs into a college classmate. He is sure of his path through life and is protective of her, and they eventually drift into an affair and marriage.
What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts—until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.
Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. We know that Mrs. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Was it a life well lived? Quite likely. Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Who is to say her path was not well taken? It is this ambiguity that is at the heart of this provocative novel.
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“Add the female protagonist of Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin’s moving new novel, to the roster of characters who have grappled with the age-old question of art vs. domesticity…a sensitive and exquisitely told meditation on the pleasures of art.”
— BookPage
Quotes
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“The focus is decidedly personal, relatable to anyone striving to live deeply.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine -
“It is the heartbreak at the sometimes barely glimpsed edges of these compromises and broken dreams that provides the novel’s dramatic tension.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Grushin beautifully renders a riddle of our time.”
— Chicago Tribune -
“Grushin’s honesty about the dilemmas of artistic life shines through.”
— Washington Post -
“From brilliance squandered to promise unfulfilled…Ms. Grushin’s ingenious and original conceit is to chronicle the chapters of this woman’s life through the rooms she occupies.”
— Wall Street Journal -
“Filled with beautiful and surreal moments that perfectly capture the magic that can exist in real life, this book has extraordinary depth of imagination and emotion.”
— Bustle -
“Spins a Bovary plot into a mystical tapestry, complete with ghostly harbingers, jarring shifts in perspective, and linguistic fillips most native-born writers would envy.”
— Vulture -
“Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“An enchanted meditation on poetry and life.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“The main character’s inner life is rich with feeling, her meditations on her writing made vivid through conversations with a dangerous visitor to her dreams.”
— Booklist -
“The genius of Forty Rooms is…its suggestion that a betrayal of childhood dreams can still allow for a life filled with meaning, one that is contradictory, replete with loss, contentment, regret, and its own definition of purpose.”
— Shelf Awareness
Awards
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A Bustle Pick of February 2016’s Best Books to Light Up Your Winter
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A Town & Country Magazine Pick for Must-Reads of Spring 2016
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A Vulture.com Pick for 8 Books You Need to Read This February
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A Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2016 Selection for Fiction
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An Electric Literature Pick of Books That Celebrate International Scholars
Forty Rooms Listener Reviews
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About Olga Grushin
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971. After studying art and journalism in Moscow, she was awarded a full scholarship to Emory University in 1989. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, earned her a place on Granta’s list of Best Young American Novelists and won her the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award; it was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Best First Novel award and for Britain’s Orange Prize. In 2002 she became an American citizen. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.
About Christa Lewis
Christa Lewis has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. She is a classically trained actress with a four-year conservatory training in voice and acting. She has a smart and funny vibe, but can also meet the moment in straightforward or somber works of nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of believable accents and dialects. Her narrations are well received—there have been seven Earphones awards across a variety of genres—YA, literary fiction, biography and memoir—a 2019 SOVAS Voice Arts Award in Biography and two Audie nominations. Pippa Jayne was the Sultry Listeners’ Award Winner 2019 in the Erotica category.