Publisher Description
"A Simple Tale" is the moving account of Maria Poniatowski, an aging Ukrainian woman who was taken by the Germans for slave labor and eventually relocated to Canada as a displaced person. She struggles to provide her son Radek with every opportunity, but his eventual success increases the gulf between him and his mother. What of the past is she to preserve, and how to avoid letting the weight of that past burden the present? Maria's story is about the moments of connection and isolation that are common to us all. "The Hunters," the second novella, is narrated by an American academic spending a summer in London who grows obsessed by the neighbors downstairs. Ridley Wandor, a plump and insipid caretaker of the elderly, lives with her ever-unseen mother and a horde of pet rabbits she calls "the hunters." While the narrator researches a book about death, all of Ridley Wandor's patients are dying. Loneliness breeds an active imagination. Is having such an imagination always destructive? Or can it be strong enough to create a new reality? Far-flung settings and universal themes give a sweeping appeal to Claire Messud's work.
Download and start listening now!
About Claire Messud
Claire Messud was
educated at Cambridge and Yale. Her novels, When
the World Was Steady and The Hunters
were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best
Book of the Year and Editor’s Choice at The
Village Voice. Three of her books were New York Times Notable Books of the
Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe Fellowship,
and is the current recipient of the Strauss Living Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her
husband and children.
About the Narrators
Alyssa Bresnahan is a dynamic dancer, actor, and audiobook narrator. She has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, has earned twenty Earphones Awards, and was named one of AudioFile magazine’s Golden Voices. In 2009 she was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best fiction narration.
Saskia Maarleveld is an experienced voice-over actress and Earphones Award–winning narrator. Raised in New Zealand and France, she is highly skilled with accents and dialects, and many of her books have been narrated entirely in accents other than her own. In addition to audiobooks, her voice can be heard in animation, video games, and commercials.