Few storytellers in America write with such unerring insight and honesty as Armistead Maupin. Now he has given us his most ambitious and daringly imaginative work, The Night Listener, a novel as spoken-word serial, including an original music score.
Gabriel Noone is a fabulist, a writer whose late-night radio tales have brought him into the homes of millions. In the midst of a painful, unwanted separation from his longtime love, Gabriel reads the extraordinary memoir of Pete Lomax, an ailing 13-year-old boy who suffered horrific abuse at the hands of his parents. Pete is not only a gifted diarist but also a devoted listener of Gabriel's show. And thus begins an extraordinary phone friendship.
Then, out of the blue, troubling new questions arise, exploding Gabriel's comfortable assumptions and causing his ordered existence to spin wildly out of control. As he walks a vertiginous line between truth and illusion, he is finally forced to confront all his relationships - familial, romantic, and erotic.
This unprecedented audio project is as thought-provoking as it is mesmeric. The Night Listener is a meditation on the power of voices and the faith we place in them, and an extraordinary audio experience from an American literary icon.
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"I love Maypin's stories, but this one became annoying toward the end. While the premis was interesting, the solution to the mystery seemed obvious way too soon and I just wanted it to be over. Only Maupin's writing skill kept me reading until the end. I wish I had stopped sooner.
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Mary (4 out of 5 stars)