A Gesture Life
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Greg Watanabe
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By:
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Chang-rae Lee
About this listen
Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life is now available for the first time in audio!
His remarkable debut novel was called "rapturous" (The New York Times Book Review), "revelatory" (Vogue), and "wholly innovative" (Kirkus Reviews). It was the recipient of six major awards, including the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. Now Chang-rae Lee has written a powerful and beautifully crafted second novel that leaves no doubt about the extraordinary depth and range of his talent.
A Gesture Life is the story of a proper man, an upstanding citizen who has come to epitomize the decorous values of his New York suburban town. Courteous, honest, hardworking, and impenetrable, Franklin Hata, a Japanese man of Korean birth, is careful never to overstep his boundaries and to make his neighbors comfortable in his presence. Yet as his story unfolds, precipitated by the small events surrounding him, we see his life begin to unravel. Gradually we learn the mystery that has shaped the core of his being: his terrible, forbidden love for a young Korean Comfort Woman when he served as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II.
In A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee leads us with dazzling control through a taut, suspenseful story about love, family, and community - and the secrets we harbor. As in Native Speaker, he writes of the ways outsiders conform in order to survive and the price they pay for doing so. It is a haunting, breathtaking display of talent by an acclaimed young author.
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Critic reviews
"A beautiful, solitary, remarkably tender book." (The New York Times Book Review)
"A Gesture Life is the touching, multilayered rumination of an uneasy psyche. It is also a tragic, horrifying page-turner, whose evocation of wartime victims is unforgettable.... A deeply involving tale, no less so because we realize, almost from the first chapter, that we can't trust Hata's version of events. [Lee] enlists the reader's full energies to interpret this enigmatic speaker, who saddens, baffles and unfuriates us all at once." (Chicago Tribune)
"Once again, this gifted young author has given us a beautifully tapestried story of seeking identity and acceptance in another culture while remaining separate from the tug of it." (The Christian Science Monitor)
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Story
After surviving the Dunkirk retreat, Laurie Odell, a young homosexual, critically examines his unorthodox lifestyle and personal relationships, as he falls in love with a young conscientious objector and becomes involved with a circle of world-weary gay men.
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A Gay Classic!
- By Christopher on 02-05-16
By: Mary Renault
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The Keys to the Street
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
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Mystery with humor and insight
- By Ida Hagman on 10-02-12
By: Ruth Rendell
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The Good Liar
- A Novel
- By: Nicholas Searle
- Narrated by: Matthew Brenher
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Veteran con artist Roy spots an obvious easy mark when he meets Betty, a wealthy widow, online. In no time at all, he's moved into Betty's lovely cottage and is preparing to accompany her on a romantic trip to Europe. Betty's grandson disapproves of their blossoming relationship, but Roy is sure this scheme will be a success. He knows what he's doing. As this remarkable feat of storytelling weaves together Roy's and Betty's futures, it also unwinds their pasts.
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Hope the movie is better than the book?
- By S. Smith on 10-17-19
By: Nicholas Searle
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The Secret Keeper
- By: Kate Morton
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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England, 1959: Laurel Nicolson is 16 years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.
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Kate Morton (and Caroline Lee) does it again!
- By Maria on 10-20-12
By: Kate Morton
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The Bad Seed
- By: William March
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
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loved it
- By CoCo B.M.J on 07-23-19
By: William March
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Secrets of a Charmed Life
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for decades...beginning with who she really is. What Kendra receives from Isabel is both a gift and a burden--one that will test her convictions and her heart.
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Rare 5-Star Across the Board!
- By Imamomof4 on 06-14-15
By: Susan Meissner
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Heat and Dust
- By: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
- Narrated by: Julie Christie
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1923 the beautiful, spoiled, and bored Olivia, married to Douglas and his career in the Indian Civil Service, outrages the English and Indian communities by eloping with an Indian prince. Fifty years later, Douglas’s granddaughter, armed with Olivia’s letters, goes back to the heat and dust and squalor of the bazaars to find out for herself how Olivia could have been so affected by India that she turned her back on her own country.
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Short, Rich Novel
- By David P on 01-23-22
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The Daughters of Mars
- By: Tom Keneally
- Narrated by: Jane Nolan
- Length: 18 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour, and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages - gas, shell-shock - present themselves.
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Interesting WWI novel with an Australian bent
- By Sarah Gamp on 03-09-13
By: Tom Keneally
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Suddenly
- By: Barbara Delinsky
- Narrated by: Carol Monda
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the idyllic small town of Tucker, Vermont, life flows at a rhythmic pace for pediatrician Paige Pfeiffer. But when Mara O'Neill, her best friend and medical partner, inexplicably kills herself, Paige's comfortable world is suddenly shattered. Temporarily caring for Mara's newly adopted baby daughter while she comes to grips with her grief, Paige clings to the hope that, in time, her orderly life will return.
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Parent guide! (not romance)
- By christine on 10-10-11
By: Barbara Delinsky
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French Exit
- A Novel
- By: Patrick deWitt
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit.
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deWitt deLivers Eccentric Quirky Characters
- By Liberty on 09-23-18
By: Patrick deWitt
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After the War Is Over
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Robson
- Narrated by: Lucy Rayner
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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After four years as a military nurse, Charlotte Brown is ready to leave behind the devastation of the Great War. The daughter of a vicar, she has always been determined to dedicate her life to helping others. Moving to busy Liverpool, she throws herself into her work with those most in need, only tearing herself away for the lively dinners she enjoys with the women at her boardinghouse.
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More romance than history
- By RueRue on 08-17-16
By: Jennifer Robson
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Wedding Ring
- A Shenandoah Album Novel
- By: Emilie Richards
- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 15 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Needing time to contemplate her troubled marriage, Tessa MacRae agrees to spend the summer helping her mother and grandmother clean out the family home in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. But the three women have never been close.
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Loved it All Over Again
- By Kathryn @theBookDate on 03-26-16
By: Emilie Richards
What listeners say about A Gesture Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- BooksRLife
- 11-19-20
Superb
Lyrical prose that's both haunting and harrowing at times. The author speaks so eloquently about the consequences of our life choices. Excellent narrator, too.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Regina
- 11-20-20
Wonderful
The perfect narrator reveals the mesmerizing tale of an immigrant man, trying to live his life as properly as possible, working hard, observing all conventions, striving for perfection, while unable to connect with the daughter he adopted to atone for his failings in the War...
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5 people found this helpful