Browse audiobooks by Domenica Ruta, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
The fates of a cast of seemingly unconnected people converge during the celebration of an ancient holiday in a thought-provoking debut that brings to mind such novels as Station Eleven and The Age of Miracles. In Domenica Ruta's profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet's demise-and to celebrate as if the day is truly its last. On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. In Boston, bookish wunderkind Sarah is looking for love and maybe a cosmic reversal from the much older Kurt, a tattoo artist she met at last year's Last Day BBQ-but he's still trying to make amends to the family he destroyed long ago. Dysfunctional Karen keeps getting into trouble, especially when the voices she's been hearing coax her to abandon everything to search for her long-lost adoptive brother; her friend Rosette has left the Jehovah's Witnesses to follow a new pastor at the Last Kingdom on Earth, where she brings Karen on this fateful day. Meanwhile, above them all, three astronauts on the International Space Station, Bear, an American; Russian Svec; and billionaire Japanese space tourist Yui, contemplate their lives as well as their precious Earth from afar. With sparkling wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination, Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears. In this tour-de-force debut novel she has written a dazzling, haunting love letter to humanity and to our planet. Advance praise for Last Day "In this woven novel, we humans are love, are destruction, are wish and want. Domenica Ruta has created a portrait of humanity in a moment that is both the end and the beginning, and this novel is urgent and true and filled with such beauty."-Ramona Ausubel, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One Is Here Except All of Us "Domenica Ruta's empathy is broad and deep, her prose fine-grained, her humor sharp but tender. Last Day is a life-affirming antidote to these pre-apocalyptic times."-Teddy Wayne, author of Loner
Domenica Ruta (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)
Audiobook
A haunting, unforgettable mother-daughter story for a new generation-the debut of a blazing new lyrical voice Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the seventeenth century women were hanged as witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in this hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in her daughter the idea that art-via a classic film or a classical education-could transcend this life of undying grudges, self-inflicted misfortune, and the crooked moral code that Kathi and her cohorts lived by. With or Without You is the story of Domenica's unconventional coming of age-a darkly hilarious chronicle of a misfit '90s childhood and the necessary and painful act of breaking away, and of overcoming her own addictions and demons in the process. In a brilliant stylistic feat, Domenica Ruta has written a powerful, inspiring, compulsively readable, and finally redemptive story about loving and leaving. Advance praise for With or Without You "Freakishly brilliant, brilliantly freakish, this is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Domenica Ruta has done something every artist with a failed family must do: She has created herself."-Gary Shteyngart " 'Make it new,' Ezra Pound directed, and Domenica Ruta has. Difficult childhoods are plentiful; the talent to transform adversity into art is in short supply. Unflinching in its regard, forgiving in its humor, With or Without You is that rare thing, a story you think you know transformed into one you have to read to the end."-Kathryn Harrison "In the world of memoir, Mary Karr's and Geoffrey Wolff's exceptional books burn and brighten, like actual stars among strings of tinsel. With or Without You is like that. I will read whatever Domenica Ruta writes."-Amy Bloom Praise for With or Without You
Domenica Ruta (Author), Domenica Ruta (Narrator)
Audiobook
©PTC International Ltd T/A LoveReading is registered in England. Company number: 10193437. VAT number: 270 4538 09. Registered address: 157 Shooters Hill, London, SE18 3HP.
Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer