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The High Mountains of Portugal

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The High Mountains of Portugal

By: Yann Martel
Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
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About this listen

With this highly anticipated new audiobook, the author of the best-selling Life of Pi returns to the storytelling power and luminous wisdom of his master novel.

The High Mountains of Portugal is a suspenseful, mesmerising story of a great quest for meaning, told in three intersecting narratives that touch the lives of three different people and their families, and taking us on an extraordinary journey through the last century.

We begin in the early 1900s, when Tomás discovers an ancient journal and sets out from Lisbon in one of the very first motor cars in Portugal in search of the strange treasure the journal describes.

Thirty-five years later, a pathologist devoted to the novels of Agatha Christie, whose wife has possibly been murdered, finds himself drawn into Tomás' quest. Then, 50 years later, Senator Peter Tovy of Ottawa, grieving the death of his own beloved wife, rescues a chimpanzee from an Oklahoma research facility and takes it to live with him in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, where the strands of all three stories miraculously mesh together.

Beautiful, witty and engaging, Yann Martel's new novel offers us the same tender exploration of the impact and significance of great love and great loss, belief and unbelief, that has marked all his brilliant, unexpected novels.

©2016 Yann Martel (P)2016 Penguin Random House LLC
Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Portugal Inspiring Witty

What listeners say about The High Mountains of Portugal

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insight

Great insight into behaviour. great reading by the narrator. unusual story that weaves together. with it

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1 person found this helpful

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Grim - not for anyone feeling fragile

A beautifully written, relentless chronicle of loneliness, grief suffering and the futile struggles of human life.

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1 person found this helpful

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A challenge to the imagination.

Having read Life of Pi I was somewhat prepared for his book. Martel challenges our imagination and forces us to extend our version of normality. The three overlapping stories are brought together at the end of the book in a way that is surreal as the text of the book. We are left wondering but accepting as if it were a fairy story. Setting the book in normal contexts heightens the feeling of disorientation but all strangeness occurs as a tragic loss of loved ones. With a solution to grief as Improbable and opposed t normality as is possible a resolution of grief occurs.
Read at your own peril.

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3 people found this helpful

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Weird but riveting

Wonderful voice and a very strange story. I did enjoy it, but didn't find it very relaxing - which is the reason I listen to Audible.

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2 people found this helpful

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Hauntingly Beautiful

This is an outstanding book, entirely engaging from first page to last. Universal stories of love, loss and grief touch each other across time. Each period is wonderfully evoked by the author and characters are drawn as well as any I've read in the past five years. The narrator is superb, adding depth and richness to a novel which was already enormously enjoyable. I'd be stunned if this didn't appear on the Booker shortlist later this year.

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just didnt work

disjointed with a vague central theme. it seemed to not draw together from each section in a way of intrigue. left me entirely wanting.

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Not for me

I couldn't finish listening. The story was really dragged out with no real point. A bit disappointing

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