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Shop nowA Death in the Family
Narrator
Lloyd James
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Length
10 hours 30 minutes
Language
English
Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.
On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxville, Tennessee, to tend to his father, whom he believes is dying. The summons turns out to be a false alarm, but on his way back to his family, Jay has a car accident and is killed instantly. Dancing back and forth in time and braiding the viewpoints of Jay’s wife, brother, and young son, Rufus, Agee creates an overwhelmingly powerful novel of innocence, tenderness, and loss that should be read aloud for the sheer music of its prose.
James Agee (1909–1955) is the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the renowned study of Alabama sharecroppers during the Depression. Born in Tennessee, he died two years before the publication of A Death in the Family, his best-known work and winner of the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Since beginning his narrating career in 1996, Lloyd James (also known as Sean Pratt) has been credited with more than 600 audiobooks. He has earned several awards, including six Audiofile Earphones Awards and two nominations for the Audie Award. His performances include Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck, Encounters with Jesus and Every Good Endeavor by Timothy Keller, and Elvis in the Morning by William F. Buckley Jr. He lives in Maryland with his wife and their children.
Reviews
“The work of a writer whose power with English words can make you gasp.”
“Maturely and masterfully, Agee accomplished a book which touches one deeply and which no reader will forget.”
“Wonderfully alive.”
“People I know who read A Death in the Family forty years ago still talk about it. So do I. It is a great book.”
“[James Agee’s words] are so indelibly etched someplace inside of me that I couldn’t reach to rub them out even if I wanted to. And I never want to.”
“Agee’s forgiving embrace of the deeply imperfect people he describes, a kind of Whitmanesque tenderness, stays with you a long time.”
“It is, in the full sense, poetry…The language of the book, at once luminous and discreet…remains in the mind.”
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