Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Diviner’s Tale
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThe Diviner’s Tale is at once a journey of self-discovery and an unorthodox murder mystery, a tale of the fantastic and a family chronicle told by an otherwise ordinary woman.
Walking a lonely forested valley in upstate New York, Cassandra Brooks comes upon the shocking vision of a young girl hanged from a tree. When she returns with authorities, the girl has vanished, leaving in question Cassandra’s credibility, if not her sanity. The next day, on a return visit, a dazed, mute missing girl emerges from the woods, alive—and the very picture of Cassandra’s hanged girl. What follows is the narrative of ever deepening and increasingly bizarre divinations that will lead this gifted young woman, the struggling single mother of twin boys, hurtling toward a past she’d long since thought was behind her. When Cass’ dark forebodings take on tangible form, she is forced to confront a life spiraling out of control. And soon she is locked in a mortal chess match with a real-life killer who has haunted her since before she can remember.
Bradford Morrow is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and poetry, including Ariel’s Crossing and Giovanni’s Gift. He is also the founder of the literary journal Conjunctions, which he has edited since 1981. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2007 and is a professor of literature at Bard College.
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.
Reviews
“Bradford Morrow, like the diviner-heroine of The Diviner’s Tale, is a mesmerizing storyteller who casts an irresistible spell. He has constructed an ingeniously plotted mystery story that is at the same time a love story—luminous and magical, fraught with suspense, beautifully and subtly rendered—a feat of prose divination.”
“In his sublime new novel The Diviner’s Tale, Bradford Morrow accomplishes the deep, subtle miracle I have been waiting and waiting for someone to effect—he gives us the first novel-length work of fiction that actually does create a seamless breathing breathtaking unity of the literary and the suspense novel. This novel detonates the very notion of genre. And it works because it is riveting, insightful, sentence by sentence charged with feeling, as it bears us helpless with it on its downward journey to illumination.”
“Vividly imagined and carefully plotted.”
“Cassandra Campbell portrays Cassandra Brooks with just the right touch of wonder and edginess. As a single mother of twins with a gift for divining water sources for local landowners, Cassandra has her quiet world upturned when she begins to have inexplicable, horrifying visions that appear to be tied to a missing girl. Campbell voices the many secondary characters with the slightest changes of inflection, tone, and rhythm—from Cassandra’s sinister childhood acquaintance to her lively, sarcastic sons. Although listeners may feel some impatience with the protagonist’s choices as she unravels the mystery of her divinations, Campbell’s gravelly, sage-like reading keeps the story moving forward.”
“Actress/narrator Cassandra Campbell strikes the perfect tone for this unusual story, gently drawing listeners deeper into its complex layers. Recommended for fans of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Joyce Carol Oates devotees.”
“Morrow does a fine job portraying a family whose love transcends sharply conflicting worldviews.”
“An astonishing dark gem of a novel, The Diviner’s Tale is a gorgeously written, deeply unsettling thriller that kept me reading long past my bedtime for three nights in a row. I don’t regret a moment of it, and neither will you—I loved this book.”
“Superb. The only thing I did for two straight days was read this book—it really is that riveting. It reminded me of the greatest Hitchcock films that were somehow alchemically able to combine suspense, wonder, and romance all in one seamless story that kept you guessing and gasping right up until the end. A long time fan of Morrow’s work, I can honestly say this is the best he’s ever done.”
“Bradford Morrow is a force of nature. I have already publicly used the word ‘masterpiece’ about one of his books, Trinity Fields. It is a measure of this writer that I must invoke the word again, and about a novel that not only contains pitch-perfect, surpassingly beautiful line-to-line writing but that finds in fictional genre forms both narrative excitement and profound human insight fully as successfully as Dostoevsky did with murder mysteries and Melville did with sea adventures. The Diviner’s Tale will not only delight, it will endure.”
“Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale packs a mighty emotional wallop. This haunting portrayal of a woman possessed by irresistible visions which draw her through mystery and terror to cataclysmic self-discovery is both chilling and impossible to put down. Morrow is at the top of his form: bold, original, and mesmerizing. Truly a stunning achievement.”
“Bradford Morrow’s beautifully written and tautly paced novel brings the old and all but forgotten gift of divination into the modern world. With the aptly named but thoroughly contemporary Cassandra as the book’s flawlessly rendered voice, Morrow has created a woman both heroic in what she seeks and human in what she finds. The Diviner’s Tale is about past crimes and future consequences, a tale whose subtle and mysterious confluences are as elusive as water underground.”
“The Diviner’s Tale is Morrow’s most ambitious novel yet. He deftly wicks the literary and the paranormal into a single strand, making us wonder why we ever thought of the two as separate, and then uses this thread to weave a perfectly articulated mystery. The result is a sly masterpiece by a truly marvelous stylist that will cause you to question what you thought you knew about both genre and literature. Triply satisfying, The Diviner’s Tale is a virtuoso performance.”
Expand reviews