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The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers
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The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

A Novel

$20.99

Retail price: $27.95

Discount: 24%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Bronson Pinchot

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Translator John Brownjohn
Length 16 hours 11 minutes
Language English
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Captain Bluebear is a bear with blue fur, a creature as unique as the fantastic adventures he undergoes. Unlike cats, which have only nine lives, bluebears have twenty-seven. This is fortunate, because our hero is forever avoiding disaster by a paw’s breadth.

In this remarkable book, Captain Bluebear tells the story of his first thirteen-and-a-half lives spent on the mysterious continent of Zamonia, where intelligence is an infectious disease and water flows uphill, where headless giants roam deserts made of sugar, and where only Captain Bluebear’s courage and ingenuity enable him to escape the dangers that lie in wait for him around every corner. In company with our indomitable hero, we enter a realm of the imagination that combines the fantasy of The Lord of the Rings and The Neverending Story with the humour of Baron Munchausen, and where anything can exist except boredom. It’s a land of imaginative lunacy and supreme adventure, wicked satire and epic fantasy, all mixed together and turned on its head.

Playful enough for young adult readers yet as intricate and engaging as any work of literary fiction, The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear has the plot of a novel and the spontaneity and humor of a vintage comic book, making it an instant international cult classic.

Walter Moers was born in 1957 and is a writer, cartoonist, painter, and sculptor. The world of Zamonia that he created is currently being adapted for the screen. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.

Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.

John Brownjohn, originally a classicist who from the age of eight studied ancient Greek as well as Latin, won a major scholarship to Oxford, from which he graduated with honors. He transitioned to a career as a literary translator, earning critical acclaim and many British and American awards. In addition to translating nearly two hundred books, he has produced English versions of many German and French screenplays and cowritten several feature films with Roman Polanski.

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Reviews

“Even readers with short attention spans will find themselves captivated by the nonstop parade of madcap characters as treacherous predicaments resolve themselves with charming ease…Comparisons to Harry Potter aside, Moers’ kaleidoscopic expedition is fanciful and endlessly entertaining.”

“Moers’ world is both refreshingly original and peppered with enough parody to make it seem eerily familiar…Brownjohn’s translation from the German is excellent. For fans of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy franchise, this is an essential read. Highly recommended for public libraries.”

“The quirky writing is definitely strong enough to carry itself, but Moers includes several black-and-white illustrations that enhance the whimsy…this is the kind of tale that readers have to just sit back and enjoy, wherever it takes them. The ending does tie the loose threads together. A wild, fun-filled ride.”

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