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Start giftingMr. Potter
Narrator
Robin Miles
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Length
5 hours 28 minutes
Language
English
A great writer’s lush, panoramic novel: the story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home.
Jamaica Kincaid’s first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.
Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of this island and of Mr. Potter’s days. As the narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid strings together a moving picture of Mr. Potter’s ancestors—beginning with memories of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide—and the outside world that presses in on his life, in the form of his Lebanese employer and, later, a couple fleeing World War II. Within these surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters—one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.
In Mr. Potter, her most luminous, ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.
Jamaica Kincaid is the author of short stories, novels, and nonfiction, including See Now Then, which was a New York Times bestseller. She is the 2022 recipient of the Hadada Award, the Paris Review’s award for lifetime achievement. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and the Dan David Prize for Literature. She is a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard and a visiting writer at UCLA in the spring of 2022. She was born in St. John’s and is a former reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
Robin Miles, named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, has twice won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration, an Audie Award for directing, and many Earphones Awards. Her film and television acting credits include The Last Days of Disco, Primary Colors, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order, New York Undercover, National Geographic’s Tales from the Wild, All My Children, and One Life to Live. She regularly gives seminars to members of SAG and AFTRA actors’ unions, and in 2005 she started Narration Arts Workshop in New York City, offering audiobook recording classes and coaching. She holds a BA degree in theater studies from Yale University, an MFA in acting from the Yale School of Drama, and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy in England.
Reviews
“Kincaid’s most poetic and affecting novel.”
“Kincaid’s clear-sighted, poetic novel…is spellbinding.
“Miles’ beautiful Antiguan accent holds listeners in thrall as she performs the hypnotic, lyrical prose, and her cadenced reading enables listeners to navigate the leaps between time periods and characters.”
“This fictionalized account…finds a vehicle in Robin Miles’ exquisite narration. She provides it with genuineness and humanity that seem lacking on the page. Employing a range of emotional tones in a consistent and accurate Caribbean accent, Miles turns Mr. Potter from problematic to human, albeit flawed…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“Kincaid has, magically, transformed the reader’s consciousness; so we realize with a shock that we’ve moved, with the narrator, from a cold-hearted contempt for Mr. Potter to a kind of purified, unsentimental sympathy.”
“As in her previous books, Kincaid has exquisite control over her narrator’s deep-seated rage, which drives the story but never overpowers it and is tempered by a clear-eyed sympathy…[A] taut and often spellbinding novel.”
“All human beings ‘are made up of their past’ in the deepest sense, Kincaid observes, yet, as her angry and sad, ultimately merciful and cathartic novel dramatizes and proves, the vicious cycle of lovelessness can be broken.”
“Like Kincaid’s previous works, Mr. Potter is full of disillusion; the narrator sees through the world to the paradox at its center, acknowledging a dialectic in which ‘your joy is your sorrow, your joy has not turned to sorrow, your joy was always your sorrow.’ The result is vivid and affecting reading.”
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