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Third Place Books Book Club Reads - 2023
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Start giftingThe Only Harmless Great Thing
Narrator
Courtney Patterson
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Length
2 hours 1 minute
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“In this alternate-history novella Brooke Bolander answers the question no one ever asked: what if the Radium Girls had been elephants instead of people?”
— Anthony • Brilliant Books Audio
Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novelette
Finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Sturgeon Awards
The Only Harmless Great Thing is a heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander that imagines an intersection between the Radium Girls and noble, sentient elephants.
In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey, slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island.
These are the facts.
Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice.
Brooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily towards fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester from 2004-2007, studying history and archaeology, and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers' Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon Awards, much to her unending bafflement.
Courtney Patterson is an Atlanta native who has been working as an actor on stage, screen, and behind the microphone for close to two decades. She has been narrating audiobooks since 2011 and has fallen in love with the craft of storytelling through narration. Courtney is the mother of two wonderful little weirdos and the wife of a brilliant sommelier. There's also a cat and some fish in the mix. Courtney couldn't be happier with her crazy artistic lifestyle and is keenly aware that having good wine always within reach is most likely the reason for her family's success.