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You Should Have Left

A Novel

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You Should Have Left

Written by: Daniel Kehlmann, Ross Benjamin - translator
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
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About this listen

From the internationally best-selling author of Measuring the World and F, an eerie and supernatural tale of a writer's emotional collapse.

"It is fitting that I'm beginning a new notebook up here. New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air."

This passage is from the first entry of a journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel. It is the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany - a house that thwarts the expectations of the narrator's recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. He is eager to finish a screenplay for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him - and within him.

©2017 Daniel Kehlmann (P)2017 Random House Audio Fiction Genre Fiction Ghosts Literary Fiction Occult Scary Haunted
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What the critics say

"A beautifully crafted exercise in terror from one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary authors.... This novel is, in many ways, a classic haunted-house tale. There are warnings about the house from the people in the village below. There's a creeping sense of horror. There are frightening phenomena that the narrator cannot explain. And there are specters. Kehlmann uses all these familiar tropes beautifully. But he also creates a sense of existential dread that transcends the typical ghost story.... A book to keep you up at night." ( Kirkus Reviews)
"My favorite German novelist. [Ian McEwan, The Sunday Times (London)]

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Profile Image for Mike Dryden

A good story but a below average audiobook

I marked down the performance on this but that's not entirely fair - the issue isn't with the voice actor, but with what he's reading.

It's quite challenging early in the book to recognize the shift between the narrator's thoughts and his narration of the book he's writing, and I suspect that in the paper copy, the differences are shown with a different font or a line break. In any case, with no verbal cue to help the listener, I found myself distracted from the story itself as I had to evaluate what I was listening to.

The story itself is entertaining and the issue becomes less of an issue as the story progresses, but it definitely detracted from the experience.

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