Ordinary Decent Criminals

  • Author: Lionel Shriver
  • Narrator: Melanie MacHugh
  • Publisher: HarperCollins USA
  • Duration: 16:23:43
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Synopsis

A new edition of one of bestselling author Lionel Shriver’s early novels, reissued 25 years after first publication—an engrossing commentary on the intersection of politics and human relationships, set in turbulent Northern Ireland.

For ten years, Estrin Lancaster has fled Philadelphia. From the Philippines to Berlin, she’s been a traveler without a destination, an expatriate without a motherland. In each of the cities Estrin favors, she manages an apartment, a job, a lover, and never tarries past the first signs of ennui.

Her latest destination is Belfast, in Northern Ireland. After twenty years of ritualized violence, this city, too, is exhausted—a town where when one more bomb explodes in the city center, old ladies blow the dust off their treacle cakes and count their change. Here the lanky and spiteful Farrell O’Phelan, former purveyor of his own bomb-disposal service, technically Catholic but everyone’s aggravation, wrangles through the maze of factions in the North by despising every side. Farrell’s affair with the curious Estrin is nonetheless a meeting of two loners; like hers, Farrell’s marathoning around the planet has become a running in place. In deadlocked Northern Ireland, it has become harder and harder to believe that anything is happening at all.

A grand tragi-comedy—one of the earliest displays of the ambition and intelligence that has since earned Lionel Shriver worldwide acclaim—Ordinary Decent Criminals is about conflict groupies, people terrified of domesticity, who stir up anguish in their lives and their countries to avoid the greater horror of what lies closest to home.

Chapters

  • 001_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals

    Duration: 08s
  • 002_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Dedication

    Duration: 40s
  • 003_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter01

    Duration: 29min
  • 004_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter02

    Duration: 21min
  • 005_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter03

    Duration: 27min
  • 006_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter04

    Duration: 34min
  • 007_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter05

    Duration: 14min
  • 008_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter06

    Duration: 24min
  • 009_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter07

    Duration: 42min
  • 010_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter08

    Duration: 44min
  • 011_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter09

    Duration: 49min
  • 012_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter10

    Duration: 34min
  • 013_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter11

    Duration: 35min
  • 014_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter12

    Duration: 43min
  • 015_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter13

    Duration: 37min
  • 016_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter14

    Duration: 32min
  • 017_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter15

    Duration: 41min
  • 018_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter16

    Duration: 55min
  • 019_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter17

    Duration: 01h01min
  • 020_Ordinary_Decent_Criminals_Chapter18

    Duration: 41min
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