A History of Loneliness - John Boyne Audiobook

Written by John Boyne
Read by Gerard Doyle
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 96 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Date: February 2015
Duration: 12 hours 42 minutes

Summary:
A History of Loneliness is narrated by Father Odran Yates, a man of faith who has served as the chaplain of a boys’ school in Ireland for nearly thirty years. From the moment a family tragedy propels him into the seminary, Odran holds fast to “a feeling of great contentment” at the center of his life. “Although I had made my choices at a young age,” he tells his nephew, “I stood by them.”

At Terenure College he tends the library, teaches literature, and cheers from the sidelines at rugby matches. Though he excelled in his studies and even served as the night attendant for Pope John Paul I’s brief papacy, Odran has little ambition. He delights in his work “behind the high walls and closed gates of this private and erudite enclave.” But when scandal begins to engulf the church in the early twenty-first century, Odran is wrested from his beloved school to serve a parish whose priest-Odran’s best friend from seminary-has been removed.

As the Catholic Church becomes increasingly suspect, Odran finds that he is now considered a pariah by the same strangers who once gave him their seats on crowded trains. He grows wary of venturing out in public and is falsely arrested when he tries to reunite a lost boy with his mother in a department store. Slowly he begins to wonder about “events over the years, things that I had noticed and ignored that sat uneasy with me. Did I have blame of my own to carry here?”

The answer to Odran’s question lies at the heart of John Boyne’s stunning novel and transforms the self-reckoning of one priest’s small life into a parable-unsparing, moving, persuasive, and vast