9780062283511
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The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells audiobook

  • By: Andrew Sean Greer
  • Narrator: Orlagh Cassidy
  • Category: Fiction, Psychological
  • Length: 7 hours 55 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: June 25, 2013
  • Language: English
  • (9101 ratings)
(9101 ratings)
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The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Audiobook Summary

1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the breakup with her longtime lover, Nathan, Greta Wells embarks on a radical psychiatric treatment to alleviate her suffocating depression. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta finds herself transported to the lives she might have had if she’d been born in different eras.

During the course of her treatment, Greta cycles between her own time and alternate lives in 1918, where she is a bohemian adulteress, and 1941, which transforms her into a devoted mother and wife. Separated by time and social mores, Greta’s three lives are remarkably similar, fraught with familiar tensions and difficult choices. Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards, and each extracts a different price. And the modern Greta learns that her alternate selves are unpredictable, driven by their own desires and needs.

As her final treatment looms, questions arise: What will happen once each Greta learns how to remain in one of the other worlds? Who will choose to stay in which life?

Magically atmospheric, achingly romantic, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells beautifully imagines “what if” and wondrously wrestles with the impossibility of what could be.

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The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Audiobook Narrator

Orlagh Cassidy is the narrator of The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells audiobook that was written by Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was a Today book club selection and received a California Book Award. He lives in San Francisco.

About the Author(s) of The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

Andrew Sean Greer is the author of The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells Full Details

Narrator Orlagh Cassidy
Length 7 hours 55 minutes
Author Andrew Sean Greer
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date June 25, 2013
ISBN 9780062283511

Subjects

The publisher of the The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Fiction, Psychological

Additional info

The publisher of the The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062283511.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Fabian

November 01, 2020

Greer's work contains much devious magic. Hypotheticals become real, & then the realness becomes too real. It's eating the metaphorical cake, and suffering the gastrointestinal implications. "Less" may be his masterpiece; "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" an experimentation on the Benjamin Button Great American legend, was also quite unique, pathos-filled. Although "Impossible Lives" has a more complex time-bend structure (one immediately notices the debt owed by the much lauded "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson), it is trickier to fall in love with the heroine, who Greer bestows with so much character irony--the knowledge of things to come, the prognostication of future events and how the character herself will act upon them--that her ultimate fate seems as whimsical as her everyday maneuvers. And herein lies the moral: we are ourselves no matter what, trapped in time, limited in circumstances. ALWAYS. But the magical stuff in between should never be discounted.

Angela M

September 01, 2013

You ‘ve got to do that “willing suspension of disbelief” thing to believe that the impossible can happen or you just have to really like time travel stories, as I do. Either way, if you just go with it, I think you will love this book.The mechanism by which Greta Wells travels between three times in 1985, 1941, and 1918 is the effect of the electroshock therapy she is getting to help with the depression that she is suffering. Her twin brother, Felix, who had Aids has just died. He long time lover, Nathan, has left her for another woman and even her wonderfully funny, eccentric unt Ruth cannot help get her out of it, nor can medication. The electroshock treatment takes her to these other years, where she is still herself. In an interesting twist, the Greta who belongs in these other years (or do they?) are traveling too, and they are not the same Greta that we know from 1985. I really like the Greta of 1985; even though she is sad and depressed, and confused at times, she just wants to “fix” things and make things better for her brother, herself and the other Gretas. A major emphasis of the story is on the the wonderful relationships she has with her brother and her eccentric Aunt Ruth. These realtionships remain constant throughout, even though in Feliz dies , and in one of the years, Aunt Ruth is dead.Greta can see clearly who she is and who she wants to be. She can see who the other Gretas are also. In the end she manages, at least in part, fix some things about their lives. Is it odd to imagine that this can happen ? Maybe so, but imagine is what we as readers of fiction always do.

Barbara

July 14, 2013

Another time travel novel by Greer. This time, it’s in the voice of a woman, Greta. Greta just lost her twin brother, who she was very close to, at the age of 31. To add to that, her lover Nathan leaves her. She seeks psychiatric treatment for her depression, and nothing works. Her shrink suggests she undergo electric shock treatment as a possible cure for her depression. What happens is that each time she undergoes her treatment, she travels in time to 1918 or 1941. She is the same person, with basically the same cast of characters in her life. She determines that each Greta in each time period undergoes shock treatment at the same time as she is doing it now, in 1985. So there are three Gretas being moved between three time periods. What the novel explores is how the time we live in affects the people we are. People born in the wrong time period have more difficulty being happy...not all lives are equal under certain circumstances. Also, does one have the right to interfere in people’s lives? And if you could, would you change the time period of your life. Great book, very easy to read. Interesting and fun characters.

Bonnie

November 14, 2015

My rating: 4 of 5 starsSource: Library Checkout'The impossible happens once to each of us.'Greta Wells is devastated after losing her twin brother Felix to AIDS and after her long term partner Nathan also leaves her. Burdened by a deep depression that is slowly getting the better of her, she takes the advice of her Aunt Ruth and visists a doctor who recommends electroconvulsive therapy. Ironically, right before her first session she considers, "How I longed to live in any time but this one. It seemed cursed with sorrow and death." The night following her first session she goes to sleep in 1985 and arises the next day in 1918. She wakes up as herself just under slightly different circumstances: her brother is alive and she is married to Nathan but is in love with a younger man named Leo. She discovers that her 1918 self is also undergoing electroconvulsive therapy and again, the night following her session she arises the next day in another time; this time in 1941. The cycle continues: 1985, 1918, 1941 and so on for 25 treatments."You’re all the same, you’re all Greta. You’re all trying to make things better, whatever that means to you. For you, it’s Felix you want to save. For another, it’s Nathan. For this one, it’s Leo she wants to resurrect. I understand. Don’t we all have someone we’d like to save from the wreckage?"This is a time travel story, yet it's not really. It touches on the possibilities of past lives and how your actions resonate to future lives and reincarnations of a sort. Because while 1985 Greta is traveling to her past selves, these individuals she's 'taking over' for are also on the same adventure and they're all trying to correct past mistakes and secure their own happiness. "Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?"The heart of the story is of course Greta, her lives, and the individuals she loves in these lives. It's a tale of romance and how each Greta found (and loved) Nathan but after experiencing each of these lives a wrench gets thrown into the works as she is forced to consider the possibility that he is not her one true love, that she's been blinded into repetition and is only resorting to what she knows.While each life could easily showcase the historical detailing of the time, this is glazed over. In 1918, we have the flu epidemic and World War I is ending. In 1941, World War II is beginning. In 1985, we have the AIDS epidemic. While living in these time periods, Greta maintains a certain absence as if she's truly just a visitor and isn't quite experiencing the moments around her. For someone who said, "...not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever though" I really wished to see the transformation of her character due to her environment and the impacts her surroundings had on her as a person.The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is treated as a serious tale of time travel yet is rife with flaws in its design. A definite suspension of disbelief is required because of how truly 'Impossible' the story is. Despite this (and the crazy unraveling that occurred at the end), it all managed to still work. It would be easy to nitpick it to death but in all actuality, time travel is not an exact science and different variations are definitely possible and this was quite an original interpretation of it. The story of Greta Wells is an imaginative tale about past lives and the implausible impossibility of "what if".

Anfri

December 02, 2018

Bellissima invenzione di Greer, un intreccio di vite (le stesse, ma triplicate in 3 diverse epoche) condotto con l'abilità nei paradossi temporali del narratore di fantascienza e la sensibilità e l'approfondimento psicologico di un romanziere.

Joe

August 13, 2013

I was drawn to this by way of The Time Travelers Wife (as in "similar to" according to Amazon), but this book goes much farther into the emotions of someone who sees through the eyes of someone else or some other time and circumstance, and thereby provides a deeper perspective on life, love and the nature of defining one's self.Thrust into alternate realities by medical procedure (and that's the total end of anything SciFi or Fantasy about this plot) Greta finds herself in her own body but at other times of history, surrounded by the same family and friends but in different yet eerily parallel circumstances. And those circumstances evolve in their own unique way.Can people change? Are we stuck with our fate no matter what? Do our feelings matter and can they help us change the evolution of events? Am I the same person no matter what time and situation I find myself in?Greta wrestles with all of these issues and more, in a prose that evokes all the colorful details of both her surroundings and the vibration of her inner emotional strings.I am a voraciously fast reader, and I have to say that this author made me willingly slow waaaaay down to take it all in and enjoy it.

Terris

January 18, 2023

This is an interesting story of a woman who travels back and forth through time trying to find the life that she thinks she should be leading -- but the decisions she needs to make are not so easy.I enjoyed this innovative story and writing style, and would recommend this author.

TheBookGroupie

July 05, 2013

The very best escape reading not only takes you away from your own situation while you read, it also lingers in your mind when the book is closed making you think, “what if could, what if I did…?” The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is that kind of imagination-luring escape novel.The set-up alone is tempting: Greta gets to travel back and forth in time between 1918, 1941, and her present time of 1985 and yet always be among the same close friends and relatives. Best of all, when she goes back in time, she retains her current consciousness and fully realizes that she is experiencing life as it might have been had she and her twin brother, her boyfriend, and her aunt, and the others existed in those earlier decades instead.Author Andrew Sean Greer, who also wrote The Confessions of Max Tivoli, is a master at moving the perspective between his characters’ thoughts and his characters’ words. Enabling readers to know Greta’s thoughts, he makes this “impossible” plot feel credible.Book groups discussing this novel may note that in the backwards travels only Greta, but not her friends or relatives—except possibly her Aunt Ruth—have any awareness about life in the future. They exist only in each era as if that is their single lifetime. This discrepancy is one of the author’s cleverest ideas because it keeps the reader aware of Greta’s fragile mental state and the literal spark that made her imagine herself living a different life.You see, Greta in the present time suffers from crippling depression for which she undergoes Electroconvulsive Therapy. Even the doctor who administers the ECT and the ECT treatments themselves are present in each visited lifetime. Like all of the other characters, this doctor’s personality and his role in Greta’s life remain the same in each era, though for all of the characters some circumstances are different.In 1985, after all, the United States was at peace and was generally prosperous. In 1918 and 1941, the whole world was at war and most women had to depend on men for financial support. And the men, what real choices did they have about the ways they conducted their lives? Meanwhile, Greta, knowing how society will turn out after 1918 and 1941, feels much more in control when she travels back to those years. Certainly, she can avoid the heartbreaks that ruined her modern life.Since the electroconvulsive treatments bring about each journey through time, and the visits follow a predictable sequence, Greta knows, after her first round of time travels, which version of life she will visit next and how long she will stay there. The travels, alone—those opportunities to be with people she has lost in her current life and to handle problems differently—give her things to look forward to and make her feel so happy… unless it’s the shock treatment that is having those effects. It’s hard to tell which of those makes Greta feel better. Is she losing her mind or getting it back? If Greta were not such a conscientious and truly loving character, readers wouldn’t follow her as she crossed between the decades. Here again we realize the brilliance of the way this author reveals his character’s thoughts: Greta is not a wallower. She takes action. She seeks out a psychiatrist when she feels bad. She says what she needs to say when time rolls back and she remembers what is a risk in her relationships. She falls in love with same man in every decade. And she figures out how to save a very important life. So much is better because of how she uses her second chances that you can’t help dreading the ever nearing end of the electroconvulsive therapy and wondering, “what if….?”

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