Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Thomas Murphy

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Roger Rosenblatt

Narrator: Gerard Doyle

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-19-16

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 25 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction with this reflective, bittersweet tale that introduces the irrepressible aging poet Thomas Murphy - a paean to the mystery, tragedy, and wonder of life.

Trying his best to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist his only child, Máire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphy - singer of the oldies, friend of the down-and-out, card sharp, raconteur, piano bar player, bon vivant, tough and honest and all-around good guy - contemplates his sunset years. Máire worries that Murph is losing his memory. Murph wonders what to do with the rest of his life. The older mind is at issue, and Murph's jumps from fact to memory to fancy, conjuring the islands that have shaped him - Irishmaan, a rocky gumdrop off the Irish coast where he was born, and New York, his longtime home. He muses on the living, his daughter and precocious grandson William, and on the dead, his dear wife Oona, and Greenberg, his best friend. Now, into Murphy's world comes the lovely Sarah, a blind woman less than half his age, who sees into his heart, as he sees into hers. Brought together under the most unlikely circumstance, Murph and Sarah begin in friendship and wind up in impossible possible love.

An Irishman, a dreamer, a poet, Murph, like Whitman, sings lustily of himself and of everyone. Through his often extravagant behavior and observations, both hilarious and profound, we see the world in all its strange glory, equally beautiful and ridiculous. With memory at the center of his thoughts, he contemplates its power and accuracy and meaning. Our life begins in dreams, but does not stay with them, Murph reminds us. What use shall we make of the past? Ultimately, he asks, are relationships our noblest reason for living?

Behold the charming, wistful, vibrant, aging Thomas Murphy, whose story celebrates the ageless confusion that is this dreadful, gorgeous life.

Members Reviews:

Not going gently into that good night...

Thomas Murphy seems to be losing step with the rest of the world these days. Meeting the disheveled old soul (when our story opens), he appears an old curmudgeon, a mumbling misanthropic stumblebum that eschews bathing and laundry; leaves eggs boiling on the stove when he steps out to the pub; a half-cracked fan of Irish whiskey and Irish ballads...sung wholeheartedly under the moonlight before retiring to his bed. His pals nowadays are likewise suited, occupants of the streets, congregated out of the mainstream in the flotsam of genteel society. Since the murder of his life-long friend, he spends time with a mountainous man that sleeps on a bench and who just occasionally believes himself a bear. Murphy ruminates about his recently deceased wife, and dodges his daughter's attempts to corral him into the doctor's office, something she's been insistent about since the day in the park that he *forgot* his beloved grandson.

When it comes to mind, he scribbles a poem. Murphy, it turns out, was/is a great Irish poet -- in the tradition of great Irish poets. In his lifetime, he has spun words into divinely beautiful poetry acclaimed around the world. His memory of awards and eggs, days in the park and friends is fading now, and the words that once came so fluidly are slipping away as the mutiny continues in his old body.