Download The Barbarian Nurseries AudioBook Free

The great panoramic social novel that Los Angeles deserves-a 21st-century, West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities by the one writer qualified to capture the city in all its glory and complexity. With The Barbarian Nurseries, Héctor Tobar gives our most misunderstood metropolis its great contemporary novel, taking us beyond the glimmer of Hollywood and deeper than camera-ready crime stories to reveal Southern California life as it truly is, across its vast, sunshiny sprawl of classes, languages, dreams, and ambitions. Araceli is the live-in maid in the Torres-Thompson household-one of three Mexican employees in a Spanish-style home with lovely views of the Pacific. She has been responsible strictly for the cooking and cleaning, however the recession has hit, and suddenly Araceli is the last Mexican standing-unless you count Scott Torres, though you'd never suspect he was half Mexican but also for his last name and an old family image with central LA in the backdrop. The financial pressure is triggering the kind of fights that even Araceli knows the children shouldn't hear, and then one morning, after an especially dramatic fight, Araceli wakes to an empty house-except for both Torres-Thompson boys, little aliens she's never really had to connect to before. Their parents are unreachable, and the one relative she knows of is Señor Torres, the subject of that old family photo. So she does the thing she can think of and heads to the bus stop to seek out their grandfather. It will be an adventure, she tells the boys. If she only knew. With a precise eye for the telling detail and an unerring way with character, soaring brilliantly and seamlessly among a panorama of viewpoints, Tobar calls on all of his experience-as a novelist, a father, a journalist, a son of Guatemalan immigrants, and a native Angeleno-to deliver a novel as broad, as essential, as alive as the location itself.

Category: Cultural Heritage