Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Narrated by Skipp Sudduth
Lisa GenovaUnabridged — 11 hours, 13 minutes
Narrated by Skipp Sudduth
Lisa GenovaUnabridged — 11 hours, 13 minutes
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
"Inside the O'Briens . . . promises to do for Huntington's disease, what Still Alice did for Alzheimer's."
"For the characters in a Lisa Genova novel, there is no way out, for genetic destiny has sealed their fate. And yet, for us as readers, there also is no way out, for we have no desire to look away. In his fear and courage, Joe O’Brien is an American hero. Huntington’s disease will claim his life, but not his capacity to love. This is Genova’s genius. A bold, skillful writer at the height of her narrative powers, she makes us long to hope for the hopeless and comfort the condemned. In their hard journeys, we find the small shining promise of every single ordinary day."
"[Genova's] compassionate storytelling is full of human emotion, all the way from boiling rage to love and gratitude, to despair."
An unsparing, heart-piercing portrait…compelling...enlightening.
"This novel of siblings rocked by their father's Huntington's disease is a total tearjerker, but ultimately it's a tribute to family love."
"Lisa Genova’s subtle, finely tuned prose gains momentum until you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or give thanks. Like all of her work, Inside the O’Briens is brimming with candor, pathos, and deeply human characters. I didn't want the book to end!"
The family’s resilience makes this a story about living, not dying.
"A moving drama."
"Compelling and masterful."
"Sympathetic, absorbing, multifaceted characters compel the reader's compassion. While Genova's background in neuroscience allows her to portray medical issues accurately, the heart of the O'Briens' story is human....Poignant and painful, warm and redemptive, Inside the O'Briens displays Genova's established strengths in bringing neuroscience to the lay reader, and portraying the power of love."
"An intimate, heartbreaking look at life with Huntington's disease."
"Genova...compassionately details how an illness—this time Huntington's disease—can destroy not only the afflicted, but those who love them as well."
"This heartbreaking book tells the whole story of how a major illness affects a family. Genova’s gift is to show that things do work out, in a sense. Her very human novel teaches us to keep living, to lean on each other and be there to be leaned on.
For a book that could be bleak and depressing, Genova turns it into a story that is strong and uplifting. The disease will continue its inexorable march, but the O’Briens’ response tells much about character when faced with crisis.
"Lisa Genova’s deep empathy for her characters shines through this poignant and uplifting story about family, grief and the resilience of the human spirit. Kudos to this amazing writer for showing us—once again—the transformative powers of even the most devastating events. Do not miss this fabulous novel."
"Inside the O'Briens is...about resilience and hope."
"Genova...compassionately details how an illness—this time Huntington's disease—can destroy not only the afflicted, but those who love them as well."
Skipp Sudduth’s performance of Genova’s exploration of Huntington’s disease makes the science of this inherited, incurable, degenerative nerve disease very personal. Joe O’Brien, 44, is an Irish cop with a wife and four children in their twenties. After some strange episodes, Joe is diagnosed with Huntington’s. Sudduth’s no-nonsense delivery and unemotional handling of this highly emotional subject are exactly right. As the O’Brien children learn that each has a 50/50 chance of inheriting the illness and that a simple blood test can tell if they have the gene, Sudduth makes their awakening to the deadly possibilities palpable. As they watch their father’s symptoms worsen, they wonder if they really want to know their genetic futures. Clear-eyed and heartrending, this is top-notch listening. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940171005474 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 04/07/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,073,983 |
Inside the O'Briens
CHAPTER 1
Damn woman is always moving his things. He can’t kick off his boots in the living room or set his sunglasses down on the coffee table without her relocating them to “where they belong.” Who made her God in this house? If he wants to leave a stinking pile of his own shit right in the middle of the kitchen table, then that’s where it should stay until he moves it.
Where the fuck is my gun?
“Rosie!” Joe hollers from the bedroom.
He looks at the time: 7:05 a.m. He’s going to be late for roll call if he doesn’t get the hell out of here pronto, but he can’t go anywhere without his gun.
Think. It’s so hard to think lately when he’s in a hurry. Plus it’s a thousand degrees hotter than hell in here. It’s been sweltering for June, in the high eighties all week, and barely cools down at night. Terrible sleeping weather. The air in the house is a thick swamp, today’s heat and humidity already elbowing in on what was trapped inside yesterday. The windows are open, but that doesn’t help a lick. His white Hanes T-shirt is sticking to his back beneath his vest, pissing him off. He just showered and could already use another.
Think. He took a shower and got dressed—pants, T-shirt, Kevlar vest, socks, boots, gun belt. Then he took his gun out of the safe, released the trigger lock, and then what? He looks down at his right hip. It’s not there. He can feel the missing weight of it without even looking. He’s got his magazine pouch, handcuffs, Mace, radio, and service baton, but no gun.
It’s not in the safe, not on his dresser, not in the top drawer of his dresser, not on the unmade bed. He looks over at Rosie’s bureau. Nothing but the Virgin Mary centered on an ivory doily. She sure ain’t going to help him.
St. Anthony, where the fuck is it?
He’s tired. He worked traffic detail last night over at the Garden. Friggin’ Justin Timberlake concert got out late. So he’s tired. So what? He’s been tired for years. He can’t imagine being so tired that he would be careless enough to misplace his loaded gun. A lot of guys with as many years on the force as Joe grow complacent about their service weapon, but he never has.
He stomps down the hall, passes the two other bedrooms, and pokes his head into their only bathroom. Nothing. He storms into the kitchen with his hands on his hips, the heel of his right hand searching for the top of his gun out of habit.
His four not-yet-showered, bed-headed, sleepy teenagers are up and seated around the tiny kitchen table for breakfast—plates of undercooked bacon, runny scrambled eggs, and burnt white toast. The usual. Joe scans the room and spots his gun, his loaded gun, on the mustard-yellow Formica counter next to the sink.
“Mornin’, Dad,” offers Katie, his youngest, smiling but shy about it, sensing that something is off.
He ignores Katie. He picks up his Glock, secures it in its holster, and then aims the crosshairs of his wrath at Rosie.
“Whaddaya doin’ with my gun there?”
“What are you talking about?” says Rosie, who is standing by the stove in a pink tank top and no bra, shorts, and bare feet.
“You’re always movin’ my shit around,” says Joe.
“I never touch your gun,” says Rosie, standing up to him.
Rosie is petite at five feet nothing and a hundred pounds soaking wet. Joe’s no giant either. He’s five feet nine with his patrol boots on, but everyone thinks of him as being taller than he is, probably because he’s barrel-chested and has muscular arms and a deep, husky voice. At thirty-six, he’s got a bit of a gut, but not bad for his age or considering how much of his life he spends sitting in a cruiser. He’s normally playful and easygoing, a pussycat really, but even when he’s smiling and there’s that twinkle in his blue eyes, everyone knows he’s old-school tough. No one messes with Joe. No one but Rosie.
She’s right. She never touches his gun. Even after all these years of his being on the force, she’s never grown comfortable with having a firearm in the house, even though it’s always in the safe or in his top dresser drawer, where it’s trigger-locked, or on his right hip. Until today.
“Then how the fuck did it get there?” he asks, pointing to the space next to the sink.
“Watch your mouth,” she says.
He looks over at his four kids, who have all stopped eating to witness the show. He narrows in on Patrick. God love him, but he’s sixteen going on stupid. This would be just the kind of knucklehead move he would pull, even after all the lectures these kids have endured about the gun.
“So which one of you did this?”
They all stare and say nothing. The Charlestown code of silence, eh?
“Who picked up my gun and left it by the sink?” he demands, his voice booming. Silence will not be an option.
“Wasn’t me, Dad,” says Meghan.
“Me either,” says Katie.
“Not me,” says JJ.
“I didn’t do it,” says Patrick.
What every criminal he’s ever arrested says. Everyone’s a fuckin’ saint. They all look up at him, blinking and waiting. Patrick shoves a rubbery slice of bacon into his mouth and chews.
“Have some breakfast before you go, Joe,” says Rosie.
He’s too late to have breakfast. He’s too late because he’s been looking for his goddamn gun that someone took and then left on the kitchen counter. He’s late and feeling out of control, and he’s hot, too hot. The air in this cramped room is too soupy to breathe, and it feels as if the heat from the stove and six bodies and the weather is stoking something already threatening to boil over inside him.
He’s going to be late for roll call, and Sergeant Rick McDonough, five years younger than Joe, is going to have a word with him again or maybe even write him up. He can’t stomach the humiliating thought of it, and something inside him explodes.
He grabs the cast-iron skillet on the stove by the handle and sidearms it across the room. It smashes a sizable hole in the drywall not far from Katie’s head, then lands with a resounding BANG on the linoleum floor. Rusty brown bacon grease drips down the daisy-patterned wallpaper like blood oozing from a wound.
The kids are wide-eyed and silent. Rosie says nothing and doesn’t move. Joe storms out of the kitchen, down the narrow hallway, and steps into the bathroom. His heart is racing, and his head is hot, too hot. He splashes cold water over his hair and face and wipes himself dry with a hand towel.
He needs to leave now, right now, but something in his reflection snags him and won’t let go.
His eyes.
His pupils are dilated, black and wide with adrenaline, like shark eyes, but that’s not it. It’s the expression in his eyes that has him arrested. Wild, unfocused, full of rage. His mother.
It’s the same unbalanced gaze that used to terrify him as a young boy. He’s looking in the mirror, late for roll call, glued to the wretched eyes of his mother, who used to stare at him just like this when she could do nothing else but lie in her bed in the psych ward at the state hospital, mute, emaciated, and possessed, waiting to die.
The devil in his mother’s eyes, dead for twenty-five years, is now staring at him in the bathroom mirror.
This month we’re getting long-awaited sequels, the latest from a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, an ice-cold noir thriller, and a delicious contemporary reimagining of a classic Jane Austen comedy of manners. These are the books you should be pairing with your coffee, your commute, and your late-night “just one more page” protests all month long.
