In this audiobook, the authors, cowriters of the “Within the Wires” podcast, have fashioned an expansive alternative-twentieth-century global history. The premise: The autobiographical manuscript of Dr. Miriam Gregory, a psychologist and spiritualist who specializes in rehabilitation from childhood trauma, has been found in an attic. Kirsten Potter's richly expressive narration gives voice to Miriam's complicated personal history. When her family died, Miriam was left on her own in a world ravaged by war, famine, and disease. After years of scavenging for food and shelter, along with a prison term, she ended up on a farm collective operated by academics who later helped establish a new global social order. Narrator Adepero Oduye seamlessly inserts explanatory notes throughout the story, which help listeners evaluate the reliability of Miriam's recollections. M.J. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
You Feel It Just Below the Ribs: A Novel
Narrated by Kirsten Potter, Adepero Oduye
Jeffrey CranorUnabridged — 9 hours, 22 minutes
You Feel It Just Below the Ribs: A Novel
Narrated by Kirsten Potter, Adepero Oduye
Jeffrey CranorUnabridged — 9 hours, 22 minutes
Audiobook (Digital)
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
Related collections and offers
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
Overview
A haunting, provocative novel, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a fictional autobiography in an alternate twentieth century that chronicles one woman's unusual life, including the price she pays to survive and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save.
Born at the end of the old world, Miriam grows up during The Great Reckoning, a sprawling, decades-long war that nearly decimates humanity and strips her of friends and family. Devastated by grief and loneliness, she emotionally exiles herself, avoiding relationships or allegiances, and throws herself into her work-disengagement that serves her when the war finally ends, and The New Society arises.
To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to-disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, endangering her own life.
But is her “confession” honest-or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?
A jarring and uncanny tale of loss, trauma, and the power of human connection and deception, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a portrait of a disturbing alternate world eerily within reach, and an examination of the difficult choices we must make to survive in it.
Editorial Reviews
08/30/2021
Cranor (cocreator of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale) and Matthewson (Of Things Gone Astray) present a sprawling tale of survival, detachment, and sacrifice set in the alternate 20th-century world of their Within the Wires podcast. Presented as the autobiography of Dr. Miriam Gregory, the story describes how Miriam weathered the Great Reckoning, a decades-long war that touched her childhood with trauma and tragedy. A meditative process helps her to detach from her painful experiences, and her later work as a psychologist allows her to adapt the practice on behalf of the New Society, which springs up in the war’s wake. The New Society adopts Miriam’s technique to prevent tribalism, nationalism, and future war—but it requires the total isolation of individuals, even from nuclear family, and the results of its implementation are devastating. Though Miriam’s internal monologue sometimes meanders, the authors succeed in crafting a fascinatingly complex narrator, and the footnotes commenting on her work—and calling it into question—are equally layered. Throughout, the novel raises the question of what humanity should sacrifice to avoid future conflict, and whether those sacrifices are worth it. Readers who enjoy dystopian tales and unreliable narrators will find much to dissect in this haunting, heart-wrenching novel. (Nov.)
This cleverly structured puzzle of a book is both tense intellectual thriller and elegant dystopian fantasy, blending fiction and history with terrifying clarity and haunting realism.” — Simon Van Booy, author of Night Came With Many Stars
“You Feel It Just Below the Ribs” mirrors the methodology of “Within the Wires,” explicitly reminding the audience of its medium while destabilizing the story through insertions and insinuations of what exists beyond it. ….the book is perfectly comprehensible as a stand-alone project, and full of moving insight into loss, grief and family.” — The New York Times
"You Feel It Just Below The Ribs is thought-provoking, more than a little melancholy, and ultimately one of the most intriguing novels I’ve read this year. What a quietly wonderful book." — mysteryandsuspense.com
“You Feel It Just Below the Ribs. . . can be read as multiple narratives, a literary choose-your-own-adventure: as a meditation on the nature of alternate histories, as a provocative account of the horrors linked to psychiatry, as a character study of a woman who has made terrible choices, even as a narrative about the ethical and political questions to consider as part of scientific research.” — Chicago Review of Books
“Readers who enjoy dystopian tales and unreliable narrators will find much to dissect in this haunting, heart-wrenching novel.” — Publishers Weekly
"A compelling story of the potential cost of achieving everlasting "peace." . . . A thought-provoking, haunting story about the sacrifices a society is willing to make to ensure its survival." — Booklist
“The book as a whole fits into the universe of the authors' serial podcast Within the Wires, which also takes its form from the idea of found communication. Unsurprisingly, that sense of collaborative creation carries over . . . The result is a fascinating layering of fiction, invention, satire, and social critique which explores much more than just the backstory of an alternative history. A metatextual inquiry into the roots of human conflict that keeps its thread of tension taut throughout.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Co-creators of the podcast Within The Wires, Cranor and Matthewson have set the foundation for a radical take on balancing the desires & needs of the individual against that of the world.” — WRAL TV
"You Feel it Just Below the Ribs is a fantastic read for anyone that is a fan of dystopian alternate realities and possibly unreliable narrators. The novel makes readers question everything and keeps you on your toes." — The Maneater
You Feel It Just Below the Ribs” mirrors the methodology of “Within the Wires,” explicitly reminding the audience of its medium while destabilizing the story through insertions and insinuations of what exists beyond it. ….the book is perfectly comprehensible as a stand-alone project, and full of moving insight into loss, grief and family.
Co-creators of the podcast Within The Wires, Cranor and Matthewson have set the foundation for a radical take on balancing the desires & needs of the individual against that of the world.
"You Feel It Just Below The Ribs is thought-provoking, more than a little melancholy, and ultimately one of the most intriguing novels I’ve read this year. What a quietly wonderful book."
"A compelling story of the potential cost of achieving everlasting "peace." . . . A thought-provoking, haunting story about the sacrifices a society is willing to make to ensure its survival."
This cleverly structured puzzle of a book is both tense intellectual thriller and elegant dystopian fantasy, blending fiction and history with terrifying clarity and haunting realism.
“You Feel It Just Below the Ribs. . . can be read as multiple narratives, a literary choose-your-own-adventure: as a meditation on the nature of alternate histories, as a provocative account of the horrors linked to psychiatry, as a character study of a woman who has made terrible choices, even as a narrative about the ethical and political questions to consider as part of scientific research.
"You Feel it Just Below the Ribs is a fantastic read for anyone that is a fan of dystopian alternate realities and possibly unreliable narrators. The novel makes readers question everything and keeps you on your toes."
"A compelling story of the potential cost of achieving everlasting "peace." . . . A thought-provoking, haunting story about the sacrifices a society is willing to make to ensure its survival."
You Feel It Just Below the Ribs” mirrors the methodology of “Within the Wires,” explicitly reminding the audience of its medium while destabilizing the story through insertions and insinuations of what exists beyond it. ….the book is perfectly comprehensible as a stand-alone project, and full of moving insight into loss, grief and family.
In this audiobook, the authors, cowriters of the “Within the Wires” podcast, have fashioned an expansive alternative-twentieth-century global history. The premise: The autobiographical manuscript of Dr. Miriam Gregory, a psychologist and spiritualist who specializes in rehabilitation from childhood trauma, has been found in an attic. Kirsten Potter's richly expressive narration gives voice to Miriam's complicated personal history. When her family died, Miriam was left on her own in a world ravaged by war, famine, and disease. After years of scavenging for food and shelter, along with a prison term, she ended up on a farm collective operated by academics who later helped establish a new global social order. Narrator Adepero Oduye seamlessly inserts explanatory notes throughout the story, which help listeners evaluate the reliability of Miriam's recollections. M.J. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2021-09-29
A recovered manuscript details the establishment of the New Society after the ruinous Great Reckoning almost ends mankind—but does it describe a triumphant return to peace and equity or the desecration of that which makes us most human?
Dr. Miriam Gregory was a visionary psychologist whose research into the link between memory and trauma led to some of the foundational tenants of the New Society, the system of political and social governance that sprang up in the shambles left behind by the Great Reckoning. In 1977, she failed to return home from work and was not heard from again until her body was discovered in Stockholm in 1996. Hidden under the floorboards of Dr. Gregory’s attic bedsit was a manuscript which, in spite of its incendiary nature, has been made available to a select few well-vetted readers in the name of free speech, the very manuscript the reader now holds in their hands. Dr. Gregory details her early life: the loss of her family, her adoption into a gang of similarly orphaned children, her specious arrest for treason, and her friendship with the ethereal Elsa. It is from Elsa that Dr. Gregory learns to enter a meditative trance state that allows the girls to remove themselves from the harsh environment of the Belgian prison in which they are both incarcerated. After Elsa’s presumed death in a prison riot, Dr. Gregory evolves the technique from meditation into a tool that can actually alter a subject’s relationship to the traumatic memories they carry within them. As her proficiency grows, however, Dr. Gregory’s research is put to uses she never intended. Eventually, her psychological treatments become the foundational tool for enacting the Age Ten Protocols, wherein children are separated from their families and conditioned to forget their emotional ties in an effort to eradicate all traces of the kind of tribal or national loyalties responsible for the Great Reckoning. Horrified by the application of her process, Dr. Gregory sets out to right some of the wrongs she has unwittingly helped create. The book as a whole fits into the universe of the authors' serial podcast Within the Wires, which also takes its form from the idea of found communication. Unsurprisingly, that sense of collaborative creation carries over, both in how Dr. Gregory’s memories intersect and sometimes refute the details of her history and in the technique of liberally footnoting the text with asides from fact-checkers and critics who warn the reader of the danger of taking Dr. Gregory’s word as law. The result is a fascinating layering of fiction, invention, satire, and social critique which explores much more than just the backstory of an alternative history.
A metatextual inquiry into the roots of human conflict that keeps its thread of tension taut throughout.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940172968761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/16/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 932,184 |
Videos
