Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Blue cover art

Blue

By: Emmelie Prophète, Tina Kover - translator
Narrated by: Krystel Roche
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Baghdad Clock cover art
The Polish Nurse cover art
The Scent of Flowers at Night cover art
Disoriental cover art
The Joy Luck Club cover art
They Said They Wanted Revolution cover art
The Night Burns Bright cover art
Open City cover art
The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry cover art
Karitas Untitled cover art
North to Paradise cover art
Full cover art
Almost Romance cover art
The Last Goddess cover art
Return to the Enchanted Island cover art
The Taste of Ginger cover art

Summary

An award-winning Haitian novel about silence, beauty, and the solidarity of tears.

Airports are distillations of the world. I like thinking of them that way. The hope of leaving and the desire to come home, existing side by side. Any voyage is possible. My mind flies off toward the blue province once again. I don’t know, anymore, why I always associate it with blue. It isn’t even my favorite color.

Traveling alone from Miami to Port-au-Prince, our narrator finds comfort at the airport. She feels free to ponder the silence that surrounds her homeland, her mother, her aunts, and her own inner thoughts. Between two places, she sees how living in poverty keeps women silent, forging their identities around practicality and resilience. From a distance, she is drawn inevitably homeward toward her family and the glittering blue Caribbean Sea.

Blue comes alive through vivid images crowding the book, just as memories do in real life, as if the author is trying to sort through them, to come to grips with her own emotional conflict. Balancing the pain and anger are spiritual bonds that connect the author to the women who have come before her, who have created her, and with Haiti itself, her motherland. No amount of glittering opportunity up north can prevent her from finding her way home.

©2013 Emmelie Prophète (P)2021 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2021 by Tina Kover.

Critic reviews

“Krystal Roche's youthful voice melds childhood memories with adult reflection, propelling this novel into the realm of poetic memoir.... Roche's Haitian cadence adds a dreaminess to all the details.... Roche's thoughtful pace weaves the words together, rendering chapter demarcations irrelevant. In Roche's voice, the narrative becomes poetry, highlighting Prophete's talent in this genre.”AudioFile Magazine

“Prophète, via Kover’s translation, demonstrates an impressive gift for lyrical prose. What makes Blue stand out is the way she turns familiar spaces—like, say, airports—into the sites of moments of beauty and reflection.”Words Without Borders

“Impressionistic…evokes matrilineage…ruminates on travel—migration, dislocation, and exile.”LitHub 

More from the same

What listeners say about Blue

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1
Performance
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    0
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    3
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    1
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.