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Releases February 27, 2024

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By the Rivers of Babylon Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Mary Glickman (Author), Rebecca Gibel (Narrator), Tantor Audio (Publisher)

4.4 30 ratings

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On a sultry South Carolina island, sunlight teases out the darkest secrets of the heart, in this novel from the author of An Undisturbed Peace.

Joe and Abigail Becker, a Jewish couple from Boston, have inherited a house on Sweetgrass Island in South Carolina's Lowcountry. Though they feel like fish out of water, the couple is excited to give the South a try—and maybe even find it a place to finally call home.

Their Boston friends are convinced they won't last the summer. But the South works its magic on the Beckers, holding them fast to misty marsh, farmlands, and grand oaks, the sweet twang of banjos and the blues. Even the locals have put aside their usual mistrust of transplants. Joe is convinced that has more to do with Abigail's beauty than with his dubious charms—especially in the case of Billy Euston. A celebrated pit master and womanizer, Billy is transfixed with Abigail at first sight. And though Joe is used to his lovely wife's effect on men, he misjudges their playful flirtations—a tragic mistake that will tear through the island like a hurricane, leaving the broken and the battered in its wake . . .

Listening Length

10 hours and 32 minutes
Author

Mary Glickman
Narrator

Rebecca Gibel
Audible release date

February 27, 2024
Language

English
Publisher

Tantor Audio
ASIN

B0CTN5BB7M
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	10 hours and 32 minutes
Author	Mary Glickman
Narrator	Rebecca Gibel
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	February 27, 2024
Publisher	Tantor Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0CTN5BB7M

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4.4 out of 5

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Roccie Hill

Loved this book!

Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2023

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What a great psychological mystery thriller! Mary Glickman is an eloquent writer with many good books under her belt, but By the Rivers of Babylon shows us her effortless talent and soul. A fascinating Jewish couple, Joe & Abigail, both transplants from the big city of Boston, inherit a house in the Old South, Sweetgrass Island off the South Carolina coast, where the landscape and weather begin as mild amusements and end as a claustrophobic backdrop to murder. Glickman shows her first-hand knowledge of Southern culture, populating the island and the book with eccentric, wonderful characters. With a pounding pace, she describes the protagonist couple falling deeper and deeper in love with their summer home and slow, agreeable Southern way of life until they decide to make it permanent. The gripping events unfold across this lazy, small community in dazzling prose that will keep you turning pages until the very last one. This is a 5-star book that seduces the reader from page one, and that’s where Glickman’s talent shines brightest, because as the darker sides of each of the people begin to creep forward, I just couldn’t put it down.

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Jocelynn Johnson

A Touching and Thrilling Story!

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2023

Mary Glickman wrote an incredibly beautiful story about ordinary small-town people dealing with the complex circumstances and choices life brings. I found “By the Rivers of Babylon”, to be emotional, suspenseful, and touching. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a feel good, thriller!

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Irma Fritz

To Sing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2024

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Islands are special places of beauty, isolation and secrets. Having lived on one of the San Juan islands in the Pacific Northwest, I was drawn to Mary Glickman’s island setting in her novel By the Rivers of Babylon.

As any islander will tell you, coming home from the mainland is an occasion to be celebrated. It begins at the dock with the screech of gulls and the salty sea breezes. Neighbors greet neighbors, shouting courtesies and exchanging chit-chat about this other world of mainlanders they've been to, of noise and pollution, confusion and too many people.

I was delighted to be invited into Mary Glickman’s novel from the ferry dock of Sweetgrass Island in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. The plot is an archetypal story of outsiders making their way in a new world. In Glickman’s story, the young couple protagonists aren’t mere Yanks from Boston; they’re Jews invading a clannish southern island community of Blacks and whites whose families go back for generations.

But soon a promising plot goes sideways. The husband is a nebbish, the beautiful wife is a hussy, the island’s welcome ambassador is a philandering, drug peddling sleaze.

Not every novel needs to address profound issues. Southern and Romance writings have their own conventions, but genre literature does not preclude quality of craft. Glickman’s novel introduces issues of race and then dismisses them quite cavalierly. There is no reach to fulfill the promise of the novel’s title, no reach for truth or honor or wisdom or understanding. And so, By the Rivers of Babylon sinks in the mud of infidelity, mendacity, and an implausible murder twist and turns the mandates of Psalm 137 into a farce.

The South Carolina Lowcountry was settled by white Europeans who built their rice plantations with African slave labor, mostly peoples of the Gullah Geechee tribes. Can the reader really accept a story where a history of racial violence and abuse of Blacks and Jews by whites, worthy of serious discussion, is dismissed as minor, where the races now mingle happily at the local watering hole or at a hurricane party? And as a non-resident I ask myself if the idyllic setting depicted in this novel is the same South Carolina we read about in the daily news.

A mere eight years before Glickman published her novel, the Confederate flag still flew high and proud above the State Capitol building. That was also the year when a white supremacist murdered nine Blacks during Bible study at the Mother Emmanual Church, a historic Black church in the Lowcountry of Charleston. Last year, the state allowed parents to challenge teachings of white privilege in public institutions, an anti Critical Race Theory measure.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is currently tracking thirty groups of neo-Nazis, antisemites, neo-Confederates, white nationalists and anti-government hate groups in South Carolina. Some of them are the Dixie Republic, the John Birch Society, Fight White Genocide, and the Constitution Party. Moms For Liberty is an anti-government group active state-wide including in the Lowcountry regions of Charleston, Colleton and Dorchester counties.

So, the question remains: Does this island of racial harmony only exist in the author’s imagination?

Glickman is a gifted writer. Her talent and skill have won her awards and honors—hard-won accolades as any author can tell you. I’m certain she won’t let those gifts go to waste but use them in a future effort and return her attention to matters worthy of her craft, to remember to “…sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.”

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Jonathan Barkan

INTERESTING STORY, WELL TOLD!

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2023

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This is a great read. I kept thinking it will make for a great film adaptation; it deserves the big screen. Characters are well-developed, the story line has interesting twists and turns, the portrait and details of the southern low country is memorable, the writing style elegant and rhythmic. Love the references to local culture. And the inter-racial friendships are a welcome attribute. Highly recommended!

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Rosanna

Thank you, Mary Glickman, for the delightful "By the Rivers of Babylon"!!

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2023

Verified Purchase

Just finished reading Mary Glickman's latest novel, "By the Rivers of Babylon", and thoroughly enjoyed it! As always, I was delighted by Mary's flair for bringing to life such vivd characters, and her love of the Low Country is front and center in this romance-driven tale of a young Boston couple taking a chance on a new life in the South. An intiguing murder mystery only adds to the spice!

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By the Rivers of Babylon Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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