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Their Eyes Were Watching God Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

4.4 out of 5 stars 15,592 ratings

鶹

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Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, the author of four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and over 50 short stories, essays, and plays. Her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance. An inspiring Southern love story, it is the narrative of Janie Crawford, a strong and independent woman, and her growth through a life marked by various challenges. The novel has been adapted for the stage, radio, and TV, and Time magazine included it in its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels published since 1923.

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  1. Listening Length
    5 hours and 31 minutes
  2. Author
    Zora Neale Hurston
  3. Narrator
    Nichole Marie
  4. Audible release date
    March 3 2021
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    MuseumAudiobooks.com
  7. ASIN
    B08XSRWH9B
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length 5 hours and 31 minutes
Author Zora Neale Hurston
Narrator Nichole Marie
Audible.ca Release Date March 03 2021
Publisher MuseumAudiobooks.com
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B08XSRWH9B
鶹 Rank

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4.4 out of 5 stars
15,592 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the content of the book lovely, wonderful, and excellent. They say it's a very human story about one woman's struggles. Opinions are mixed on the writing quality, with some finding it eloquent and beautifully written, while others say it is poorly transcribed.

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ContentWriting quality
14 customers mention "Content"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the book lovely and enjoyable. They say it's an excellent read on survival for those living in poverty and challenges they face. Readers mention the core of the story is deep love. They also say it tells the story of a young woman seeking love and finding triumph and tragedy.

"...might as well have been set a thousand years ago - the core of the story is deep deep love." Read more

"...-dialect", Hurston brings the community to life; you sense the cultural richness of the people who, despite their poverty, bring dynamism and magic..." Read more

"...recommend it to anyone interested in human rights or just a very human story about one woman's struggles...." Read more

"...The language, and the emotions portrayed, are so raw and so vital. Its a great read - highly recommended!" Read more

7 customers mention "Writing quality"4 positive3 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some find it eloquent, unhurried, and beautifully written. However, others say the writing is poorly transcribed and the idiomatic black voice lent surprising imagery to the dialogue.

"...Writing in rich "afro-dialect", Hurston brings the community to life; you sense the cultural richness of the people who, despite their poverty,..." Read more

"...with the dialect used (or creole and it’s creative spelling) made reading very hard and slow until I got used to it...." Read more

"...be - a classic, for those interested in long gone-by and extremely poetic description of how blacks used to live in America...." Read more

"couldn't stand to read this - the writing was poor or the accents in the book ...just couldn't tolerate it...to continue" Read more

Top reviews from Canada

  • Leon
    5.0 out of 5 stars A truly touching love story
    Reviewed in Canada on January 21, 2025
    Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
    This is a lovely book. It portrays the lives of poor black people in Georgia a hundred years ago - it might as well have been set a thousand years ago - the core of the story is deep deep love.
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  • Eugene Ramcharan
    5.0 out of 5 stars It took me back to Caribbean island life
    Reviewed in Canada on February 1, 2022
    Verified Purchase
    On one level the book tells the story of a young woman seeking love and finding triumph and tragedy. The shenanigans of the characters took me back to the Caribbean in the early 50's and 60's when the afro-Caribbean peasant community, sensing freedom, expressed themselves with joyful abandon. Writing in rich "afro-dialect", Hurston brings the community to life; you sense the cultural richness of the people who, despite their poverty, bring dynamism and magic to laborious peasant life similar to what I observed growing up in and around the afro-Caribbean community in Trinidad. On another level, Hurston takes readers into the emotional depth that her characters must have known and tried to escape from - the fear of the "white man", darkness of their future, poverty of their present life which can only be assuaged by escape into music and party, and their helplessness in it all as described in their dealing with the hurricane which finally ends it all. One can look at the obvious story of love and tragedy but it is the underlying communal fear that struck me most and unleashed grieving.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Brianne
    4.0 out of 5 stars This book will make your heart bleed with compassion
    Reviewed in Canada on December 27, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    I was assigned this book in university and, because it was mandatory, I convinced myself that I would not enjoy it. I could not have been more wrong.

    This book is excellent. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in human rights or just a very human story about one woman's struggles. It will open your eyes to the double-edged sword of inequality that women of colour faced during the 1900s. The main character, Janie Crawford, will take you on an emotional journey filled with moments of laughter and blistering anger. Zora Neale Hurston created lovable, complex characters that I was eager to follow through their hardships and successes.

    Their Eyes Were Watching God will make your heart bleed with compassion and Hurston's use of colloquialisms breathes life into the story and its characters.
    7 people found this helpful
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  • Jess Hungate
    5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, and Little Known
    Reviewed in Canada on March 31, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    This is - or, more realistically, should most certainly be - a classic, for those interested in long gone-by and extremely poetic description of how blacks used to live in America. The language, and the emotions portrayed, are so raw and so vital. Its a great read - highly recommended!
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  • Yham
    3.0 out of 5 stars Hard to follow
    Reviewed in Canada on April 18, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    I did not finish the book yet but it does take a while if ever to get used to the way of speaking that is used for most of the book
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  • SGCF
    5.0 out of 5 stars Loved, loved, loved this book
    Reviewed in Canada on October 9, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Loved, loved, loved this book. I was captivated by the idiomatic black voice which lent surprising imagery to the dialogue even though it slowed me down, because I wanted to really hear it in my head. Such a noble story of a woman discovering the indomitability of her spirit despite being mired in the lower echelons of society. Hurston has it all here – themes of love, race, power, gender, spirituality – eloquent and unhurried as she brings the protagonist into self-realization
    One person found this helpful
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  • PauL L.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good
    Reviewed in Canada on January 6, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Great
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  • Selene
    4.0 out of 5 stars Her stories are great
    Reviewed in Canada on March 17, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    I have bought most of Zora Neale Hurston books because she gives a very real story about African people and European people it is not a clash but a way to learn one from the other and to learn how to respect one another. Her stories are great
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Ann
    5.0 out of 5 stars Gift - they liked it
    Reviewed in Australia on November 6, 2024
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    Gift
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  • Aly
    5.0 out of 5 stars different than image but same book so wtv
    Reviewed in the United Arab Emirates on November 20, 2020
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    yea
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  • Myosotis
    5.0 out of 5 stars En perfecto estado
    Reviewed in Spain on April 23, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    Cuando vi las malas reseñas tuve miedo de que el producto llegara deteriorado porque muchas de las malas reseñas es por este tema, pero me llegó en perfecto estado. Preciosa editorial. En cuanto a las malas reseñas porque es complicado de leer, sí, lo es, pero hay que informarse antes de por qué es complicado, investigar un poco. Yo ya lo sabía e iba preparada. Y es que la autora transcribió fielmente la forma de hablar de los afroamericanos, pero es algo que cuando te acostumbras y lees despacio, no encarna tantos problemas.
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  • Br 79
    5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and....Sad
    Reviewed in Brazil on April 18, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Pode-se ver este livro sob diferentes ângulos (sendo o principal a questão racial), mas eu prefiro acreditar que se trata de uma belíssima história de amor, onde a cor da pele nao importa em nenhum momento. Livro maravilhoso, daria nota 1.000 se possível fosse.
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  • FictionFan
    5.0 out of 5 stars A tide in the affairs of women...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 15, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    When Janie walks back into town eighteen months after leaving with a man 12 years her junior, her former friends and neighbours gossip and snigger, assuming he has spent all her money and then left her for a younger woman. But Janie's story is more complicated, a tragedy but also an awakening, her journey one of self-discovery.

    Janie is 16 when we first meet her in the care of her grandmother, a slave who became pregnant to her owner just before abolition. Janie's own birth was as a result of the rape of her mother by a teacher. The date isn't given, but a quick calculation suggests that the bulk of the book takes place in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. This matters, because one of my major criticisms of the book is that it seems to be set quite apart from historical context. There is no mention of WW1, no suggestion that any of the men fought or, indeed, had an opinion on the rights or wrongs of fighting for the USA. My (shallow) understanding is that this was a time of great change for African Americans, when they began to demand that a country that expected them to fight and die for it should also give them rights as equal citizens, develop a true democracy that embraced all people equally. But Janie's world indicates none of this, and I found myself therefore not being able to entirely accept it as a realistic picture of the time.

    Instead, Janie's contemporaries are shown as lazy, passive and unambitious on the whole, their aspirations beaten out of them by a world still run by and for the white elite. That I could accept more, though it seems in conflict with the idea of the development of the all-black town of Eatonville in which much of the story is placed. And Eatonville itself doesn't ring wholly true – when Janie and her new husband arrive there, it is no more than a plot of land with a few shacks, but within a few years it seems to be a thriving success story, without any indication of where that success comes from. And again, there is no discussion of politics or the wider world – Eatonville seems to exist in happy isolation, and the people Janie meets there and on her travels live carefree lives, based around drinking, gambling and sex – a happy-go-lucky existence, with no thought for the future. The position of women is one of almost total subservience to their men – a style of life where sexism and domestic violence is accepted by all. I was surprised at how negative a picture a black author was creating of the black community at a time when the political struggle for equality was building to a crescendo.

    The reason I bring up these criticisms first is that, after I finished the book, I read the forewords and afterword in my copy, written by Edwidge Danticat, Mary Helen Washington and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and was rather stunned to discover that my criticisms echoed those of the male black writing community of the time, whose dismissal of the book was based pretty much on it not conforming to the political agenda of the black movement. The subsequent feminist critiques of the '70s and later, it seems to me, dismiss these criticisms too easily, perhaps because they think that to accept them would weaken their own argument that the book is a seminal text in the finding of the black female voice in literature. I beg to disagree - with both parties: the lack of a political context is a weakness but not one that prevents the book from making an important contribution; and the fact that it gives women in black culture a voice does not negate the fact that it would have been a greater book had it addressed, or at least acknowledged, the contemporary political situation.

    Where the book excels is in its portrayal of Janie's character – her finding of her own way despite the male dominance of the society she lives in. As a person of mixed racial ancestry, Janie's light skin tone and unusual hair are used to great effect to show how indoctrinated the black psyche had become to accept the desirability of 'white' physical traits; showing within their community the same kind of prejudices heaped on them from outside it. Having been married off young to a much older man, Janie rebels and runs off with the good-looking and ambitious Joe to Eatonville, only to discover that Joe too believes that a woman is at her best in the kitchen and bedroom. We know from the beginning of the book that there is a third man in Janie's story – the younger Tea Cake, for whom she has left her comfortable home in Eatonville and gone off to work the fields in the Florida Everglades. It is in the few months that she spends with Tea Cake that Janie finally discovers what it is to love and be loved equally.

    Although the structure of the book is that Janie is telling her story in retrospect to her friend Pheoby, this is a third person narrative for the most part, slipping into first occasionally as we are made directly privy to Janie's thoughts. All of the speech is in dialect, which Hurston handles brilliantly, and although the non-dialogue parts are in a more standard form of English, she maintains speech patterns, tone and vocabulary throughout. The dialect is not so broad that it makes the book hard to read – it's sustained so beautifully that it almost recedes into the background after the reader gets tuned into it. While I have criticised the portrayal of the society as negative, it's also done with great skill, making it completely believable within the internal context of the book. The writing is lyrical at times, especially the section in the Florida Everglades where the land and weather come to play a huge part in the story. The book has its share of tragedy and horror, but Hurston offers compassion to her characters at all times, and she draws them subtly, so that there are few of them who can't earn our empathy.

    I am aware that this review has taken on gargantuan proportions, but that's a sign of the effect the book and the debate surrounding it had on me. I could write at length about my disappointment that fundamentally Janie's search for herself seems too much to be a search for a man who will love her right. I could mention my anger at the way Hurston seems tacitly to endorse wife-beating so long as it's done with love(!). I could wonder about the lack, not just of children, but of any mention of them. But instead, I'll say that, despite my quite severe criticisms of it, I loved the book for the language and the compelling story-telling, and for making me think, and it's one that I'm sure would deliver even more on a re-read. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.
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