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    Run
    Run
    Run
    Audiobook9 hours

    Run

    Written by Ann Patchett

    Narrated by Peter Francis James

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    ""Engaging, surprising, provocative and moving...a thoroughly intelligent book, an intimate domestic drama that nonetheless deals with big issues touching us all: religion, race, class, politics and, above all else, family."" -- Washington Post

    From New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett comes an engrossing story of one family on one fateful night in Boston where secrets are unlocked and new bonds are formed.

    Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving possessive and ambitions father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see is sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children--all his children--safe.

    Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic Priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met. As an in her bestselling novel, Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative. Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 25, 2007
    ISBN9780061554476
    Run
    Author

    Ann Patchett

    Ann Patchett is originally from Los Angeles and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of eight novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, Commonwealth and The Dutch House. She lives in Nashville.

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    Reviews for Run

    4/5

    307 ratings119 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Tip walks in to the path of an oncoming car. A woman pushes him out of the way, suffering injuries herself.Here begins a strange unravelling tale of a family, and what a family becomes.To be honest I couldn't really see the point of the story. It was disjointed, all to convenient and didn't really seem to get anywhere

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      So many threads coming apart and together through the story. Couldn’t put it down. A gem of a book.

      But…. PLEASE EXCISE OR EDIT THE MUSIC BETWEEN CHAPTERS- not against music, liked idea of it, but MUSIC CHOICE WAS INEPT. On several occasions jaunty music followed sad or serious passages. It was clear whoever added the music hadn’t read the book/relevant chapter. Very jarring and just dumb, spoiled the reading experience! Someone should have taken the time to read the book and edit in appropriate music. Do not include music if you aren’t willing to do this, too risky for something optional. And please, edit it out of this edition asap until you have time to make a careful selection!!!!
    • 5/5
      This is a beautifully told story about a car accident that suddenly transforms a Boston family. Suddenly, relationships are all mixed up and allegiences aren't what they appear to be. A fascinating study of relationships and how they can change. Also a good look at race relations without a load of white guilt.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely spectacular. I inhaled this book. I started it on the bus one morning, just for something to do, and I ended up reading almost half of it in just one day.The "summer reading" book I had to read before my freshman year of college was Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty". While I liked Ms. Patchett a lot, I wasn't really fond of the book and put off reading anything else by her for several years. That was a HUGE mistake. Both Run and Bel Canto were simply amazing. Her character development is some of the best I've ever read; she takes such care with even the smallest character. I really, really recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed it—Patchett is such a great writer— but I didn't love it as much as I have her other books. The characters in this one seem a little too nice; their flaws don't tarnish them much. It's a good story, but even with the tragedies included, it feels a bit too sweet, and everyone ends up a bit too happy.
    • 2/5
      Major meh. The character were so flat, in their boxes. The smart kid, the friendly kid, the mess-up. Took me forever to finish. I was really unimpressed.
    • 3/5
      A good read but I enjoyed Bel Canto more.
    • 5/5
      Ann Patchett at her best! Ann Patchett writes about families-from The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), in which young, unwed mothers become family, to Bel Canto (2001), in which hostages and their kidnappers forms unexpected bonds. Beautifully written, Run again explores family, this time through the lenses of birth, class, and race. While mainly a domestic drama, Run also touches on larger themes-such as social exclusion, privilege, and obligation; politics; and religion and the afterlife. Critics overall lauded Patchett's thematic depth, though a couple of reviewers noted her failure to delve deeply enough. And while most characters-particularly Kenya-captivated them, a few also described them as unrealistically sympathetic. Despite these minor complaints, Run is, at best, that rare, mature work that exquisitely dissects human relationships and possibilities.
    • 3/5
      I am a big fan of Bel Canto and couldn't wait to get my hands on Patchett's latest novel. Sadly, I did not think it lived up to her prior talent. The story line and characters seemed shallow and predictable. While I did enjoy the character of Kenya, the other people in the novel did not engage me. I did not expect it to have the tension I felt in Bel Canto, but with the family crises present in this novel, I would have expected to feel more than I did.
    • 5/5
      Run by Ann Patchett is a multi-character story about family. One family consists of a run.giffather, a mother and one son. Regrettably only one son. The family adopts two little boys and the world seems a sunny place to be until the death of the mother. The Father is a political enthusiast, while the boys gravitate to their own interests while dealing with the blow of losing a mom. Patchett allows each character their voice and viewpoint while moderating the story of the emotional difficulties associated with family and growing up. The second family has a mother and one little girl. This family does not live in the good neighborhood but is bound tightly together by discipline and dreams. One dark and snowy evening after a Jesse Jackson lecture a car wreck ties both families together in unexpected ways.
    • 5/5
      Another beautifully written book by Ann Patchett. Another compelling story with amazing description and relatable characters. Run was a joy to read. I have reread a number of passages just to enjoy them again.
    • 4/5
      Beautiful writing! The story meanders through Boston and the lives of the family with skill, intrigue, love and small revelations. Nicely done.
    • 4/5
      Good book about families and politics. Makes you really think about the word Run and it's many meanings which all seem to be explored in this novel. Liked Bel Canto much more but a good read especially for the summer.
    • 5/5
      Seldom has my book club enjoyed a book more. Run by Ann Patchett takes place in a single, eventful day. It's a character driven novel, but it's full of so many plot twists that it becomes very difficult to put down. (I think you can see this from the opening sentence quoted above.) It's also very difficult to write about without giving anything away. Be warned.Run tells the story of the the Doyle family. Bernard Doyle, who becomes mayor and then former mayor of Boston, and his wife Bernadette already have a 12-year-old son, Sullivan, when they adopt a child. Bernadette wants a big family and has tried for years to adopt, so she does not hesitate to accept the baby even though it is black and the Doyles are Irish catholics. A week later the Doyles are told that the baby's mother has changed her mind. She will only allow the adoption to go through if the Doyles also adopt the infant's 14-month old brother as well. Bernadette and Bernard do not hesitate to say yes. Unfortunately, less than five years later, Bernadette falls ill and dies leaving Bernard with one teenage son, Sullivan, and two sons under six, Tip and Teddy, to raise on his own. Run takes place many years later, when the two biological brothers are grown and in college. One night cold winter night, after a lecture by Jesse Jackson that Bernard dragged Tip and Teddy to, Tip walks into the street in front of an oncoming car. Out of nowhere, a woman rushes at him and shoves him out of the way probably saving his life. Only his ankle is injured, but the woman is struck by the full force of the car. The Doyles find she was with her young daughter, Kenya, who has no one else to look after her. They take Kenya to the hospital and end up bringing her home to stay the night with them. Over the course of the next day, while the Doyles and Kenya await the outcome of her mother's surgery, we learn the full history of the Doyle family as well as that of Kenya and her mother. We also learn how the two family's are connected. To Ms. Patchett's great credit, this never once feels forced or contrived. It also makes Run something of a page-turner. Just as the reader thinks one thing is true, Ms. Patchett gives another detail that changes everything. (This even happens in the story's epilogue.) The danger with plots twists and with the big reveal is that some readers won't buy it, that the author will lose a few members of the audience along the way. This never happened with Run, at least not with the members of my book club. In the end were all left not with a sense of how tragic life can be, but of how wonderful it is.
    • 2/5
      So disappointing! I loved Bel Canto, and was expecting a lot from this new book by Ann Patchett and was incredibly let down. The writing wasn't nearly as good and the plot was weak. There was one interesting twist, the only reason I continued to read, but even that wasn't amazing. I read it in the matter of a few hours and can't say I'm sad it's over.
    • 4/5
      My first Ann Patchett book and I really enjoyed it!
    • 4/5
      Excellent book about the adoption of two black brothers by a white family, and how their lives literally "crash" into a sudden meeting with their birth mother and little sister. Very well written and finely crafted story.
    • 5/5
      Tip and Teddy Doyle and their father, Doyle, have gone to a program in Boston to hear Jesse Jackson speak. Doyle is a former politician who would love for his sons to follow in his footsteps. Tip and Teddy are African-American and were adopted by Doyle and Bernadette when they were 14 months and 5 days respectively, Bernadette died of cancer when the boys were 5 and 6, and Doyle has raised them on his own ever since. Coming out of the program that night into a blinding snowstorm, Tip is arguing with his father and inadvertently walks in front of a car. Someone pushes him out of the way and saves his life, which is the beginning of a dramatic change for the whole family. Excellent story about families and adoption with some twists and turns that the reader won't have a clue are coming down the road.
    • 5/5
      On a cold and snowy night in Boston, an adopted son of the former mayor is almost run over by an SUV. At the last moment he’s shoved out of its path by an unknown woman who is hit by the vehicle. In the hospital his family meets her family, an eleven-year-old girl who says that her mother is his birthmother. Patchett tells a richly textured tale of family relationships, bereavement, spirituality, parental expectations and achievements that subtly juxtaposes economic divisions in American society.
    • 4/5
      It’s funny what the passage of time can do to the quality of a book. In the years since I read Bel Canto, I’ve read everything that Ann Patchett has written and have recommended them to my other book loving friends. I’ve liked all of her books and LOVED some of them, and have eagerly awaited her next offering.Run, while a lovely book, has not benefited from that passage of years because I have since built Patchett’s writing talents up in my mind as to be almost unattainable, even by the author herself. Who knows if a second reading of Bel Canto would result in the magic I’ve held on to in my memory, but Run does not.I remember Bel Canto as possessing of phrasing as soaring and lyrical as the operas sung by one of the main characters. The prose in Run is, while certainly not sparse, is more matter of fact. We get to know the characters but our look of this world more closely resembles a well drawn sketch than the multi-layered painting of words that I expected from Patchett.Even as I write these words, I am trying to figure out from where my disappointment stems…and I think it is that, in a book that is about family, the mothers do not play much of an active role. True, I am a mother and may be biased…but although the theme of mother love comes up again and again – I don’t FEEL it. I feel the main characters doubt themselves, their choices, their actions. I feel them trying, usually without success, to express themselves to the other characters. I see what they do and what happens to them…but I don’t care as much as I want to.Teddy and Tip seem to be awfully well-adjusted young men, despite the fact that they were places for adoption at a very young age, their adoptive mother died after only a few years, and they were raised by a father of a race not their own. I understand that they lived a privileged life, monetarily, but they just don’t seem to have any real problems. They don’t spend much time grieving for the loss they’ve experienced in their lives – which doesn’t seem very believable to me.I cared most about what happens to Kenya, but was certainly not surprised by the end result. Her fate seemed cemented the second the accident that is the main event of the book takes place. She is more clearly and deeply defined than the other characters, and yet, even from her, I don’t experience the depth of feeling one might expect given what happens.It’s like just as a major event takes place – the book cuts to black and there is a time or place shift. Most of my reviews are packed with quotes from the book – but I only found myself drawn to a few passages. One of them: “He looked at her, at the crown of her head bowed there beneath his chin, at the straight lines that ran between her braids. At some point she had taken off her hat. At some point her mother had put this child on the floor between her knees and parted her hair with such mathematical consideration that he could read her intentions in the child’s scalp.” See? THAT’S the beauty that Patchett draws from a single moment in time.I guess what it comes down to is that I wanted more. Not more words or more to happen – just more. I liked Run, and will of COURSE be first in line to buy Patchett’s next book…but I can’t say that I will recommend it with the same enthusiasm that I do Bel Canto. Who knows – time will pass…
    • 3/5
      received a nice hard-cover copy (with a red marker ribbon even!) of Run: A Novel as a Christmas gift. It's so nice to get books during the cold dark time of the year. I curled up with it on one of our (many) snowy, blowy, rainy, floody days and read it straight through.It's the story of a widowed man and his 3 children as they work through some relationship snags. One child is home-grown, the other 2 are adopted and are of an other race. Through some odd circumstances, they are thrown together with the biological mother and her daughter and they work through their new contacts with varying degrees of poise and grace.It was interesting and well-told. Have you read her other book? Bel Canto? I had similar impressions of this one as I did the other -- that her character-development skills and the grace of her word-crafting exceed her plot. That is, I got to know all her people really really well -- they are real to me -- but the story didn't need to be told. I wish I could merge her talents with Douglas Jacobson who wrote a fascinating story with flat characters: Night of Flames.Is it just me that feels this way about Ann Patchett? What do you think?
    • 5/5
      The best book I hav read in a long time!
    • 3/5
      A book club selection............I liked this story. It was an unusual plot about a complex family (aren't they all complex?). When I think of this book I will consider all the ways/reasons people run: to something, away from something, over something, run the show, run for fun, run competitively, run for office......and I am sure you can think of more. All of these occured in this novel. A nice book with a pretty nice ending.
    • 5/5
      Another truly profound and very engaging work from this great author. Great narration as well. Hard for me to put down.
    • 5/5
      I almost never read contemporary fiction, yet couldn't put this compelling novel down. It's a masterpiece of weaving threads of lives, thoughts, ambitions, and moralities together into a fabric of prose.Bernard Doyle has lost his wife to illness, his oldest son to get-rich-quick-at-the-expense-of-others morality, his older adopted son to academia and his youngest to dreamy hopes of priesthood. Yet one night after a Jesse Jackson speech to which he drags the younger two, all the Doyle's lives are changed when Tip is pushed out of the path of an oncoming vehicle by a passing woman. In a moment not only does the younger Doyles' birth mother enter all of their lives, but so does her 11 year old daughter. Not only does this spur changes in everyone's inter-relations, it changes how they think of themselves, their futures, and their dreams.This examination of hope, personal growth and family proceeds to investigate the issues of what it means to be a parent, what is owed to family, and what is owed to the self. I highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      I really like Ann Patchett's books, even though the ones I've read so far seem to leave me feeling a little sad in the end. Not necessarily UNhappy endings to her books, but unanswered questions, sometimes important, sometimes unimportant, that leave me feeling disturbed and sad that there isn't one more line, one more chapter, to tie things up for me. I guess that's part of her gift in her storytelling--or at least the power she holds as the creator. She has a way of drawing us in to her characters, wanting to know them personally or better, and wanting a happy ending for all (well, maybe not the mother in Patron Saint of Liars). Instead she gives us the harshness of real life and all the ambiguity, secrets and sometimes selfishness and disappointments that encompass it. I wonder if anyone else closed the book thinking, "What about Sullivan?"
    • 4/5
      I find it hard to understand why this book has so divided Good Reads reviewers. If it is not their sort of book why on earth did they read it. I know I make the odd mistake, but that is normally when a writer I normally read produces a book out of left field. But this is a book by Ann Pratchett, author of the wonderful "Bel Canto" and you get what you should expect; wonderful writing about real lives. I really enjoyed this book which tells a story essentially within the bounds of the three unities, of time, place and action, that touched my heart. The characters are memorable and will stay with me. It tells us a lot about families and what shapes relationships within them. It tells us something about racial attitudes in the USA without preaching at us. But above all it tells us a story with all the skills that Ann Pratchett has in her formidable armoury. I wait, patiently but expectantly for "Commonwealth".
    • 3/5
      "Bernadette had been dead two weeks when her sisters showed up in Doyle's living room asking for the statue back. They had no legal claim to it, of course, she never would have though of leaving it to them, but the statue had been in their family for four generations, passing down a maternal line from mother to daughter, and it was their intention to hold with tradition."So begins what I thought was going to be a story of a Catholic family in Boston (yawn) but the statue turned out to be a small part of it. Two families attend a speech by Jesse Jackson one night as a snow storm is starting. When they leave the meeting, one boy doesn't realize he is walking into the street, into the path of an SUV, and is knocked out of his path by the mother of the other family. How these families are linked is the true story.Ex-mayor Bernard Doyle, father of Sullivan, adopted father of Tip and Teddy, and widower of Bernadette, has no idea how this woman is linked to his family, neither does the reader. We all eventually learn in flash backs that interrupt the present story.As Tennessee Moser lay in the street unconscious, her daughter, Kenya, shows how remarkable she is by gathering the belongings that were knocked off in the collision. Doyle hardly delays in sweeping her up as he takes his own son to the same hospital Tennessee is taken. Making this decision easier for him is the fact that the two adopted boys are black so it's not so unusual for him to take care of her. As we learn, there is much, much more to this story.At the upper level of chick lit, I am probably not the best audience for this book. I felt manipulated by the slow exposure of the facts always leaving questions unanswered but I did stay with it to the end. Should I be bothered that the whole truth wasn't revealed to the characters? Maybe not, but it left me with a feeling like an unscratched itch, a loose end not tied up.
    • 4/5
      After trying for years to create a large family Bernadette and Bernard Doyle have only had one child. They decide to adopt two black boys, Tip and Teddy, to add to their small family of three. Then Bernadette dies and the newly widowed Bernard is left to raise his three young sons on his own. The book really kicks into gear when the two adopted sons are in college. One night a stranger shoves Tip out of the way of an oncoming car and he narrowly escapes disaster. This act forces the Doyle family’s world to intersect with the strangers in some unexpected ways. The majority of the action takes place in a single 24 hour period, though it feels like a much longer stretch of time. Patchett really manages to develop each of her characters, allowing the reader to become invested in their lives. Out of everyone, Tip’s story really resonated with me the most. He’s intelligent and intense while his brother Teddy is endearing and easy to get along with. This book was all about family to me. It questions what makes someone family and what you’re willing to do for family. It made me think about what creates the bonds between people and how experience or even coincidence sometimes makes strangers become family. It was interesting to read an interview with the author saying that to her the book was about politics. It’s fascinating that books manage to take on lives of their own after they’re written and can mean different things to each reader. Side Note: If you’re looking for a Patchett book to start with, Bel Canto is my absolute favorite of hers.
    • 2/5
      I didn't like it. It seemed gratuitous. I so much enjoyed Truth & Beauty that I thought I would be equally impressed, but not so.