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    The Last Laugh: A Novel
    The Last Laugh: A Novel
    The Last Laugh: A Novel
    Audiobook6 hours

    The Last Laugh: A Novel

    Written by Lynn Freed

    Narrated by Jennifer M. Dixon

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    To escape their griping grown children, husbands and lovers, and an abundance of grandchildren underfoot, three self-proclaimed "old bags," Dania, Ruth, and Bess, head for a quiet island on the Aegean Sea. They'll spend a year by the water-watching the sunset, eating grilled fish and fresh olives, sipping ouzo. They deserve it, they say. After all those years, the three women will finally have some peace.

    Except that they can't. For one, Bess, a pampered, once-beautiful inheritress, falls swiftly into an affair with a poetry-writing taxi driver-who has, of course, a territorial wife. And Dania, a therapist, begins to receive an increasing number of cryptically menacing phone calls from a psychotic patient. An ex-lover of Ruth's shows up unexpectedly, right before one of Bess's does?and then the women's children arrive, with their own demanding children in tow. As the island quickly becomes crowded, the women's serene year in Greece devolves perilously, and uproariously, into something much more complicated.

    With the wit of Maria Semple's Today Will Be Different and all the adventure of Deborah Moggach's The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Lynn Freed's The Last Laugh is at once wildly funny and deeply perceptive, an exuberant story of friendship and pleasure, family and love.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 10, 2017
    ISBN9781541485204
    Author

    Lynn Freed

    Lynn Freed is the author of numerous short stories, essays, and novels, including The Last Laugh and Home Ground. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, among many others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two PEN/O. Henry Awards, and has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

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    Reviews for The Last Laugh

    3/5

    19 ratings2 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I guess I was expecting a mature version of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants but the only connection between the two is the setting in Greece. I thought I’d have a lot in common with the three friends in their 70’s who come to Greece for an extended holiday, but I connected with none of them or their families.
    • 4/5
      The Last Laugh is the story of three sixty-nine-year-old women who decide to take a break from their families for a year. Now, if you're thinking The Enchanted April, you're halfway right. Ruth, Bess and Dania decide to go to a Greek Island. But, things don't turn out as they planned. Family is not so easily left behind, and soon Bess' son Wilfrid and his partner Tarquin and their adopted baby Mohammed descend on the women. They are followed by a psychotic patient of Dania's and ex-lovers. The events of the year are both hilarious and frightening. Freed shows that age doesn't always bring wisdom, or fewer emotions, contrary to what Ruth, the narrator, might think: "Anyway, we said, passion had accomplished its chief work, at least from a biological point of view -- children and grandchildren. What we wanted now was peace." They might not achieve peace, but it is a good story.