The Third Brother
Written by Nick McDonell
Narrated by William Dufris
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Nick McDonell's Twelve created a sensation around the world, establishing its seventeen-year-old author as one of the new and important voices of his generation. The book sold over 300,000 copies, was published in twenty-four countries, and was hailed by The New York Times as "fast as speed, relentless as acid." The Third Brother is his highly anticipated second novel.
"The story is backpacker kids going to Bangkok to do ecstasy," Analect says. "Just don't get arrested." Mike is interning in Hong Kong when his editor, a friend of his father's, gives him the assignment, and a mission: find Christopher Dorr, a brilliant journalist gone AWOL. So begins a propulsive journey that will take a young man grasping after his identity headlong through fast nights in Thailand, into the grip of family tragedy, and into the heart of September 11, 2001. Along the way he encounters a kaleidoscope of characters-the Flying Circus, a hard-living band of journalists trying to expose the Thai government's murderous repression of drug dealers; Tweety, an inexplicably alluring prostitute hungry to leave her world of poverty and desperation; and the third brother, a mysterious, imaginary sibling created by Mike's haunted older brother.
Through it all, Mike must come to terms with the legacies of his troubled family and privileged upbringing. "He knew that if you grow up with money, you don't think about being rich and that the same is probably true of courage. But if you grow up with lies, you find out that some lies become true. Mike knew this and so did not lie. Except to himself, about his parents." The Third Brother moves with the speed and purpose of a bullet through the complexities of life in a Third-World capital of illicit hedonism, to the unspeakable horror of 9/11, and to the polished life of academia, offering a devastating portrait of a family caught between love and turmoil, and of a young man stretching to come to terms with his past and to find his future.
Nick McDonell
Nick McDonell, born in 1984, is a writer of novels, journalism, and political theory. He studied literature at Harvard and international relations at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. His fiction has been published in twenty-two languages and appeared on bestseller lists around the world. A film adaptation of his first novel, Twelve, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His academic work on nomadism—The Civilization of Perpetual Movement—was published in 2016. As a reporter for the London Review of Books, Time, TheNewYorker.com, and Harper’s, Nick has embedded with the United States Army and Marines, the Afghan Special Forces, the African Union Mission to Darfur, and the Iraqi Special Forces. Nick’s book, The Bodies in Person: An Account of Civilian Casualties in American Wars, was published in 2018. Nick is a cofounder of the Zomia Center for the Study of Non-State Spaces, which supports scholarly and humanitarian projects around the world.
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Reviews for The Third Brother
4 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I loved his first novel Twelve so was looking forward to seeing what his next book would be like. I was left a bit disappointed with this one - perhaps it was because my expectations were so high. It wasn't a bad book, it was well-written and quite easy to read, but it didn't live up to the hype surrounding the author. The part set in Thailand didn't really interest me that much, perhaps because in real life the cliche of western backpackers "discovering" Thailand bores me. The parts about the family were more interesting, but I feel that the youth of the author (despite his obvious talent) means he hasn't experience much to draw on, and can only write about what he knows about, which isn't that interesting. Perhaps when he is 40 he will have something more to say.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When McDonnell's firts novel was released to critical acclaim I was among the many who summarily judged him as a rich boy with literary pretensions and advantageous contacts. This speaks volumes about my own prejudices but is an unfair dismissal of a talented and mature author. Mick McDonnell is an excellent writer: he has a gift for building suspense, misleading his expectant reader and exploring the nastier side of familial relations without resorting to cliche or jumping the shark.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Strange little book. It's about a guy, Mike, who gets assigned a story about drug use by tourists in Thailand. He's working as an intern for a friend of his dad's. His family is not exactlywhat one would call stable, and some things happen in Thailand which affect Mike and are somewhat intertwined with his family issues. Then he comes home and 9/11 happens, along with some other personal tragedies, and his brother Lyle is hallucinating the existence of a third brother in their family.Odd, and written in 100-something extremely short chapters, jumping between present and past tense. Quick to read, but I'm still not entirely sure what I thought about it.