The Great Gatsby

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
A young man rents a small house on Long Island for the summer and finds that his neighbour throws parties nobody is invited to. Cars come up the drive all night, the orchestra is real, the bar is stocked, and the host is never seen. When Nick Carraway finally meets Jay Gatsby across the lawn, he is handed a story so carefully built that it takes the whole book to come apart.

Gatsby has money from somewhere, a house that looks like a hotel, a wardrobe of shirts in every colour, and one fixed idea: that a girl he loved five years ago in Louisville will walk out of a house across the bay and tell him the last five years did not happen. Daisy Buchanan is married, rich, and careless in the way that only people who have never had to be careful can be. Her husband Tom keeps a mistress in a garage on the road to New York. Between the two houses lies a body of water and a green light at the end of a dock, and the distance between them is the whole novel.

Fitzgerald wrote this in France in 1924 and it sold badly while he was alive. What it got right was the sound of a particular summer: the piano playing in a hotel suite, the shirt collars on a hot afternoon, the way a room full of wealthy people can agree to forget something by the time the drinks are poured. It is a short book about a man who invented himself and then could not stop performing the invention.

This unabridged recording keeps all nine chapters intact, from the advice Nick's father gives him on the first page to the last line about boats and the current.