The God of Endings: A Novel

Jacqueline Holland

Mar 2023 · Macmillan Audio · Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld

About this audiobook

"Maarleveld's narration takes the exquisite prose of this story and elevates it to a lyrical listening experience. Her consistently skilled delivery moves through a variety of accents and time periods. This audiobook is a fascinating story told by a masterful performer."- AudioFile

By turns suspenseful and enchanting, this breathtaking first novel weaves a story of love, family, history, and myth as seen through the eyes of one immortal woman.

Collette LeSange is a lonely artist who heads an elite fine arts school for children in upstate New York. Her youthful beauty masks the dark truth of her life: she has endured centuries of turmoil and heartache in the wake of her grandfather’s long-ago decision to make her immortal like himself. Now in 1984, Collette finds her life upended by the arrival of a gifted child from a troubled home, the return of a stalking presence from her past, and her own mysteriously growing hunger.

Combining brilliant prose with breathtaking suspense, Jacqueline Holland's The God of Endings serves as a larger exploration of the human condition in all its complexity, asking us the most fundamental question: is life in this world a gift or a curse?

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

Ratings and reviews

the protagonist is way too intentionally ignorant for me and it was frustrating to listen to her bumble around for a few hundred years. Most of all it was difficult for me to know halfway through the book what's going on while Anna is completely lost until the end. A more even development of character would have made this story work for me. 🤷 The book was alright, but I wouldn't likely recommend it to someone.

When the right book finds me at the right time, magic happens. And magic happened as I listened to The God of Endings. First, Saskia Maarleveld is a captivating narrator, with her ability to effortlessly switch accents, and to infuse personalities in her works to make me believe I was listening to the characters speak. The story is told in alternating timelines. The present in this case is 1984, and the past reaches 150 years. The transitions were seamless, and the atmosphere and setting felt believable wherever we were in history. I loved that the author played with genre expectations and colored outside the lines. This story honestly reflects society back at us in the way we treat people we don’t understand, who are different from our accepted standards. In how that fear of the “other” allows us to turn them into monsters unworthy of basic human empathy. Pacing is slow but steady, not through any fault of the author, but because it needs to be in order for us to feel this story at its core. *Thanks to Macmillan Audio for the free download!*

About the author

JACQUELINE HOLLAND is a recent graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Kansas. Her short fiction has been published in Hotel Amerika, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Big Fiction Magazine. She was selected as a top-twenty-five finalist for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers, as well as Sequestrum Magazine's New Writers Award.