Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Sorrowland

A Novel

by Rivers Solomon

Narrator Karen Chilton

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Length 12 hours 1 minute

Language English

Send as gift Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Bookseller recommendation

“Vern is fleeing an abusive cult that targets Black people. As their body mutates into something entirely new, Vern must face the past before they can move towards their future. This book is many things: an adult fairytale, a Southern gothic horror, a thriller that twists and turns. A testament to forging pain into strength, this book is unlike anything else you’ve read.”
— Samantha • Rediscovered Books

Bookseller recommendation

“Vern is a captivating protagonist from page one: gritty, determined, flawed, clever, and resourceful. The story slowly fills in all the details of a life that wasn’t what it seemed, and offers an ending you can’t predict. Sorrowland is beautiful, ugly, engaging, and awe-inspiring.”
— Sydne Conant • A Room Of One's Own Bookstore

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

"Narrator Karen Chilton gives a riveting performance in this genre-defying masterpiece...The echoes of Chilton's haunting and beautiful narration will reverberate long after this powerful audiobook is over." -- AudioFile Magazine

A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction

Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.

But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.

To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it.

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD

Fiction Mystery & Thriller Science Fiction LGBTQIA+ Fiction

Rivers Solomon writes about life in the margins, where they are much at home. In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon's debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, was a finalist for Lambda, Hurston/Wright, Otherwise (formerly Tiptree), and Locus Awards. Solomon's second book, The Deep, based on the Hugo-nominated song by the Daveed Diggs–fronted hip-hop group clipping, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and was short-listed for the Nebula, Locus, Hugo, Ignyte, Brooklyn Library Literary, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. Their work appears in Black Warrior Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Guernica, Best American Short Stories, Tor.com, Best American Horror and Dark Fantasy, and elsewhere. A refugee of the transatlantic slave trade, Solomon was born on Turtle Island but currently resides on an isle in an archipelago off the western coast of the Eurasian continent.

Karen Chilton is a multi-talented author, actor, and audiobook narrator, as well as a freelance writer, script writer, and librettist. She wrote the biography Hazel Scott about the trailblazing jazz pianist and coauthored I Wish You Love with legendary jazz vocalist Gloria Lynne. Her acting credits include It's Kind of a Funny Story and Half Nelson. She won a New Professional Theatre Writers award for her play Convergence and an Audiofile Golden Earphones Award for her narration of Karolyn Smardz Frost's I've Got a Home in Glory Land. She has also narrated Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Jennifer Berry Hawes' Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness.