Biography & Memoir audiobooks

The Invisible Woman

By: Claire Tomalin

Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon

Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens's marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record.
 
In this... Read more

Bruce

By: Peter Ames Carlin

Narrated by: Bobby Cannavale

Length: 17 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Peter Ames Carlin’s New York Times bestselling biography of one America’s greatest musicians is the first in twenty-five years to be written with the cooperation of Bruce Springsteen himself; “Carlin gets across why Mr. Springsteen has meant so much, for so long, to so many people” (The New York Times).

In Bruce, acclaimed music writer Peter Ames... Read more

Elsewhere

By: Richard Russo

Narrated by: Richard Russo

Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.

Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing... Read more

Island Practice

By: Pam Belluck

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

If you need an appendectomy, he can do it with a stone scalpel he fashioned himself. If you have a condition nobody can diagnose—"creeping eruption" perhaps—he can identify what it is and treat it. A baby with hair tourniquet syndrome, a human leg that's washed ashore, a horse with Lyme disease, a narcoleptic falling face-first in the street, a... Read more

Beatrix Potter Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman - Abridged

By: Judy Taylor

Narrated by: Patricia Routledge

Length: 3 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The downloadable audiobook edition of Judy Taylor's classic biography, Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman, read by the actress Patricia Routledge.

Starting with the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, Beatrix Potter went on to become one of the world's most successful children's authors. This illustrated... Read more

Rod

By: Rod Stewart

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

The extraordinary life and career of music legend Rod Stewart, in his own words for the first time.
 
With his soulful and singular voice, narrative songwriting, and passionate live performances Rod Stewart has paved one of the most iconic and successful music careers of all time. He was the charismatic lead singer for the trailblazing rock and... Read more

The Dawn of Innovation

By: Charles R. Morris

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 12 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

In the thirty years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan walked the earth.

But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that... Read more

Am I A Jew?

By: Theodore Ross

Narrated by: Steve Blane & Theodore Ross

Length: 8 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

What makes someone Jewish?

Theodore Ross was nine years old when he moved with his mother from New York City to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Once there, his mother decided, for both personal and spiritual reasons, to have her family pretend not to be Jewish. He went to an Episcopal school, where he studied the New Testament, sang in the choir,... Read more

A Free Man

By: Aman Sethi

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Length: 6 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

Like Dave Eggers' Zeitoun and Alexander Masters' Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage—an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and... Read more

Thalia Book Club: Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir

By: Salman Rushdie

Narrated by: Salman Rushdie, Colum McCann & John Freeman

Length: 1 hour 22 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses talks with Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin) about his long-anticipated, enthralling and provocative new memoir of his exile under the fatwa that sentenced him to death in 1989. Read more

Why I Left Goldman Sachs

By: Greg Smith

Narrated by: Greg Smith

Length: 9 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

An insightful and devastating account of how Wall Street lost its way from an insider who experienced the culture of Goldman Sachs first-hand.

On March 14, 2012, more than three million people read Greg Smith's bombshell Op-Ed in the New York Times titled "Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs." The column immediately went viral, became a worldwide... Read more

My Old Man

By: John Major

Narrated by: Sir John Major & Roy Hudd OBE

Length: 13 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror... Read more

John Lennon In His Own Words

By: John Lennon

Narrated by: John Lennon

Length: 51 minutes

Abridged: No

John Lennon was a world famous and influential singer/songwriter and former member of the Beatles.

Here he discusses his life and achievements in a series of interviews from the BBC radio and TV archive: Tonight, broadcast on BBC TV, 18 June 1965 (featuring Kenneth Allsop); The World of Books, broadcast on BBC Radio, 3 July 1965 (featuring... Read more

In the Pleasure Groove

By: John Taylor

Narrated by: John Taylor

Length: 7 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

John Taylor, Duran Duran’s co-founder, takes the reader on a wild ride through his life. From the eighties through today, from Rio to All You Need is Now, John writes about the music, the parties, and the MTV videos that made millions swoon.

With Duran Duran, John Taylor has created some of the greatest music of our time. From the disco dazzle... Read more

Too Good to Be True

By: Benjamin Anastas

Narrated by: Tim Lundeen

Length: 6 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

When he was three, in the early 1970s, Benjamin Anastas found himself in his mother’s fringe-therapy group in Massachusetts, a sign around his neck: Too Good to Be True. The phrase haunted him through his life, even as he found the literary acclaim he sought after his 1999 novel, An Underachiever’s Diary, had made the smart set take notice. Too... Read more

Hell's Angel

By: Sonny Barger

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 7 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Narrated by the visionary founding member, Hell's Angel provides a fascinating all-access pass to the secret world of the notorious Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club. Sonny Barger recounts the birth of the original Oakland Hell's Angels and the four turbulent decades that followed. Hell's Angel also chronicles the way the HAMC revolutionized the... Read more

The Glitter and the Gold

By: Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan

Narrated by: Coleen Marlo

Length: 9 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Consuelo Vanderbilt was young, beautiful and the heir to a vast family fortune. She was also deeply in love with an American suitor when her mother chose instead for her to fulfill her social ambitions and marry an English Duke. Leaving her life in America, she came to England as the Duchess of Marlborough in 1895 and took up residence in her... Read more

In Search of Cleo

By: Gina Gershon

Narrated by: Gina Gershon

Length: 3 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Film and television icon Gina Gershon may be best known for her movie roles in Bound and Showgirls and television appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and How to Make It in America, but deep down she is a self-described cat lady. In Search of Cleo follows Gina's desperation and despair when her assistant loses her beloved cat, Cleo. Gina spends... Read more

Is It Just Me?

By: Miranda Hart

Narrated by: Miranda Hart

Length: 7 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

Well hello to you dear audiobook browser. Now I have your attention it would be rude if I didn't tell you a little about my literary feast. So, here is the thing: is it just me or does anyone else find that adulthood offers no refuge from the unexpected horrors, peculiar lack of physical coordination and sometimes unexplained nudity, that... Read more

There Was a Country

By: Chinua Achebe

Narrated by: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a longawaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on... Read more

David Mitchell: Back Story

By: David Mitchell

Narrated by: David Mitchell

Length: 9 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb Look, has written a book about his life. ... Read more

Happy Days

By: Olly Murs

Narrated by: Olly Murs

Length: 2 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Olly Murs invites you behind the scenes in his official autobiography.


'My life has been a non-stop roller-coaster of extreme emotions, crazy days, unexpected highs and yet my life hasn't been without its low points too. I've tried to imagine myself sitting down with you explaining what I was thinking and feeling during those times. I hope this... Read more

Darwin

By: Paul Johnson

Narrated by: John Curless

Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of more than 40 books, acclaimed historian Paul Johnson also writes for Forbes and theSpectator. With Darwin, Johnson sheds new light on a man many regard as the most influential scientist in history. Darwin's theories of evolution transformed the world's view of biology. Here, in meticulous detail, Johnson describes Darwin's... Read more

The Guy Under the Sheets

By: Chris Elliott

Narrated by: Chris Elliott

Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Because no one will write an unauthorized biography about Emmy-winning actor and comedian Chris Elliott, he has done it himself. Listener, you’re hereby warned that much of this book will be disturbing. The Guy Under the Sheets is a behind-the-scenes memoir so personal, so provocative, that Elliott nearly sued himself to halt publication: the... Read more