Bookshop Santa Cruz

The Mechanical

By: Ian Tregillis

Narrated by: Chris Kayser

Length: 15 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

From "a major new talent" (George R. R. Martin) comes an epic speculative novel of revolution, adventure, and the struggle for free will set in a world that might have been, of mechanical men and alchemical dreams.

My name is Jax.

That is the name granted to me by my human masters.

I am a slave.

But I shall be free. Read more

Elder Race

By: Adrian Tchaikovsky

Narrated by: John Lee

Length: 4 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race, a junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the locals he has sworn to study to save a planet from an unbeatable foe.



Lynesse is the lowly Fourth Daughter of the queen, and always getting in the way.



But a demon is terrorizing the land, and now she's an adult (albeit barely) with responsibilities (she... Read more

The Fall of Lisa Bellow

By: Susan Perabo

Narrated by: Madeleine Maby

Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

The breakout novel from the critically acclaimed author of the short story collections Who I Was Supposed to Be and Why They Run the Way They Do—when a middle school girl is abducted in broad daylight, a fellow student and witness to the crime copes with the tragedy in unforgettable ways.

What happens to the girl left behind?

A masked man with a... Read more

Madonna

By: Mary Gabriel

Narrated by: Elise Arsenault

Length: 41 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In this riveting biography, award-winning author Mary Gabriel chronicles the meteoric rise and enduring influence of the greatest female pop icon of the modern era: Madonna.

With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion—as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles—taking the nation by storm... Read more

Shrill

By: Lindy West

Narrated by: Lindy West

Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Shrill is an uproarious memoir, a feminist rallying cry in a world that thinks gender politics are tedious and that women, especially feminists, can't be funny.

Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible -- like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you -- writer and humoristLindy West... Read more

The Sirens of Mars

By: Sarah Stewart Johnson

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 7 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

“Sarah Stewart Johnson interweaves her own coming-of-age story as a planetary scientist with a vivid history of the exploration of Mars in this celebration of human curiosity, passion, and perseverance.”—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams

WINNER OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA AWARD FOR SCIENCE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New... Read more

The Labyrinth of the Spirits

By: Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Narrated by: Daniel Weyman

Length: 27 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times Bestseller""Packed with suspense. . . a gripping edge-of-your-seat thriller.” — Washington Book Review
The internationally acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author returns to the magnificent universe he constructed in his bestselling novels The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game, and The Prisoner of Heaven in this riveting... Read more

The Knockout Queen

By: Rufi Thorpe

Narrated by: Michael Crouch

Length: 10 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD

"Full of verve... Revelatory." —Los Angeles Times

A dazzling and darkly comic novel of love, violence, and friendship in the California suburbs

Bunny Lampert is the princess of North Shore⁠—beautiful, tall, blond, with a rich real-estate-developer father and a swimming pool in her backyard. Michael⁠⁠—with a... Read more

Future Feeling

By: Joss Lake

Narrated by: MW Cartozian Wilson

Length: 8 hours

Abridged: No

An embittered dog walker obsessed with a social media influencer inadvertently puts a curse on a young man—and must adventure into a mysterious dimension in order to save him—in this wildly inventive, delightfully subversive, genre-nonconforming debut novel about illusion, magic, technology, kinship, and the emergent future.The year is 20__, and... Read more

Fox 8

By: George Saunders

Narrated by: George Saunders

Length: 37 minutes

Abridged: No

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a darkly comic short story about the unintended consequences unleashed by our quest to tame the natural world.

Fox 8 has always been known as the daydreamer in his pack, the one his fellow foxes regarded with a knowing snort and a roll of the eyes. That is, until Fox 8... Read more

My Fake Rake

By: Eva Leigh

Narrated by: Zara Hampton-Brown

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In the first book in Eva Leigh's new Union of the Rakes series, a bluestocking enlists a faux suitor to help her land an ideal husband only to be blindsided by real desire…Lady Grace Wyatt is content as a wallflower, focusing on scientific pursuits rather than the complications of society matches. But when a handsome, celebrated naturalist... Read more

A Hundred Thousand Worlds

By: Bob Proehl

Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews

Length: 12 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

“A Kavalier & Clay for the Comic-Con Age, this is a bighearted, inventive, exuberant debut.” —Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints

"Proehl creates worlds within worlds within worlds, all of them full of surprise and wonder."
—Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Valerie Torrey took her son, Alex,... Read more

Brown Girls

By: Daphne Palasi Andreades

Narrated by: Tashi Thomas

Length: 4 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “boisterous and infectious debut novel” (The Guardian) about a group of friends and their immigrant families from Queens, New York—a tenderly observed, fiercely poetic love letter to a modern generation of brown girls.
 
“An acute study of those tender moments of becoming, this is an ode to girlhood, inheritance,... Read more

Ophelia After All

By: Racquel Marie

Narrated by: Maria Liatis

Length: 8 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

A teen girl navigates friendship drama, the end of high school, and discovering her queerness in Ophelia After All, a hilarious and heartfelt contemporary YA debut by author Racquel Marie.

Ophelia Rojas knows what she likes: her best friends, Cuban food, rose-gardening, and boys—way too many boys. Her friends and parents make fun of her endless... Read more

Lost Memory of Skin

By: Russell Banks

Narrated by: Scott Shepherd

Length: 13 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

“Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country.”
—Cornel West“Of the many writers working in the great tradition today, one of the best is Russell Banks.”
—New York TimesLost Memory of Skin is a provocative novel of... Read more

Key of Light

By: Nora Roberts

Narrated by: Susan Ericksen

Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Fate brings three women together for a chance to unlock their deepest desires.What happens when the very gods depend on mortals for help? That's what three very different young women find out when they are invited to Warrior's Peak.The Malory Price Life Plan does not include a quixotic quest—but the strangers on Warrior's Peak claim that she... Read more

The Banned Bookshop of Maggie Banks

By: Shauna Robinson

Narrated by: Imani Jade Powers

Length: 9 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

I, Maggie Banks, solemnly swear to uphold the rules of Cobblestone Books.
If only, I, Maggie Banks, cared about following the rules.
When Maggie Banks arrives to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to the small-town clientele. But with the town on the map as a top literary destination and the tourist... Read more

Good Boy

By: Jennifer Finney Boylan

Narrated by: Jennifer Finney Boylan & Kelsey Navarro

Length: 7 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

From bestselling author of She’s Not There, New York Times opinion columnist, and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, a memoir of the transformative power of loving dogs.

This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love... Read more

Rainbow Milk

By: Paul Mendez

Narrated by: Paul Mendez

Length: 11 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Nominated for a 34th annual Lambda Literary Award • An essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing.
 
"The kind of novel you never knew you were waiting... Read more

Riverine

By: Angela Palm

Narrated by: Jorjeana Marie

Length: 8 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Angela Palm grew up in a place not marked on the map, her house set on the banks of a river that had been straightened to make way for farmland. Every year, the Kankakee River in rural Indiana flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window, Palm watched the... Read more

The Stars Did Wander Darkling

By: Colin Meloy

Narrated by: Kirt Graves

Length: 9 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

A suspenseful and atmospheric horror set in 1980s Oregon, perfect for fans of Stranger Things, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Peterson Haddix, from New York Times bestselling author and the Decemberists’ lead singer/songwriter, Colin Meloy.Maybe Archie Coomes has been watching too many horror movies.All of a sudden, the most ordinary things have... Read more

Brief Answers to the Big Questions

By: Stephen Hawking

Narrated by: Ben Whishaw, Garrick Hagon & Lucy Hawking

Length: 4 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The world-famous cosmologist and author of A Brief History of Time leaves us with his final thoughts on the biggest questions facing humankind.

“Hawking’s parting gift to humanity . . . a book every thinking person worried about humanity’s future should read.”—NPR

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Forbes •... Read more

The Refrigerator Monologues

By: Catherynne M. Valente

Narrated by: Karis A. Campbell

Length: 4 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

The lives of six female superheroes and the girlfriends of superheroes. A ferocious riff on women in superhero comics.



From the New York Times bestselling author Catherynne Valente comes a series of linked stories from the points of view of the wives and girlfriends of superheroes, female heroes, and anyone who's ever been "refrigerated": comic... Read more

The Book of Lost Things

By: John Connolly

Narrated by: Steven Crossley

Length: 10 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the loss of his mother. He is angry and he is alone, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness, and as he takes refuge in the myths and fairytales so beloved of his dead mother he finds that the real world and the fantasy... Read more