Bookshop Santa Cruz

The New York Times: Footsteps

By: New York Times

Narrated by: David Colacci & Susan Ericksen

Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Before Nick Carraway was drawn into Daisy and Gatsby's sparkling, champagne-fueled world in The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald vacationed in the French Riviera, where a small green lighthouse winked at ships on the horizon. Before the nameless lovers began their illicit affair in The Lover, Marguerite Duras embarked upon her own scandalous... Read more

Your Duck Is My Duck

By: Deborah Eisenberg

Narrated by: Deborah Eisenberg, Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moor...

Length: 6 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

A much-anticipated collection of brilliantly observant short stories from one of the great American masters of the form, performed by a remarkable cast: Deborah Eisenberg, Julianne Moore, Josh Hamilton, and Wallace Shawn.At times raucously hilarious, at times charming and delightful, at times as solemn and mysterious as a pond at midnight,... Read more

She Would Be King

By: Wayétu Moore

Narrated by: Wayétu Moore

Length: 9 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Sarah Jessica Parker and the American Library Association Book Club Central Official SelectionA novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history―a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formationWayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters... 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

Washington Black

By: Esi Edugyan

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • “A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free.” —Vanity Fair

Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is... 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

November Road

By: Lou Berney

Narrated by: Johnathan McClain

Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

""When people say they want to read a really good novel, the kind you just can't put down, this is the kind of book they mean. Exceptional."" —STEPHEN KING
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • Washington Post • AARP • Newsweek • Dallas Morning News • South Florida Sun-Sentinel • Chicago Public Library • Real Book Spy •... 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

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

The End of the End of the Earth

By: Jonathan Franzen

Narrated by: Robert Petkoff

Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

This program has been updated with a new epilogue written and read by the author.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections

The essayist, Jonathan Franzen writes, is like “a fire-fighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them.”... 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

Smile

By: Roddy Doyle

Narrated by: Roddy Doyle

Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, a bold, haunting novel about the uncertainty of memory and how we contend with the past.

"It's his bravest novel yet; it's also, by far, his best." -- npr.org

“The closest thing he’s written to a psychological thriller."– The New York Times Book Review

Just moved into a new... Read more

What If? 2

By: Randall Munroe

Narrated by: Wil Wheaton

Length: 6 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to ask
 
The millions of people around the world who read and loved What If? still have questions, and those questions are getting stranger. Thank goodness xkcd creator Randall Munroe is here to help. Planning to ride a fire... 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

Hidden Figures

By: Margot Lee Shetterly

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the... Read more

The Craftsman

By: Sharon Bolton

Narrated by: Nathalie Buscombe

Length: 11 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

Sharon Bolton returns with her creepiest standalone yet, following a young cop trying to trace the disappearances of a small town's teenagers.

Florence Lovelady's career was made when she convicted coffin-maker Larry Grassbrook of a series of child murders 30 years ago in a small village in Lancashire. Like something out of a nightmare, the... Read more

The Summer Before the War

By: Helen Simonson

Narrated by: Fiona Hardingham

Length: 15 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A novel to cure your Downton Abbey withdrawal . . . a delightful story about nontraditional romantic relationships, class snobbery and the everybody-knows-everybody complications of living in a small community.”—The Washington Post

The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand returns with a breathtaking... Read more

The Space Between the Stars

By: Anne Corlett

Narrated by: Mary Woodvine

Length: 12 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

A Recommended Summer Read from The Verge and io9
A Recommended June Read from Hello Giggles and Tor.com

When the world ends, where will you go?

In a breathtakingly vivid and emotionally gripping debut novel, one woman must confront the emptiness in the universe—and in her own heart—when a devastating virus reduces most of humanity to dust and... 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

Virgil Wander

By: Leif Enger

Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews

Length: 10 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander is an enchanting and timeless all-American story that follows the inhabitants of a small Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his... Read more

Alice Isn't Dead

By: Joseph Fink

Narrated by: Jasika Nicole

Length: 8 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

From the New York Times best-selling coauthor of It Devours! and Welcome to Night Vale comes a fast-paced thriller about a truck driver searching across America for the wife she had long assumed to be dead, performed by the voice of the Alice Isn’t Dead podcast, Jasika Nicole, with an exclusive essay written and read by Joseph Fink.""This isn’t... Read more

In the House in the Dark of the Woods

By: Laird Hunt

Length: 5 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations -- witchcraft in colonial America -- wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense.

"Once upon a time there was and there wasn't a woman who went to the woods." In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has... Read more

Why Religion?

By: Elaine Pagels

Narrated by: Lynde Houck

Length: 7 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.These questions took on a new... Read more

Split Tooth

By: Tanya Tagaq

Narrated by: Tanya Tagaq

Length: 5 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 Amazon First Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
Winner of the 2019 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Prose in English
Winner of the 2018 Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design – Prose Fiction
Longlisted for the 2019 Sunburst... Read more