Local bookseller recommendations

Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

By: Brock Clarke

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 7 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

With the comic unpredictability of a Wes Anderson movie and the inventive sharpness of a John Irving novel, author Brock Clarke introduces listeners to an ordinary man who is about to embark on an absurdly extraordinary adventure.



After his mother, a theologian and bestselling author, dies in a fiery explosion, forty-nine-year-old Calvin... Read more

Hell Divers

By: Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Narrated by: R. C. Bray

Length: 10 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

The New York Times and USA Today bestselling seriesThey dive so humanity survives …More than two centuries after World War III poisoned the planet, the final bastion of humanity lives on massive airships circling the globe in search of a habitable area to call home. Aging and outdated, most of the ships plummeted back to earth long ago. The only... Read more

Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing

By: Lauren Hough

Narrated by: Cate Blanchett & Lauren Hough

Length: 9 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • "A memoir in essays about so many things—growing up in an abusive cult, coming of age as a lesbian in the military, forced out by homophobia, living on the margins as a working class woman and what it’s like to grow into the person you are meant to be. Hough’s writing will break your heart." —Roxane Gay, author of... Read more

The Unwilling

By: John Hart

Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell

Length: 13 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

"The tension in Hart’s story never lets up, and you’ll find yourself unable to break away — disc after disc (or page after page) — long past your bedtime." -- NJ.com

This program includes a letter read by the author

“We the unwilling, led by the unqualified to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful.” —Unknown Soldier

Set in the South at the... Read more

Stone Arabia

By: Dana Spiotta

Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers

Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Stone Arabia is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create—in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.In the sibling relationship, "there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other," says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more... Read more

The Terrible

By: Yrsa Daley-Ward

Narrated by: Yrsa Daley-Ward & Howard Daley-Ward

Length: 3 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the PEN Ackerley Prize • Longlisted for the 2019 PEN Open Book Award

“Devastating and lyrical.” —The New York Times

“Suspenseful and affecting.” —The New Yorker

From the celebrated poet behind bone, a collection of poems that tells a story of coming-of-age, uncovering the cruelty and beauty of the world, going under, and finding... Read more

The Plot against America

By: Philip Roth

Narrated by: Ron Silver

Length: 13 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history.In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a... Read more

The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone

By: Felicity McLean

Narrated by: Cat Gould

Length: 7 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

"We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song, and when one came back, she wasn’t the one we were trying to recall to begin with."



Tikka Malloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992, living in an Australian suburb with her sister and their three best friends.... Read more

Number One Chinese Restaurant

By: Lillian Li

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Read more

Skandar and the Unicorn Thief

By: A.F. Steadman

Narrated by: David Dawson

Length: 11 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times bestseller!

Soar into a breathtaking world of heroes and unicorns as you’ve never seen them before in this “unexpected, suspenseful, and heartwarming” (Kirkus Reviews) middle grade debut perfect for fans of the Percy Jackson and Eragon series!

Skandar Smith has always yearned to leave the Mainland and escape to the secretive... Read more

The Twilight Zone

By: Nona Fernandez

Narrated by: Raquel Beattie

Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine’s cover... Read more

Time's Undoing

By: Cheryl A. Head

Narrated by: Jade Wheeler & Ronald Peet

Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history

Birmingham, 1929: Robert Lee Harrington, a master carpenter, has just moved to Alabama to pursue a job opportunity, bringing... Read more

Arlington Park

By: Rachel Cusk

Narrated by: Jilly Bond

Length: 8 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

A funny, satirical tale of English mothers on the brink of rebellion, Arlington Park is a novel for the ages.Set over the course of one rainy day in an ordinary English suburb, Arlington Park is a viciously funny portrait of a group of young mothers, each bound to their families, each straining for some kind of independence: Juliet, enraged at... Read more

The Sword Unbound

By: Gareth Hanrahan

Narrated by: George Weightman

Length: 20 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

Gareth Hanrahan's acclaimed epic fantasy series of dark myth, daring warriors and bloodthirsty vengeance continues with The Sword Unbound.

He thought he was saving the world. That was his first mistake.
 
Twenty years ago, Alf and his companions defeated the Dark Lord and claimed his city. Now, those few of the Nine that remain find themselves... Read more

True Story

By: Kate Reed Petty

Narrated by: Kristen Sieh, Alexander Cendese & Cassandra Cam...

Length: 8 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

“A gripping, ripped-from-headlines tale.” —People 

“Spellbinding.” —Megan Abbott, The New York Times Book Review 

Tracing the fifteen-year fallout of a toxic high school rumor, a riveting, astonishingly original debut novel about the power of stories—and who gets to tell them

2015. A gifted and reclusive ghostwriter, Alice Lovett makes a living... Read more

The Lies That Bind

By: Emily Giffin

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley, Will Damron & Vikas Adam

Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this irresistible novel from the author of All We Ever Wanted and Something Borrowed, a young woman falls hard for an impossibly perfect man before he disappears without a trace. . . . 

It’s 2 A.M. on a Saturday night in the spring of 2001, and twenty-eight-year-old Cecily Gardner sits alone in a dive bar in New... Read more

The Downstairs Girl

By: Stacey Lee

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

From the critically-acclaimed author of Under a Painted Sky and Outrun the Moon and founding member of We Need Diverse Books comes a powerful novel about identity, betrayal, and the meaning of family.



By day, seventeen-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady's maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo... Read more

The Twilight World

By: Werner Herzog

Narrated by: Werner Herzog

Length: 3 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

“A potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion, and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.” —The New York Times Book Review

The national bestseller by the great filmmaker Werner Herzog.

The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of... Read more

Swift River

By: Essie Chambers

Narrated by: Shayna Small, Janina Edwards & Robin Miles

Length: 10 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK | A National Bestseller | Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize | One of The Washington Post's Best Books of 2024 | An NPR Best Book of 2024 | An Elle Best Book of 2024 | A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 | An NAACP Image Award Nominee

“A book we all need to revive our souls” (Nicole... Read more

A Pho Love Story

By: Loan Le

Narrated by: Ryan Do & Vyvy Nguyen

Length: 9 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

“Will leave readers swooning.” —PopSugar

​When Dimple Met Rishi meets Ugly Delicious in this funny, smart romantic comedy, in which two Vietnamese American teens fall in love and must navigate their newfound relationship amid their families’ age-old feud about their competing, neighboring restaurants.

If Bao Nguyen had to describe himself, he’d... Read more

Surrender

By: Ray Loriga

Narrated by: Michael Patrick F Smith

Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

"[A] riveting, and original, achievement."—WIRED

From award-winning Spanish author Ray Loriga comes a dystopian novel about authority, manipulation, and the disappearance of privacy that “calls to mind The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood [and] Blindness by José Saramago” (Alfaguara Prize Winner Citation).

Ten long years have passed since war... Read more

Vacationland

By: John Hodgman

Narrated by: John Hodgman

Length: 5 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

“I love everything about this hilarious book except the font size.” —Jon Stewart

Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn’t seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now. 
 
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only... Read more

The Woman Inside

By: M. T. Edvardsson

Narrated by: Josh Dylan, Nathalie Buscombe & Sofia Engstrand

Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

This program features multicast narration and an author's note read by the author.

A wealthy couple ends up murdered in the nicest part of town in this compulsively listenable thriller from M. T. Edvardsson.

Bill Olsson, recently widowed, is desperate to provide for his daughter, Sally. Struggling to pay rent, he welcomes a lodger into their... Read more

The Director

By: Daniel Kehlmann

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

From “one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today” (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich.

An artist’s life, a... Read more