Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountShop small, give big!
With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.
Start giftingLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayThe Hero of This Book
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“This is a quiet book – and I say this as someone who lacks patience for quiet books – but I loved this one anyway. In The Hero of This Book, an American woman, a writer, spends a Sunday wandering the streets of London, and as she does, she thinks about her mother who recently died. To quote the unnamed writer/narrator, 'I kept walking. It's not much of a plot.' And yet, Elizabeth McCracken's droll prose is irresistible; she is forgiven. This unnamed writer swears repeatedly the book is a novel, not a memoir, but most of the specific details of the book – places, jobs, circumstances – point to the unnamed author being Elizabeth McCracken herself, whose mother did in fact pass away in recent years. In fact, this unassuming little book is as much a meditation on writing as it is a meditation on grief. She confesses that she hates writers as characters in books, that she hates unnamed narrators in books. But no matter: Elizabeth McCracken – who is perhaps my favorite writer – can pull off anything, even that which breaks all of her own rules. Is it a novel? A memoir? Autofiction? It doesn't matter. It's delightful.”
— Rachel • The Book Table
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall from: Los Angeles Times * Boston Globe * BookPage * Book Riot * The Millions * Publishers Weekly * LitHub * St. Louis Post Dispatch * Town & Country
A taut, groundbreaking new novel from bestselling and award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken, about a writer’s relationship with her larger-than-life mother—and about the very nature of writing, memory, and art
Ten months after her mother’s death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother’s, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother’s life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed.
The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary—her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties—and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother’s nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.
The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. What begins as a question of filial devotion ultimately becomes a lesson in what it means to write. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that delights at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away.
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books, including The Hero of This Book, The Souvenir Museum (long-listed for the National Book Award), Bowlaway, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award), and The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist). Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and have won three Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of eight books, including The Hero of This Book, The Souvenir Museum (long-listed for the National Book Award), Bowlaway, Thunderstruck & Other Stories (winner of the 2014 Story Prize and long-listed for the National Book Award), and The Giant’s House (a National Book Award finalist). Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and have won three Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. She has served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently holds the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.