Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowThe Language of Moths
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreA boy’s family travels to the Allegheny Mountains in order for his entomologist father to find an undiscovered moth he remembers seeing there in his youth. Over the course of the summer, the boy’s sister, who suffers from autism, finds she can speak the language of various insects and creatures of nature, allowing her to understand the world around her for the first time in her life. And as the boy himself comes of age, he discovers that he speaks a different sort of language as well. As each person journeys closer to their true nature, tension is eased within the sometimes strained relationships of this unique family.
A Nebula Award Finalist, Barzak’s novella combines realism and fantasy to explore how we each experience the world through our own inimitable language, creating distance even from those closest to us.
Christopher Barzak’s stories have appeared in a many venues, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and his first novel, One for Sorrow, was published in 2007. He grew up in rural Ohio and has since lived in both rural and urban settings, including Tokyo, Japan where he taught English in rural junior high and elementary schools. Currently he lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University.
Richard Powers is the author of New York Times bestseller Bewilderment; The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and The Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; among many other novels. Powers has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Historical Fiction, and is a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Reviews
“Christopher Barzak has written a marvelous narrative that left me pensive for hours. Impressionable characters, words ‘like bubbles,’ parallel tales of two remarkable lives…Phenomenal writing, how superb.”
“Barzak should be specially credited for delivering an ending that is moving, and which delivers multiple, credible epiphanies.”
“A beautifully written, extremely moving coming-of-age story told from the perspectives of a teenage boy struggling with his sexuality and his autistic elder sister. Others…feel somewhat inconsequential by comparison.”
Expand reviews