Skip content
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
Bookseller pick
Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop 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 gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-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 today

Cuyahoga

$20.99

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Feodor Chin

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 6 hours 41 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

Cuyahoga is tragic and comic, hilarious and inventive—a 19th-century legend for 21st-century America” (The Boston Globe).

Big Son is a spirit of the times—the times being 1837. Behind his broad shoulders, shiny hair, and church-organ laugh, Big Son practically made Ohio City all by himself. The feats of this proto-superhero have earned him wonder and whiskey, but very little in the way of fortune. And without money, Big cannot become an honest husband to his beloved Cloe (who may or may not want to be his honest wife).

In pursuit of a steady wage, our hero hits the (dirt) streets of Ohio City and Cleveland, the twin towns racing to become the first great metropolis of the West. Their rivalry reaches a boil over the building of a bridge across the Cuyahoga River—and Big stumbles right into the kettle. The resulting misadventures involve elderly terrorists, infrastructure collapse, steamboat races, wild pigs, and multiple ruined weddings.

Narrating this “very funny, rambunctious debut novel” (Los Angeles Times) tale is Medium Son—known as Meed—apprentice coffin maker, almanac author, orphan, and the younger brother of Big. Meed finds himself swept up in the action, and he is forced to choose between brotherly love and his own ambitions. His uncanny voice—plain but profound, colloquial but poetic—elevates a slapstick frontier tale into a “breezy fable of empire, class, conquest, and ecocide” (The New York Times Book Review).

Evoking the Greek classics and the Bible alongside nods to Looney Tunes, Charles Portis, and Flannery O’Connor, Pete Beatty has written “a hilarious and moving exploration of family, home, and fate [and] you won’t read anything else like it this year” (BuzzFeed).

Pete Beatty is a Cleveland-area native. He has taught writing at Kent State University and the University of Alabama. He currently works at the University of Alabama Press. He lives with his wife in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Cuyahoga is his first novel.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop 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 gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-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 today

Reviews

"Narrator Feodor Chin embraces the satirical world of this debut novel with a whimsical tone, an engaged style, and a quick cadence that suits the nineteenth-century fable. He does a fine performance of the sounds in this audiobook—from the thwack of an axe to the sharp sound of gunshots and the splashes of swimming in Lake Erie. Befitting this satire of the tall tale, everything in this audiobook is outsized. The plot rotates around the brothers Son—Big Son, the author of fabulous feats, and Medium (called "Meed"), the narrator, who tells of his mythic sibling's exploits and records them in an almanac. The listener is treated to all the hijinks—from a boat race to a bridge burning and a prodigious brawl." Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting