Biography & Memoir audiobooks

There Will Be No Miracles Here

By: Casey Gerald

Narrated by: Casey Gerald

Length: 13 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2018 BY NPR AND THE NEW YORK TIMES
A PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB PICK

"Somehow Casey Gerald has pulled off the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time by just looking outside his window and inside himself. Extraordinary." —Marlon James

"Staccato prose and... Read more

The Poison Squad

By: Deborah Blum

Narrated by: Kirsten Potter

Length: 11 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times Notable Book 

The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad.

From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change

By the end... Read more

How to Be a Good Creature

By: Sy Montgomery

Narrated by: Sy Montgomery

Length: 3 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Understanding someone who belongs to another species can be transformative. No one knows this better than author, naturalist, and adventurer Sy Montgomery. To research her books, Sy has traveled the world and encountered some of the planet's rarest and most beautiful animals. From tarantulas to tigers, Sy's life continually intersects with and... Read more

Daemon Voices

By: Philip Pullman

Narrated by: Philip Pullman & Simon Mason

Length: 12 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

From the internationally best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, a spellbinding journey into the secrets of his art--the narratives that have shaped his vision, his experience of writing, and the keys to mastering the art of storytelling.

One of the most highly acclaimed and best-selling authors of our time now gives us a book that... Read more

Rising Out of Hatred

By: Eli Saslow

Narrated by: Scott Brick & Eli Saslow

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

The powerful story of how a prominent white supremacist changed his heart and mind. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, this is a book to help us understand the American moment and to help us better understand one another. 

“Rising Out of Hatred proclaims if the successor to the white nationalist movement can forsake his ideological... Read more

The Real Lolita

By: Sarah Weinman

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

“The Real Lolita is a tour de force of literary detective work. Not only does it shed new light on the terrifying true saga that influenced Nabokov’s masterpiece, it restores the forgotten victim to our consciousness.” —David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower MoonVladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of... Read more

The Last Palace

By: Norman Eisen

Narrated by: Jeff Goldblum

Length: 15 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants
 
When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s residence in Prague, returning to the land his mother had fled after the Holocaust, he was startled to discover... Read more

Feminasty

By: Erin Gibson

Narrated by: Erin Gibson

Length: 6 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

From the wickedly funny and feminist creator and host of the Throwing Shade podcast, a collection of hilarious personal essays and political commentary perfect for fans of Lindy West and Roxane Gay.

Since women earned the right to vote a little under one hundred years ago, our progress hasn't been the Olympic sprint toward gender equality... Read more

The Black and the Blue

By: Matthew Horace & Ron Harris

Narrated by: Matthew Horace

Length: 9 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

During his 28-year career, Matthew Horace rose through the ranks from a police officer working the beat to a federal agent working criminal cases in some of the toughest communities in America to a highly decorated federal law enforcement executive managing high-profile investigations nationwide. Yet it was not until seven years into his... Read more

If They Come for Us

By: Fatimah Asghar

Narrated by: Fatimah Asghar

Length: 1 hour 22 minutes

Abridged: No

“A debut poetry collection showcasing both a fierce and tender new voice.”—Booklist
“Elegant and playful . . . The poet invents new forms and updates classic ones.”—Elle
“[Fatimah] Asghar interrogates divisions along lines of nationality, age, and gender, illuminating the forces by which identity is fixed or flexible.”—The New Yorker

NAMED ONE OF... 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 Girl Who Smiled Beads

By: Clemantine Wamariya & Elizabeth Weil

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.”
 
Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were... Read more

The Best Cook in the World

By: Rick Bragg

Narrated by: Rick Bragg

Length: 19 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

From the beloved, best-selling author of All Over but the Shoutin', a delectable, rollicking food memoir, cookbook, and loving tribute to a region, a vanishing history, a family, and, especially, to his mother.

Margaret Bragg does not own a single cookbook. She measures in "dabs" and "smidgens" and "tads" and "you know, hon, just some." She... Read more

The Recovering

By: Leslie Jamison

Narrated by: Leslie Jamison

Length: 16 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction.

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction... Read more

The Man Who Caught the Storm

By: Brantley Hargrove

Narrated by: Jacques Roy

Length: 8 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

The saga of the greatest tornado chaser who ever lived: a tale of obsession and daring and an extraordinary account of humanity’s high-stakes race to understand nature’s fiercest phenomenon from Brantley Hargrove, “one of today’s great science writers” (The Washington Post).

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the tornado was one of the last... Read more

When They Call You a Terrorist

By: Patrisse Cullors & asha bandele

Narrated by: Angela Davis & Patrisse Cullors

Length: 6 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

"Narrating her own work, Patrisse Khan-Cullors shares the salient moments of her life that led her to become a founder of Black Lives Matter...pain, frustration, and joy [emblazon] each word she utters." — AudioFile Magazine

This program is read by Patrisse Cullors and includes a bonus conversation.

The emotional and powerful story of one of the... Read more

The Stowaway

By: Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Narrated by: Jacques Roy

Length: 6 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The spectacular, true story of a scrappy teenager from New York’s Lower East Side who stowed away on the most remarkable feat of science and daring of the Jazz Age, The Stowaway is “a thrilling adventure that captures not only the making of a man but of a nation” (David Grann, bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon).

It was 1928: a time... Read more

The Year of Less

By: Cait Flanders

Narrated by: Cait Flanders

Length: 5 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

In her late twenties, Cait Flanders found herself stuck in the consumerism cycle that grips so many of us: earn more, buy more, want more, rinse, repeat. Even after she worked her way out of nearly $30,000 of consumer debt, her old habits took hold again. When she realized that nothing she was doing or buying was making her happy—only keeping... Read more

It's All Relative

By: A. J. Jacobs

Narrated by: A. J. Jacobs

Length: 8 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs undergoes a hilarious, poignant quest to understand what constitutes family—where it begins and how far it goes—in It’s All Relative, a “thought-provoking…delightful, easy-to-read, informative book” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

A.J. Jacobs has received some strange emails over the years, but... 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

Reckless Daughter

By: David Yaffe

Narrated by: Xe Sands

Length: 12 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

Joni Mitchell is a cultural touchstone for generations of Americans. In her heyday she released ten experimental, challenging, and revealing albums; her lyrics captivated people with the beauty of their language and the rawness of their emotions, both deeply personal to Mitchell and universally relatable to her audience. In this intimate... Read more

Thanks, Obama

By: David Litt

Narrated by: David Litt

Length: 9 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERRemember when presidents spoke in complete sentences instead of in unhinged tweets? David Litt does. In his comic, coming-of-age memoir, he takes us back to the Obama years – and charts a path forward in the age of Trump.More than any other presidency, Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House were defined by young... Read more

The Tender Bar

By: J. R. Moehringer

Narrated by: Adam Grupper & Daniel Thomas May

Length: 16 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club—with a new Afterword.

J.R. Moehringer grew up... Read more

Blood Brothers

By: Elias Chacour

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the... Read more