Underground Books
Local bookseller recommendations
Find audiobooks personally recommended by our booksellers.
Native Tongue
By: Suzette Haden Elgin
Narrated by: Amy Landon
Length: 13 hours 42 minutes
Abridged: No
Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action.
In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar... Read more
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
By: Saidiya Hartman
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 10 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday... Read more
View audiobookThe City in the Middle of the Night
By: Charlie Jane Anders
Narrated by: Jennifer O'Donnell & Laura Knight Keating
Length: 13 hours 56 minutes
Abridged: No
A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST!Charlie Jane Anders, the nationally bestselling author of All the Birds in the Sky delivers a brilliant new novel set in a hauntingly strange future with #10 LA Times bestseller The City in the Middle of the Night.WOULD YOU GIVE UP EVERYTHING TO CHANGE THE WORLD?Humanity clings to life on January—a colonized planet divided... Read more
View audiobookSouthern Discomfort
By: Tena Clark
Narrated by: Tena Clark
Length: 8 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No
“Southern Discomfort is a raw, thought-provoking examination of privilege, racism, sexism, the masks we wear to conform to society’s expectations, and the journey toward authentic identity.” —Read with Us: Caste, An Oprah’s Book Club Discussion Guide
For fans of beloved memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, a “raw and deeply honest”... Read more
Small Spaces
By: Katherine Arden
Narrated by: Renee Dorian
Length: 5 hours 16 minutes
Abridged: No
New York Times bestselling adult author of The Bear and the Nightingale makes her middle grade debut with a creepy, spellbinding ghost story destined to become a classic.
After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie only finds solace in books. So when she happens upon a crazed woman at the river threatening to throw a book into the... Read more
The Bad Seed
By: William March
Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
Length: 7 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No
The bestselling novel that inspired Mervyn LeRoy's classic horror film about the little girl who can get away with anything—even murder.
There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers... Read more
Witchmark
By: C.L. Polk
Narrated by: Samuel Roukin
Length: 8 hours 53 minutes
Abridged: No
WINNER of the 2019 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and the Lammy Award!C. L. Polk arrives on the scene with Witchmark, a stunning, addictive fantasy that combines intrigue, magic, betrayal, and romance. The New York Times calls it “thoroughly charming and deftly paced … an accomplished... Read more
View audiobookGods of Howl Mountain
By: Taylor Brown
Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
Length: 9 hours
Abridged: No
In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina.Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood—a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at... Read more
View audiobookFirst, We Make the Beast Beautiful
By: Sarah Wilson
Narrated by: Sarah Wilson
Length: 9 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No
New York Times Bestseller""Probably the best book on living with anxiety that I’ve ever read.” – Mark Manson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ckThe Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast, you must first make it beautiful.Sarah Wilson first came across this Chinese proverb in psychiatrist Kay... Read more
View audiobookThe Female Persuasion
By: Meg Wolitzer
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
Length: 14 hours 48 minutes
Abridged: No
A New York Times Bestseller
“A powerful coming-of-age story that looks at ambition, friendship, identity, desire, and power from the much-needed female lens." —Bustle
“Ultra-readable.” —Vogue
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Interestings, comes an electric novel not just about who we want to be with, but who we want... Read more
Living in the Woods in a Tree
By: Sybil Rosen
Narrated by: Pam Ward
Length: 9 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No
Living in the Woods in a Tree is an intimate glimpse into the turbulent life of Texas music legend Blaze Foley (1949–1989), seen through the eyes of Sybil Rosen, the woman for whom he wrote his most widely known song, "If I Could Only Fly." It captures the exuberance of their fleeting idyll in a tree house in the Georgia woods during the... Read more
View audiobookFever Dream
By: Samanta Schweblin
Narrated by: Hillary Huber
Length: 3 hours 13 minutes
Abridged: No
NOW A FEATURE FILM COMING SOON TO NETFLIX
"Genius." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize!
Experience the blazing, surreal sensation of a fever dream...
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a rural hospital clinic. A boy named David sits beside her. She’s not his mother. He's not her child. Together,... Read more
Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World
By: Tim Marshall
Narrated by: Scott Brick
Length: 8 hours 49 minutes
Abridged: No
In this New York Times bestseller, updated for 2016, an award-winning journalist uses ten maps of crucial regions to explain the geo-political strategies of the world powers—“fans of geography, history, and politics (and maps) will be enthralled” (Fort Worth Star-Telegram).
Maps have a mysterious hold over us. Whether ancient, crumbling... Read more
Slow Days, Fast Company
By: Eve Babitz
Narrated by: Mia Barron
Length: 5 hours 32 minutes
Abridged: No
Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of L.A. in the1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her first hand experiences in the L.A. cultural scene, translated... Read more
View audiobookThe Fifth Child
By: Doris Lessing
Narrated by: Sue Pitkin
Length: 5 hours 15 minutes
Abridged: No
Doris Lessing's contemporary gothic horror story—centered on the birth of a baby who seems less than human—probes society's unwillingness to recognize its own brutality.Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and... Read more
View audiobookSecondhand Time
By: Svetlana Alexievich
Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbel...
Length: 22 hours 56 minutes
Abridged: No
The magnum opus and latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing “a new kind of literary genre,”... Read more
My Best Friend’s Exorcism
By: Grady Hendrix
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 10 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No
A heartwarming story of friendship and demonic possessionThe year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since the fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act … different. She’s moody. She’s irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she’s... Read more
View audiobookCarmilla
By: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Narrated by: Cathy Dobson
Length: 2 hours 57 minutes
Abridged: No
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the 19th century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era.
Carmilla is Le Fanu's famous classic vampire story which has been filmed numerous times, including Vampyre (1932), Blood... Read more
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
By: C.G. Jung
Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
Length: 16 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No
'I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals' (Carl Gustav Jung)
In 1957, four years before his death, Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, began writing his life story. But what started as an exercise in autobiography soon... Read more
All the Birds in the Sky
By: Charlie Jane Anders
Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
Length: 12 hours 36 minutes
Abridged: No
From the former editor-in-chief of io9.com, a stunning Nebula Award–winning and Hugo–shortlisted novel about the end of the world—and the beginning of our future
An ancient society of witches and a hipster technological startup go to war in order to prevent the world from tearing itself apart. To further complicate things, each of the groups’... Read more
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
By: Becky Albertalli
Narrated by: Michael Crouch
Length: 6 hours 45 minutes
Abridged: No
Now a major motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox: Love, SimonWilliam C. Morris Award Winner: Best Young Adult Debut of the Year * National Book Award Longlist""A remarkable gift of a novel.""—Andrew Smith, author of Grasshopper Jungle""I am so in love with this book.""—Nina LaCour, author of Hold Still""Feels timelessly, effortlessly... Read more
View audiobookGood Omens
By: Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Narrated by: Full Cast, Mark Heap & Peter Serafinowicz
Length: 4 hours 19 minutes
Abridged: No
A full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s celebrated apocalyptic comic novel.
According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday in fact. Just after Any Answers on Radio 4….
Events have been set in motion to bring about the End of Days. The armies... Read more
The Hero and the Crown
By: Robin McKinley
Narrated by: Roslyn Alexander
Length: 10 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No
An outcast princess must earn her birthright as a hero of the realm—in this “utterly engrossing” Newbery Medal–winning fantasy (The New York Times).Aerin is an outcast in her own father’s court, daughter of the foreign woman who, it was rumored, was a witch, and enchanted the king to marry her.She makes friends with her father’s lame, retired... Read more
View audiobookIt's Kind of a Funny Story
By: Ned Vizzini
Narrated by: Robert Fass
Length: 8 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No
Ambitious New York City teenager Craig Gilner is determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job. But once Craig aces his way into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School, the pressure becomes unbearable. He stops eating and sleeping until, one night, he... Read more
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