Local bookseller recommendations

Sycamore

By: Bryn Chancellor

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Steven Jay Cohen, Sara Mors...

Length: 11 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

“In this masterful performance, Bryn Chancellor explores the loss around which an entire community has calcified with humanity and wisdom. Chancellor digs deep in these pages, unearthing broken hearts, secrets, betrayals, passion and—most impressively—grace. What a joy to find a book that is both propulsive and perfectly composed.”—Cynthia... Read more

House of Names

By: Colm Toibin

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson, Charlie Anson & Pippa Nixon

Length: 8 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year
* Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, St. Louis Dispatch

From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children—“brilliant…gripping…high drama…made tangible and graphic in... Read more

The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness

By: Paula Poundstone

Narrated by: Paula Poundstone

Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

Is there a secret to happiness? Beloved comedian Paula Poundstone conducts a series of "thoroughly scientific" experiments to find out, offering herself up as a guinea pig and recording her data for the benefit of all humankind. Armed with her unique brand of self-deprecating wit and the scientific method, in each chapter Paula tries out a... Read more

'Round Midnight

By: Laura McBride

Narrated by: Joy Osmanski

Length: 11 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

“If McBride is trying to prove—that if you change one life, you change the world—she succeeds magnificently.”—Booklist

From the author of the acclaimed novel We Are Called to Rise comes a “jewel of a novel” (BookPage) about four vivid and complicated women in Las Vegas whose lives become connected by secrets, courage, tragedies, and small acts... Read more

The Baker's Secret

By: Stephen P. Kiernan

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

From the multiple-award-winning, critically acclaimed author of The Hummingbird and The Curiosity comes a dazzling novel of World War II—a shimmering tale of courage, determination, optimism, and the resilience of the human spirit, set in a small Normandy village on the eve of D-Day.On June 5, 1944, as dawn rises over a small town on the... Read more

The Garden of Small Beginnings

By: Abbi Waxman

Narrated by: Emily Rankin

Length: 9 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

“A quirky, funny, and deeply thoughtful book”* that’s “filled with characters you’ll love and wish you lived next door to in real life”** from the author of The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.
 
Lilian Girvan has been a single mother for three years—ever since her husband died in a car accident. One mental breakdown and some random suicidal thoughts... Read more

Anything Is Possible

By: Elizabeth Strout

Narrated by: Kimberly Farr

Length: 8 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this “compulsively readable” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton

“This book, this writer, are magnificent.”—Ann Patchett

WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF... Read more

Move Fast and Break Things

By: Jonathan Taplin

Narrated by: Jonathan Taplin

Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

The book that started the Techlash.

A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age.

Move Fast and Break Things is the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs... Read more

Spoils

By: Brian Van Reet

Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella, Armando Duran & Andrew Eiden

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

It is April 2003. American forces have taken Baghdad and are now charged with winning hearts and minds. But this vital tipping point is barely recognized for what it is, as a series of miscalculations and blunders fuels an already-simmering insurgency intent on making Iraq the next graveyard of empires.

In dazzling and propulsive prose, Brian... Read more

The Stars Are Fire

By: Anita Shreve

Narrated by: Suzanne Elise Freeman

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Water and The Pilot's Wife (an Oprah's Book Club selection): an exquisitely suspenseful new novel about an extraordinary young woman tested by a catastrophic event and its devastating aftermath--based on the true story of the largest fire in Maine's... Read more

The Day I Died

By: Lori Rader-Day

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Length: 12 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

From the award-winning author of Little Pretty Things comes this gripping, unforgettable tale of a mother's desperate search for a lost boy.Anna Winger can know people better than they know themselves with only a glance—at their handwriting. Hired out by companies wanting to land trustworthy employees and by the lovelorn hoping to find... Read more

Sunshine State

By: Sarah Gerard

Narrated by: Madeleine Maby

Length: 10 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Rising literary star and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Sarah Gerard uses her experiences growing up along Florida’s gulf coast to illuminate the struggles of modern human survival—physical, emotional, environmental—through a collection of essays exploring intimacy, addiction, obsession, religion, homelessness, and... Read more

The Shadow Land

By: Elizabeth Kostova

Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik, Fred Berman, Barbara Caruso & G...

Length: 18 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

From the #1 bestselling author of The Historian comes a mesmerizing novel that spans the past and the present—and unearths the troubled history of a gorgeous but haunted country.

A young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, has traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, hoping that life abroad will salve the wounds left by the loss of her beloved brother. Soon... Read more

Hourglass

By: Dani Shapiro

Narrated by: Dani Shapiro

Length: 3 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love.

Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded,... Read more

Letters to a Young Writer

By: Colum McCann

Narrated by: Colum McCann

Length: 2 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

From the bestselling author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin comes a lesson in how to be a writer—and so much more than that.

Intriguing and inspirational, this book is a call to look outward rather than inward. McCann asks his readers to constantly push the boundaries of experience, to see empathy and wonder in the... Read more

Miss You

By: Kate Eberlen

Narrated by: Anna Acton & Finlay Robertson

Length: 13 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

""If ever a couple was ‘meant to be,’ it’s Tess and Gus. This is such a witty, poignant, and uplifting story of two lives crisscrossing over the years, with near miss after near miss. . . . I couldn’t put it down."" — Sophie KinsellaFor fans of One Day in December, The Flatshare, and This Time Next Year, a wryly romantic debut novel that asks,... Read more

Waking Gods

By: Sylvain Neuvel

Narrated by: Various

Length: 9 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

In the gripping sequel to Sleeping Giants, which was hailed by Pierce Brown as “a luminous conspiracy yarn . . . reminiscent of The Martian and World War Z,” Sylvain Neuvel’s innovative series about human-alien contact takes another giant step forward.
 
As a child, Rose Franklin made an astonishing discovery: a giant metallic hand, buried deep... Read more

American War

By: Omar El Akkad

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Length: 12 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

“Powerful . . . As haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy [created] in The Road, and as devastating a look as the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America. . . . Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot... Read more

Hallelujah Anyway

By: Anne Lamott

Narrated by: Anne Lamott

Length: 2 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

“Anne Lamott is my Oprah.” —Chicago Tribune

The New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it.

"Mercy is radical kindness," Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give... Read more

Mozart's Starling

By: Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Narrated by: Linda Henning

Length: 7 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

On May 27th, 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart met a flirtatious little starling in a Viennese shop who sang an improvised version of the theme from his Piano Concerto no. 17 in G major. Sensing a kindred spirit in the plucky young bird, Mozart bought him and took him home to be a family pet. For three years, the starling lived with Mozart,... Read more

What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

By: Lesley Nneka Arimah

Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh

Length: 5 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

A PBS NewsHour/New York Times Book Club Pick

A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION "5 UNDER 35" HONOREE

WINNER OF THE 2017 KIRKUS PRIZE

WINNER OF THE NYPL'S YOUNG LIONS FICTION AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE LEONARD PRIZE

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE

A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind... Read more

Defy the Stars

By: Claudia Gray

Narrated by: Nate Begle

Length: 11 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Lost Stars and Bloodline comes a thrilling sci-fi adventure that Kass Morgan, bestselling author of The 100 series, calls "startlingly original and achingly romantic...nothing short of masterful."

She's a soldier--Noemi Vidal is willing to risk anything to protect her planet, Genesis,... Read more

Life's Work

By: Dr. Willie Parker

Narrated by: Caz Harleaux

Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

In this “vivid and companionable memoir of a remarkable life” (The New Yorker), an outspoken, Christian reproductive justice advocate and abortion provider reveals his personal and professional journeys in an effort to seize the moral high ground on the question of choice and reproductive justice.

Dr. Willie Parker grew up in the Deep South,... Read more

No One Cares About Crazy People

By: Ron Powers

Narrated by: Ron Powers

Length: 14 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times-bestselling author Ron Powers offers a searching, richly researched narrative of the social history of mental illness in America paired with the deeply personal story of his two sons' battles with schizophrenia.

From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the infamous eugenics era to the follies of the... Read more