2020 Holiday Book Catalog List

The Shadow King

By: Maaza Mengiste
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 16 hours 9 minutes

Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and named a best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more, The Shadow King is an “unforgettable epic from an immensely talented author who’s unafraid to take risks” (Michael Schaub, NPR).

Set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, The Shadow King takes us back to the first... Read more

The Color of Law

A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

By: Richard Rothstein
Narrated by: Adam Grupper
Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

“This is one of the most informative and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. Rothstein masterfully delivers information on the way local and federal governments reinforce segregated neighborhoods, racial zoning, and support violence to keep African Americans out of certain areas. Full of eye-opening research, this is the kind of book everyone... Read more

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

By: Saidiya Hartman
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

“This intense, experimental history weaves together biography, archival record, photographs, and a kind of radical act of imagination to tell the stories of Black and queer women in Philadelphia & NYC at the turn of the century - their experiments in love, living, sex, family, gender, autonomy - all while under severe legal, societal, and... Read more

The Dead Are Arising

The Life of Malcolm X

By: Les Payne & Tamara Payne
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 18 hours 6 minutes

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm
X—all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders... Read more

Patsy

A Novel

By: Nicole Dennis-Benn
Narrated by: Sharon Gordon
Length: 17 hours 9 minutes

“I feel that Dennis-Benn is unparalleled in writing the insidious unforgivables. The mother who can't find love for her daughter, the more-than-friend who takes everything you give them and never gives back, the daughter told to be a "good girl" who finds difficulty doing either of those things for the woman who ends up raising her. Like her... Read more

Driving While Black

African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights

By: Gretchen Sorin
Narrated by: Gretchen Sorin & Janina Edwards
Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

How the automobile fundamentally changed African American life—the true history beyond the Best Picture–winning movie.



The ultimate symbol of independence and possibility, the automobile has shaped this country from the moment the first Model T rolled off Henry Ford's assembly line. Yet cars have always held distinct importance for African... Read more

Felon

Poems

By: Reginald Dwayne Betts
Narrated by: Reginald Dwayne Betts
Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity” (New York Times).

Felon tells the story of one man in fierce, dazzling poems― canvassing his wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace― and, in doing so,... Read more

Afropessimism

By: Frank B. Wilderson, III
Narrated by: Frank B. Wilderson, III
Length: 13 hours 39 minutes

Longlisted • National Book Award (Nonfiction) Combining trenchant philosophy with lyrical memoir, Afropessimism is an unparalleled account of Blackness. Why does race seem to color almost every feature of our moral and political universe? Why does a perpetual cycle of slavery—in all its political, intellectual, and cultural forms—continue to... Read more

The Book of Two Ways

A Novel

By: Jodi Picoult
Narrated by: Patti Murin
Length: 15 hours 47 minutes

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Small Great Things and A Spark of Light comes a “powerful” (The Washington Post) novel about the choices that alter the course of our lives.

Look for Jodi Picoult’s new novel, By Any Other Name, now available!

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE

Everything changes in a single... Read more

Magic Lessons

The Prequel to Practical Magic

By: Alice Hoffman
Narrated by: Sutton Foster
Length: 13 hours 25 minutes

“I so wanted to read this slowly and savor every page since this may be the last time we get to venture into this world of magic and the Owens family. But as if entranced by Alice Hoffman’s magic, the pages were turning faster and faster and I devoured this book in two sittings. No one tells a story like Alice Hoffman, and I only hope she finds a... Read more

Monogamy

A Novel

By: Sue Miller
Narrated by: Sue Miller
Length: 10 hours 53 minutes

“I could hardly wait to get in my car and start the audio of Sue Miller reading her novel Monogamy, a welcome relief from radio news! The story of Annie and her marriage -- before, during, and as a widow -- it is also a perspective on other loyalties, besides the one to a spouse: friendships, "steps and exes," children, neighbors, even Annie's... Read more

The Exiles

A Novel

By: Christina Baker Kline
Narrated by: Caroline Lee
Length: 10 hours 43 minutes

“I just read The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline (the author of Orphan Train) and loved it. We meet three unforgettable characters whose shocking and disquieting paths bring them together in nineteenth-century Australia. Matheinna, an orphaned aboriginal girl, is taken to live with a wealthy couple as an experiment in civilizing natives, which... Read more

The London Restoration

By: Rachel McMillan
Narrated by: Hannah Curtis
Length: 11 hours 47 minutes

The secrets that might save a nation could shatter a marriage.Madly in love, Diana Foyle and Brent Somerville married in London as the bombs of World War II dropped on their beloved city. Without time for a honeymoon, the couple spent the next four years apart. Diana, an architectural historian, took a top-secret intelligence post at Bletchley... Read more

Take a Hint, Dani Brown

A Novel

The Brown Sisters: Book #2

By: Talia Hibbert
Narrated by: Ione Butler
Length: 10 hours

“One of the great pleasures of getting to work in a bookstore is having co-workers coax you to new genres and experiences. So many folk were raving about Talia Hibbert that I decided to give her a read. Delightful! Funny and moving. Damn charming. Serious in intent and yet light as a feather. And very, very sexy. If you are looking for a book... Read more

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

By: V. E. Schwab
Narrated by: Julia Whelan
Length: 17 hours 9 minutes

“France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go... Read more

The Once and Future Witches

By: Alix E. Harrow
Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
Length: 16 hours 3 minutes

“Alix E. Harrow's second novel propels the listener from the year 1893 through a past and the future, with fantasy releasing the spells the Sisters Grimm have hidden in plain sight. I also delighted in the witchy affirmation of historical moments and unions at the turn of the 20th Century. Read more

The Orphan Collector

By: Ellen Marie Wiseman
Narrated by: Rachel Botchan
Length: 15 hours 51 minutes

Ellen Marie Wiseman, acclaimed author of What She Left Behind and The Life She Was Given, weaves the
stories of two very different women into a page-turning novel as suspenseful as it is poignant, set amid one of
history’s deadliest pandemics.

In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia’s... Read more

The Daughters Of Yalta

The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War

By: Catherine Grace Katz
Narrated by: Christine Rendel
Length: 14 hours 55 minutes

The untold story of the three intelligent and glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference in February 1945, and of the conference’s fateful reverberations in the waning days of World War II.
 
Tensions during the Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear apart the wartime alliance among Franklin... Read more

Is this Anything?

By: Jerry Seinfeld
Narrated by: Jerry Seinfeld
Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

“My husband and I have had the pleasure of seeing Jerry Seinfeld live on two occasions. Obviously, we are big fans. When I learned that Seinfeld was releasing his book at the same time as a cross-country road trip that we had planned, I was ecstatic. Jerry did not let us down. The miles flew by quickly as we laughed our way through Connecticut. I... Read more

Everything Beautiful in Its Time

Seasons of Love and Loss

By: Jenna Bush Hager
Narrated by: Jenna Bush Hager
Length: 5 hours 1 minute

Jenna Bush Hager, the former first daughter and granddaughter, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and coanchor of the Today show, shares moving, funny stories about her beloved grandparents and the wisdom they passed on that has shaped her life.To the world, George and Barbara Bush were America’s powerful president and influ­ential first... Read more