Mississippi Authors

The Barn

The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

By: Wright Thompson
Narrated by: Wright Thompson
Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

“This is the story/history of the kidnapping, torture and murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. It is a reckoning with the horrors and injustices that Black Americans face daily, even today, but specifically in the South. It is a history of the insular community surrounding this (and other) murders. It is the... Read more

Let Us Descend

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Jesmyn Ward
Length: 8 hours 12 minutes

“Let Us Descend enveloped me. Jesmyn Ward's rich prose at the sentence level and her sheer determination through all 300 pages of this book are remarkable. I don't feel she once faltered. So many books peter out at the end or lose focus or motivation but not here...The book is a brutal retelling of slavery and the physical/spiritual/mental... Read more

Beautiful Dreamers

By: Minrose Gwin
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

From Minrose Gwin, award-winning author of The Accidentals, comes Beautiful Dreamers, a story of a precocious teen and her mother, their gay best friend, and the con man who unravels their family. It’s 1953 when Memory Feather and her mother, Virginia, are welcomed back home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast community of Belle Cote by Virginia’s... Read more

Salvage This World

By: Michael Farris Smith
Narrated by: Tess Riley
Length: 7 hours 1 minute

In this gritty epic novel, a young woman returns home with her child to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the stormridden territory to find the girl who may be a savior in the apocalypse.There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.
 
In the... Read more

The Queen City Detective Agency

A Novel

By: Snowden Wright
Narrated by: Shayna Small
Length: 10 hours 34 minutes

Following an unforgettable cast of characters and a jaded female P.I. enmeshed in a criminal conspiracy in 1980s Mississippi, The Queen City Detective Agency is a riveting, razor-sharp Southern noir that unravels the greed, corruption, and racism at the heart of the American Dream.Meridian, Mississippi—once known as the Queen City for its status... Read more

Don't Let the Devil Ride

A Novel

By: Ace Atkins
Narrated by: Michael Boatman
Length: 14 hours 41 minutes

“An instant Southern noir classic” –S.A. Cosby S.A. Cosby meets Don Winslow in the breakout thriller from New York Times bestselling author Ace Atkins. A Memphis woman hires a PI to find her missing husband, only to discover that he is involved in a dangerous web of international intrigue—and she and her children are now at risk.Hell is... Read more

Biography of X : A Novel

By: Catherine Lacey
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 14 hours 6 minutes

“A fictionalized memoir about a non-existent star of the east village art scene. An America broken in two after the end of World War 2. A woman attempts to understand abuse at the hands of the person she loved. All at once. Read more

The Weeds

By: Katy Simpson Smith
Narrated by: Cindy Kay & Mia Hutchinson-Shaw
Length: 6 hours 48 minutes

A Mississippi woman pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, apprenticed herself to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific... Read more

Memorial Drive

A Daughter's Memoir

By: Natasha Trethewey
Narrated by: Natasha Trethewey
Length: 5 hours 9 minutes

“When poets write memoirs, I read them. And this shocking coming-of-age reflection on violence, race and motherless daughters evoked a subtle rage that later boiled and then recoiled in me by the end of the book. I am so grateful to witness Threthewey's survival on the page and in her own voice, as read in the audiobook. Unforgettable. Read more

Heavy

An American Memoir

By: Kiese Laymon
Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
Length: 6 hours 17 minutes

“An incredibly generous, tender, and searingly honest book. Kiese Laymon is hands down one of the most talented American writers publishing right now. HEAVY overflows with deep love and deep pain. Laymon holds up a mirror to the US past, present - "We did not have to be this way. We will not ever have to be this way." I'm going back to read... Read more

The Secret History

By: Donna Tartt
Narrated by: Donna Tartt
Length: 22 hours 3 minutes

“Every page of this book is riveting and so, so rich. Richard as narrator is at first unreliable and, as the story unfolds, more and more sincere - as much an enigma as his cohort but more quietly so and ever compelling as the mystery itself. Somehow he is both blundering outsider D'Artagnan joining the Musketeers and Dante the Pilgrim. Tartt's... Read more

The Fire This Time

A New Generation Speaks about Race

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, Korey Jackson & Susan Spain
Length: 5 hours 36 minutes

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The... Read more

The Girls in the Stilt House

A Novel

By: Kelly Mustian
Narrated by: Johanna Parker
Length: 9 hours 56 minutes

Murder breaks through the racial divide that separates two teenage girls, forging an unlikely friendship in this Southern debut that’s perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and If the Creek Don’t Rise.Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But... Read more

When Evil Lived in Laurel

The "White Knights" and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer

By: Curtis Wilkie
Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
Length: 12 hours 37 minutes

One of NPR's Best Books of the Year
A finalist of the for the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime

The inside story of how a courageous FBI informant helped to bring down the KKK organization responsible for a brutal civil rights–era killing.
By early 1966, the work of Vernon Dahmer was well known in south Mississippi. A light-skinned Black... Read more

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

A Novel

By: Tom Franklin
Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly
Length: 9 hours 27 minutes

“The classic trifecta of talent, heart, and a bone-deep sense of storytelling….A masterful performance, deftly rendered and deeply satisfying. For days on end, I woke with this story on my mind.”— David Wroblewski“A new Tom Franklin novel is always a reason to get excited, but Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is more—a cause for celebration. What... Read more

The Hate U Give

By: Angie Thomas
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 11 hours 50 minutes

“This bestselling, powerful young adult novel about social justice and one teen girl's effort to fight for what is right, will leave you breathless. The narration by Bahni Turpin is hands down the best I've ever heard. This is such an important book it should be required reading for life in general. Or listening. Definitely listening. Read more

One Writer's Beginnings

By: Eudora Welty
Narrated by: Eudora Welty
Length: 3 hours 1 minute

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s timeless lectures that became a New York Times bestselling classic regarded as a “profound and priceless as guidance for anyone who aspires to write” (Los Angeles Times).

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her... Read more

Some Go Home

By: Odie Lindsey
Narrated by: Wayne Mitchell
Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

An Iraq War veteran turned small-town homemaker, Colleen works hard to keep her deployment behind her—until pregnancy brings her buried trauma to the surface. She hides her mounting anxiety from her husband, Derby, who is in turn preoccupied with the retrial of his father, Hare Hobbs, for a decades-old, civil rights–era murder. Colleen and... Read more

The Deepest South of All

True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

By: Richard Grant
Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Bestselling travel writer Richard Grant “sensitively probes the complex and troubled history of the oldest city on the Mississippi River through the eyes of a cast of eccentric and unexpected characters” (Newsweek).

Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and... Read more