bookcircle 2019 -2022

Guidebook to Relative Strangers

Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History

By: Camille T. Dungy
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 6 hours 24 minutes

As a working mother whose livelihood as a poet-lecturer depended on travel, Camille T. Dungy crisscrossed America with her infant, then a toddler. As they travel, Dungy is intensely aware of how they are seen, not just as mother and child but as black females. With a poet's eye, she celebrates the particular in the universal, such as a child's... Read more

Ordinary Light

A Memoir

By: Tracy K. Smith
Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
Length: 11 hours 5 minutes

Positioning Statement From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Description Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of... Read more

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire

The Journals of Alice Walker

By: Alice Walker
Narrated by: Aunjanue Ellis, Walker & Janina Edwards
Length: 22 hours 28 minutes

“I have long been a fan of Alice Walker’s writing, but as I began listening to her journal entries, I realized how little I knew of the author herself. In these entries, she reveals details about her romantic, family, and other relationships. She discusses other authors and their work, as well as her own writing process through various works. She... Read more

Getting Mother's Body

A Novel

By: Suzan-Lori Parks
Narrated by: Suzan-Lori Parks
Length: 7 hours 29 minutes

Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae, comes home one day to find a fateful letter waiting for her: Willa Mae’s burial spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a supermarket.

As Willa Mae’s only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother’s substantial but... Read more

Breath, Eyes, Memory

By: Edwidge Danticat
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 6 hours 8 minutes

At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage. At the age of twelve,... Read more

The Salt Eaters

By: Toni Cade Bambara
Narrated by: Mia Ellis
Length: 11 hours 25 minutes

A community of Black faith healers witness an event that will change their lives forever in this "hard-nosed, wise, funny" novel (Los Angeles Times).

Set in a fictional city in the American South, the novel also "inhabits the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion” (The New York Times Book Review).

Though they... Read more

The Fifth Season

The Broken Earth: Book #1

By: N. K. Jemisin
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 15 hours 27 minutes

“Maybe one of the best science fiction/fantasy novels I've ever read! No wonder the entire trilogy won three consecutive Hugo Awards. I loved: the masterfully crafted nonlinear storytelling that kept me guessing til the very end, the unparalleled world building, the strong characterization, the high stakes action/adventure, the diversity of... Read more

How We Get Free

Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

By: Keeanga -Yamahtta Taylor
Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
Length: 6 hours 39 minutes

The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization... Read more

A Small Place

By: Jamaica Kincaid
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 1 hour 47 minutes

From the award-winning author of Annie John comes a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua.“If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the prime minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist... Read more

Annie John

By: Jamaica Kincaid
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 4 hours 19 minutes

Jamaica Kincaid presents a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua.An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived an idyllic life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful presence at the very center of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives... Read more

Lucy

By: Jamaica Kincaid
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 4 hours 16 minutes

The coming-of-age story of one of Jamaica Kincaid’s most admired creationsLucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are a thrice-blessed couple—handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in... Read more

Like Water for Chocolate

By: Laura Esquivel
Narrated by: Kate Reading
Length: 5 hours 52 minutes

“I love impossible love and heartbreaking romance, so that would be enough to get me reading, but this novel has so much more. Published in 1990, it was a huge success in Mexico. It was an international best-seller, and with good reason. Food has magical powers in this book, as do tears and sexual attraction. This story is a delight. It will... Read more

Pet

By: Akwaeke Emezi
Narrated by: Christopher Myers
Length: 5 hours 32 minutes

National Book Award Finalist

Stonewall Book Award Winner

"[A] beautiful, genre-expanding debut...Pet is a nesting doll of creative possibilities." (The New York Times)

The award-winning, genre-defying novel by the New York Times best-selling author of The Death of Vivek Oji that explores themes of identity and justice and asks: How do you share the... Read more

Freshwater

By: Akwaeke Emezi
Narrated by: Akwaeke Emezi
Length: 6 hours 42 minutes

An extraordinary debut novel, Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born "with one foot on the other side." Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful, Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of... Read more

Sing, Unburied, Sing

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Chris Chalk & Rutina Wesley
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Sing, Unburied, Sing is a dark and gorgeous song of love and heartbreak, haunting and tragic and disorienting in its timelessness. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill anchors Ward's tale to Mississippi today, which is almost indistinguishable from its notorious yesterday, a present and past (ironically) made more alive in the novel by ghosts and... Read more

Parable of the Sower

Earthseed: Book #1

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Lynne Thigpen
Length: 12 hours 2 minutes

Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Octavia E. Butler paints a stunning portrait of an all-too-believable near future. As with Kindred and her other critically-acclaimed novels, Parable of the Sower skillfully combines startling visionary and socially realistic concepts. God is change. That is the central truth of the Earthseed movement, whose... Read more

Homegoing

A novel

By: Yaa Gyasi
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 13 hours 10 minutes

“AN EXCELLENT LISTEN. Read more

M Archive

After the End of the World

By: Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Narrated by: Angel Pean
Length: 4 hours 9 minutes

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and... Read more

Girl, Woman, Other

By: Bernardine Evaristo
Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
Length: 11 hours 6 minutes

“The twelve Black British women who are the central characters in Bernardine Evaristo's GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER are so vastly different that when their connections are slowly revealed, like a spider web you didn't see until the light hits it just so, you'll settle in and become entranced. I loved this deep dive into a part of British culture that... Read more