July Author Curator - Wiley Cash's Favorites

The Birds of Opulence

By: Crystal Wilkinson
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 4 hours 50 minutes

From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.

The Goode-Brown... 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

Nothing to See Here

By: Kevin Wilson
Narrated by: Marin Ireland
Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

“When a politician’s young wife hires her old school friend as a nanny for her two stepchildren, the main duty will be to keep the twins out of sight and out of trouble. That’s because the kids’ father is a senator and under serious consideration to be the next Secretary of State. But what if the children can’t control themselves? Who is the best... Read more

The Five Wounds

A Novel

By: Kirstin Valdez Quade
Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
Length: 15 hours 43 minutes

It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans for personal redemption. With... Read more

Leave the World Behind

A Novel

By: Rumaan Alam
Narrated by: Marin Ireland
Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

“Riveting! I hurried through this apocalyptic novel about two families thrown together during an earth shattering event. Alam builds tension even during a relaxing family day at the beach and expertly paces the reader through idle, dreamy stages and amps up the speed during stressful times. A thought-provoking study of humanity. Read more

Beautiful Ruins

A Novel

By: Jess Walter
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
Length: 12 hours 53 minutes

The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his  funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 . . . and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.  

“Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an... Read more

Look Homeward, Angel

By: Thomas Wolfe
Narrated by: Scott Sowers
Length: 26 hours 20 minutes

The works of Thomas Wolfe cemented his legacy as one of the very best of the American Southern writers. Wolfe's largely autobiographical novel features Eugene Gant, who pines for a more expansive life after being born to a father whose bouts of maniacal raving are fueled by a prodigious appetite for drink. "... rich and ambitious and intensely... Read more

A Land More Kind Than Home

By: Wiley Cash
Narrated by: Nick Sullivan, Lorna Raver & Mark Bramhall
Length: 8 hours 56 minutes

“Bold, daring, graceful, and engrossing.”
—Bobbie Ann Mason“This book will knock your socks off….A first novel that sings with talent.”
—Clyde EdgertonIn his phenomenal debut novel—a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small North Carolina town—author Wiley Cash displays a remarkable talent... Read more

The Last Ballad

A Novel

By: Wiley Cash
Narrated by: Karen White & Elizabeth Wiley
Length: 14 hours 6 minutes

“Ella May has never had much of anything. She labors long hours in a textile mill in North Carolina trying to feed her four young children on nine dollars a week. When Ella sings one of her songs at a meeting of workers who are hoping to form a union, she finds herself something of a local celebrity. Written in beautifully evocative prose, this... Read more

This Dark Road to Mercy

A Novel

By: Wiley Cash
Narrated by: Jenna Lamia, Erik Bergmann & Scott Sowers
Length: 7 hours 53 minutes

The critically acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller A Land More Kind Than Home—hailed as "a powerfully moving debut that reads as if Cormac McCarthy decided to rewrite Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird" (Richmond Times Dispatch)—returns with a resonant novel of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, set in western North Carolina,... Read more

When Ghosts Come Home

A Novel

By: Wiley Cash
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 10 hours 14 minutes

“Only Wiley Cash’s exquisite storytelling could turn a story full of sad and depressing topics into a powerful, beautiful and meaningful story. It is the story of Sheriff Winston Barnes, the longtime sheriff of the small community of Oak Island, NC who is up for re-election and doubts that he will win. It is the story of how something in his... Read more