Books and Books at the Studios Staff Picks
Check out our favorite staff picks from the crew at Books and Books at the Studios
Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Stories
By Karen Russell / Narrated by Various / 9 hours 15 minutes
From the author of the instant New York Times best seller Swamplandia! (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), a dazzling new collection of stories that showcases Karen Russell's gifts at their inimitable best.
In the collection's marvelous title story, two aging vampires in a sun-drenched Italian lemon grove find their hundred-year marriage tested... Read More »
The Sunken Cathedral
A Novel
By Kate Walbert / Narrated by Kate Walbert / 5 hours 45 minutes
From the National Book Award nominee and author of the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling A Short History of Women, a deeply moving, “lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny” (Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers) novel that follows a cast of characters as they negotiate one of Manhattan’s swiftly changing neighborhoods, extreme weather,... Read More »
City of Thieves
A Novel
By David Benioff / Narrated by Ron Perlman / 8 hours 28 minutes
From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour and When the Nines Roll Over and co-creator of the HBO series Game of Thrones, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.
During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the... Read More »
Stoner
By John Williams / Narrated by Robin Field / 9 hours 46 minutes
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession... Read More »
Burial Rites
A Novel
By Hannah Kent / Narrated by Morven Christie / 11 hours 59 minutes
A brilliant literary debut, inspired by a true story: the final days of a young woman accused of murder in Iceland in 1829.
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.
Horrified at the... Read More »
Florence Gordon
By Brian Morton / Narrated by Dawn Harvey / 7 hours 14 minutes
A wise and entertaining novel about a woman who has lived life on her own terms for seventy-five defiant and determined years, only to find herself suddenly thrust to the center of her family’s various catastrophes
Meet Florence Gordon: blunt, brilliant, cantankerous, and passionate, a feminist icon to young women. At seventy-five, Florence has... Read More »
H Is for Hawk
By Helen Macdonald / 11 hours 6 minutes
When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer captivated by hawks since childhood, she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators: the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral anger mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and... Read More »
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A Memoir of Life in Death
By Jean-Dominique Bauby / Narrated by Rene Auberjonois / 2 hours 8 minutes
In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle, the father of two young childen, a 44-year-old man known and loved for his wit, his style, and his impassioned approach to life. By the end of the year he was also the victim of a rare kind of stroke to the brainstem. After 20 days in a coma, Bauby awoke into a body which had... Read More »
The Devil in the White City
Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
By Erik Larson / Narrated by Scott Brick / 14 hours 58 minutes
In The Devil in the White City, the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before.
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant... Read More »
The Light Between Oceans
A Novel
By M.L. Stedman / Narrated by Noah Taylor / 10 hours 21 minutes
The years-long New York Times bestseller soon to be a major motion picture from Spielberg’s Dreamworks that is “irresistible…seductive…with a high concept plot that keeps you riveted from the first page” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
After four harrowing years on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse... Read More »
One More Thing
Stories and Other Stories
By B. J. Novak / Narrated by B. J. Novak, Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling & Various / 6 hours 47 minutes
WITH SPECIAL APPEARANCES by Lena Dunham, Jenna Fischer, Mindy Kaling, Julianne Moore, Carey Mulligan, Katy Perry, Jason Schwartzman, Emma Thompson, and Rainn Wilson
B.J. Novak's One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is an endlessly entertaining, surprisingly sensitive, and startlingly original debut that signals the arrival of a brilliant new... Read More »
Brain on Fire
My Month of Madness
By Susannah Cahalan / Narrated by Heather Henderson / 7 hours 48 minutes
One day, Susannah Cahalan woke up in a strange hospital room, strapped to her bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak. Her medical records—from a month-long hospital stay of which she had no memory—showed psychosis, violence, and dangerous instability. Yet, only weeks earlier she had been a healthy, ambitious twenty-four-year-old, six... Read More »
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
A Novel
By Maria Semple / Narrated by Kathleen Wilhoite / 9 hours 35 minutes
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and... Read More »
Sisterland
A Novel
By Curtis Sittenfeld / Narrated by Rebecca Lowman / 14 hours 57 minutes
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR BY
Slate • Daily Candy • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian (U.K.)
“Novelists get called master storytellers all the time, but Sittenfeld really is one. . . . What might be most strikingly excellent about Sisterland is the way Sittenfeld depicts domesticity and... Read More »
Started Early, Took My Dog
A Novel
By Kate Atkinson / Narrated by Graeme Malcolm / 12 hours 21 minutes
Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly... Read More »
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
By Karen Joy Fowler / Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy / 8 hours 56 minutes
Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award
One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2013
Named by The Christian Science Monitor as one of the top 15 works of fiction
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family, ordinary in... Read More »
The Lost City of Z
A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
By David Grann / Narrated by Mark Deakins / 10 hours 3 minutes
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.
After stumbling... Read More »
Modern Romance
By Aziz Ansari & Eric Klinenberg / Narrated by Aziz Ansari / 6 hours 14 minutes
The #1 New York Times Bestseller
A hilarious, thoughtful, and in-depth exploration of the pleasures and perils of modern romance from Aziz Ansari, the star of Master of None and one of this generation’s sharpest comedic voices
At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships,... Read More »
In a Dark, Dark Wood
By Ruth Ware / Narrated by Imogen Church / 9 hours 34 minutes
What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware’s suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller.
Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her “nest” of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a... Read More »
Euphoria
A Novel
By Lily King / Narrated by Xe Sands & Simon Vance / 6 hours 53 minutes
From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the ’30s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and ultimately, their lives.
English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in... Read More »
The Plot against America
By Philip Roth / Narrated by Ron Silver / 13 hours 23 minutes
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a... Read More »