FictionMatters’ Audio Favorites
Hi! I'm Sara (or @fictionmatters over on Instagram). Audiobooks get me up and out of the bed in the morning, doing the impossible by making me actually look forward to my morning commute. While fiction matters most to me, I love getting my dose of nonfiction on audio. You'll find a little bit of both on my playlist, but everything here is a great story with a great narrator. Enjoy!
The Heart's Invisible Furies
A Novel
By John Boyne
Narrated by Stephen Hogan / 21 hours 8 minutes
The Heart's Invisible Furies
“This is the novel John Boyne was born to write: A brilliant book of identity and redemption, both heartbreaking and humorous, intimate and expansive. Cyril Avery has been constantly reminded he doesn't belong, first by his adopted parents, then by the church and his country. As we follow him on his journey to acceptance, we are shown the cruelty of fate and the surprising kindness of ordinary people. Boyne perfectly constructs every story told, unveiling the humor and hypocrisy of humanity in each character and illuminating how the arc of Cyril's story is also the arc of modern times. An amazing feat from the first page to the last.”
Luisa Smith, Book Passage
Little Fires Everywhere
By Celeste Ng
Narrated by Jennifer Lim / 11 hours 26 minutes
Little Fires Everywhere
“Little Fires Everywhere is a breathtaking novel about art, motherhood, and truth. Mia and her daughter, Pearl, move to the perfectly planned community of Shaker Heights as the last stop on their nomadic adventure, bringing some much-needed permanence to teenager Pearl's life. They both find friendship, but the connections they create with their landlord's family will soon change all of their lives. Impossible to put down or stop thinking about. A great read.”
Stef Schmidt, Water Street Books
Bad Blood
Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
By John Carreyrou
Narrated by Will Damron / 11 hours 36 minutes
Bad Blood
“Theranos was a startup that set itself apart from the bevy of others in Silicon Valley. Its cause was noble, manufacturing revolutionary medical technology that could run a menu of blood tests on only a finger stick's worth of blood, eliminating the need for large painful needles. There was only one problem: the technology didn't exist. Painstakingly researched but still accessible to the medical layman, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou investigates the meteoric rise and fall of Theranos, exploring how the company managed to fool the public, investors, board members like George Schultz and Henry Kissinger, and even Barack Obama. A must for true crime podcast fans, especially if you find yourself needing a break from the more gruesome stuff.”
Maggie, Square Books
Washington Black
A novel
By Esi Edugyan
Narrated by Dion Graham / 12 hours 18 minutes
Washington Black
“From sweltering Barbados to London streets, Arctic ice to Moroccan heat, skies above to depths below, fear to love and back again, again, again. Esi Edugyan’s epic new historical novel follows the young Washington Black from the unrelenting brutality of slavery to the edges of the world as he searches for freedom, finding the complexities of the world, of the heart, and of humanity. A journey that vividly lingers long after turning the last page.”
Jocelyn, Bookshop Santa Cruz
American Girls
Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers
By Nancy Jo Sales
Narrated by Thérèse Plummer & Nancy Jo Sales / 14 hours 49 minutes
A New York Times Bestseller
Instagram. Whisper. YouTube. Kik. Ask.fm. Tinder. The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media. What it is doing to an entire generation of young women is the subject of award-winning Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales’s riveting and explosive American Girls.
With extraordinary... Read More »
Zealot
The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
By Reza Aslan
Narrated by Reza Aslan / 8 hours 8 minutes
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A lucid, intelligent page-turner” (Los Angeles Times) that challenges long-held assumptions about Jesus, from the host of Believer
Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” The revolutionary movement he... Read More »
The Magicians
A Novel
Magicians Trilogy
By Lev Grossman
Narrated by Mark Bramhall / 17 hours 23 minutes
The New York Times bestselling novel about a young man practicing magic in the real world, now an original series on SYFY
“The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. . . . Hogwarts was never like this.”
—George R.R. Martin
“Sad, hilarious, beautiful, and essential to anyone who cares about modern... Read More »
What Alice Forgot
By Liane Moriarty
Narrated by Tamara Lovatt Smith / 13 hours 32 minutes
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE HUSBAND'S SECRET AND BIG LITTLE LIES.
A “cheerfully engaging”(Kirkus Reviews) novel for anyone who’s ever asked herself, “How did I get here?”
Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child. So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a... Read More »
Atonement
A Novel
By Ian McEwan
Narrated by Jill Tanner / 12 hours 26 minutes
Ian McEwan has received prestigious awards and international praise for his novels, including Enduring Love. In Atonement, three children lose their innocence--as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935--and their lives are changed forever. Cecilia Tallis is of England's priviledged class; Robbie Turner is the... Read More »
Gulp
Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
By Mary Roach
Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller / 8 hours 21 minutes
"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food... Read More »
The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
By Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by Robin Miles / 22 hours 40 minutes
In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE... Read More »
A Secret Sisterhood
The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf
By Emily Midorikawa, Emma Claire Sweeney & Margaret Atwood
Narrated by Elizabeth Sastre / 9 hours 2 minutes
Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world's best-loved female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Coauthors and real-life friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their discovery of a wealth of... Read More »
Good and Mad
The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger
By Rebecca Traister
Narrated by Rebecca Traister / 9 hours 56 minutes
Journalist Rebecca Traister’s New York Times bestselling exploration of the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement is “a hopeful, maddening compendium of righteous feminine anger, and the good it can do when wielded efficiently—and collectively” (Vanity Fair).
Long before Pantsuit Nation,... Read More »
Transcription
A Novel
By Kate Atkinson
Narrated by Fenella Woolgar / 11 hours 9 minutes
Transcription
“In Transcription, Kate Atkinson brings the past of mid-20th-century Britian so thoroughly to life that she almost seems to be reporting rather than inventing. Her details are so rich and her hand so certain that, as readers, we are there — we are walking those streets, sitting in those smoky rooms. And, most of all, we are completely caught up in the emotional power of the tensions and fears of that past. With Juliet Armstrong, Atkinson has given us a remarkable addition to the canon of British spies.”
Michael Barnard, Rakestraw Books
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