Midwest Connections
Bookseller selected, Midwest approved! Indie booksellers throughout the Midwest have hand-selected these titles based on their discoverability and regional value. From small towns to bustling cities, many of the most celebrated writers have roots in the middle of the country and explore this distinctly American landscape and experience. Discover your next great read and explore a whole region of amazing literature.
The Daughter
The Family Secrets Series: Book #1
By Sara Blaedel
Narrated by: Molly Parker Myers
Length: 8 hours 39 minutes
A thrilling novel from #1 international bestselling author Sara Blaedel, author of The Forgotten Girls
"One of the best I've come across." -- Michael Connelly
"Sara Blaedel is a force to be reckoned with. She's a remarkable crime writer who time and again delivers a solid, engaging story that any reader in the world can enjoy." -- Karin... Read more »
What Are We Doing Here?
Essays
By Marilynne Robinson
Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
Length: 11 hours 7 minutes
Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith.Whether... Read more »
Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories
By Kelly Barnhill
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 7 hours 32 minutes
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Kelly Barnhill comes a stunning collection of nine stories teeming with uncanny characters whose lives unfold in worlds at once strikingly human and eerily original. When Mrs. Sorensen's husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in "Mrs. Sorensen and the... Read more »
See What Can Be Done
Essays, Criticism, and Commentary
By Lorrie Moore
Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
Length: 16 hours 33 minutes
A welcome surprise: more than fifty prose pieces, gathered together for the first time, by one of America's most revered and admired novelists and short-story writers, whose articles, essays, and cultural commentary-appearing in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper's... Read more »
Universal Harvester
A Novel
By John Darnielle
Narrated by: John Darnielle
Length: 5 hours 48 minutes
Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state—the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet... Read more »
The Immortalists
By Chloe Benjamin
Narrated by: Maggie Hoffman
Length: 11 hours 29 minutes
The Immortalists
“In 1969, four siblings visit a fortune teller, who tells each child the date of their death. We follow the Gold siblings both separately and together over the next four decades and see how these revelations affect their choices, their behavior, and their relationships with one another. Apart from raising the obvious question (would you want to know the date of your death?), Benjamin brilliantly explores how family members can be both close to and distant from one another, and ponders the point at which our actions cease to matter and fate steps in. I LOVED The Immortalists, and if there's any justice in bookselling, this book will find the massive audience it so deserves.”
Erika VanDam, RoscoeBooks
American Heart
By Laura Moriarty
Narrated by: Luci Christian Bell
Length: 11 hours 2 minutes
A powerful and thought-provoking YA debut from New York Times bestselling author Laura Moriarty.
Imagine a United States in which registries and detainment camps for Muslim-Americans are a reality.
Fifteen-year-old Sarah-Mary Williams of Hannibal, Missouri, lives in this world, and though she has strong opinions on almost everything, she isn’t... Read more »
The Wizard and the Prophet
Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
By Charles C. Mann
Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
Length: 18 hours 55 minutes
From the best-selling, award-winning author of 1491 and 1493--an incisive portrait of the two little-known twentieth-century scientists, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, whose diametrically opposed views shaped our ideas about the environment, laying the groundwork for how people in the twenty-first century will choose to live in tomorrow's... Read more »
No Saints in Kansas
By Amy Brashear
Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
Length: 8 hours 8 minutes
A gripping reimagining of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and the brutal murders that inspired it November is usually quiet in Holcomb, Kansas, but in 1959, the town is shattered by the quadruple murder of the Clutter family. Suspicion falls on Nancy Clutter's boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, the last one to see them alive. New Yorker Carly Fleming, new to... Read more »
Savage Country
A Novel
By Robert Olmstead
Narrated by: Danny Campbell
Length: 8 hours 46 minutes
In September 1873, Elizabeth Coughlin, a widow bankrupted by her husband's folly and death, embarks on a buffalo hunt with her estranged and mysterious brother-in-law, Michael. With no money, no family, no job or security, she hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who depend on her. The... Read more »
Never Coming Back
By Alison McGhee
Narrated by: Alison McGhee
Length: 10 hours 7 minutes
When Clara Winter left her rural Adirondack Mountain town for college, she never looked back. Her mother, Tamar, a fiercely independent but loving woman who raised Clara on her own, all but pushed her out the door, forcing Clara to build a new life for herself, far from her roots, far from her high-school boyfriend, and far from the life she had... Read more »
The Hearts of Men
A Novel
By Nickolas Butler
Narrated by: Adam Verner
Length: 11 hours 56 minutes
The Hearts of Men
“If you read Shotgun Lovesongs, you know that two of Butler's strengths are his rich Wisconsin settings and his ability to probe the depths of men's friendships. His new novel, an epic about three generations at a Boy Scout camp in the North Woods, takes it to the next level. It starts with the bullied Nelson, who finds purpose in the Scouts and winds up running the camp, and Jonathan, the older boy who becomes both his manipulator and protector. Their complicated friendship unfolds through Jonathan's son Trevor and grandson Thomas, who both wind up spending summers at Chippewa, but what's a Scout to do when the Scout Oath doesn't always hold up in reality? Is there a place for honor when nobody wants to get a stamp-collecting or radio merit badge? In Butler's hands, the answers unfold, all in the context of a heck of a good story.”
Daniel Goldin, Boswell Book Company
Setting Free the Kites
By Alex George
Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
Length: 8 hours 51 minutes
Setting Free the Kites
“This heartfelt and compelling novel from A Good American author Alex George is a story of friendship, loss, and how we deal with grief, a story about how a single friendship can change us forever. Yet again, George has developed beautiful, layered characters and you will quickly fall in love with Nathan, Robert, and Liam in blustery seaside Maine in the 1970s. You will hear the excitement each hot, blistering summer of children and families visiting the amusement park owned by Robert's family. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will grieve, but you will not be disappointed.”
The Roanoke Girls
A Novel
By Amy Engel
Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
Length: 10 hours 40 minutes
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “With more twists than a bag of pretzels, this compelling family saga may make you question what you think you know about your own relatives.”—Cosmopolitan
“Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.”
After her mother's suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her... Read more »
Goodbye to the Dead
A Jonathan Stride Novel
The Jonathan Stride Series: Book #7
By Brian Freeman
Narrated by: Joe Barrett
Length: 11 hours 55 minutes
Detective Jonathan Stride’s first wife, Cindy, died of cancer eight years ago, but her ghost hangs over Stride’s relationship with his current lover and fellow detective Serena Dial. When Serena witnesses a brutal murder outside a Duluth bar, she stumbles onto a case with roots that go all the way back to the last year of Cindy Stride’s life. At... Read more »
A Crack in the Sea
By H. M. Bouwman
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin & H. M. Bouwman
Length: 9 hours 44 minutes
An enchanting historical fantasy adventure perfect for fans of Thanhha Lai's Newbery Honor-winning Inside Out and Back Again
No one comes to the Second World on purpose. The doorway between worlds opens only when least expected. The Raft King is desperate to change that by finding the doorway that will finally take him and the people of... Read more »
Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down
A Novel
By Anne Valente
Narrated by: Andi Arndt & Todd Haberkorn
Length: 12 hours
The lives of four teenagers are capsized by a shocking school shooting and its aftermath in this powerful debut novel, a coming-of-age story with the haunting power of Station Eleven and the bittersweet poignancy of Everything I Never Told You.
As members of the yearbook committee, Nick, Zola, Matt, and Christina are eager to capture all the... Read more »
Missing Pieces
By Heather Gudenkauf
Narrated by: Christina Traister
Length: 9 hours 9 minutes
New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf returns with a chilling thriller about a woman chasing clues into a decades-old mystery that could have shattering repercussions.
Sarah Quinlan's husband, Jack, has been haunted for decades by the untimely death of his mother when he was just a teenager, her body found in the cellar of their... Read more »
The Nix
A novel
By Nathan Hill
Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
Length: 21 hours 41 minutes
The Nix
“Hill's debut is remarkable because it does both the little things and the big things right. It is an intimate novel of identity and loss, the story of a boy abandoned and the man now trying to recover. It also paints a vivid portrait of America and its politics from the 1960s to the present. The Nix overflows with unforgettable characters, but none more clearly rendered than Samuel Andersen-Anderson and his mother, Faye, both bewildered by life and struggling to repair the rift between them. From intimate whispers to American news cycles, this astounding novel of reclamation is guaranteed to sweep readers off their feet.”
Luisa Smith, Book Passage
I Will Send Rain
A Novel
By Rae Meadows
Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith
Length: 8 hours 3 minutes
From award-winning author Rae Meadows comes a luminous, tenderly rendered novel of a woman fighting for her family’s survival in the early years of the Dust Bowl.Annie Bell can’t escape the dust. It’s in her hair, covering the windowsills, coating the animals in the barn, and in the corners of her children’s dry, cracked lips. It’s 1934, and the... Read more »