The Writer's Chronicle Audiobooks Playlist for February 2025

To the Lighthouse

By: Virginia Woolf
Narrated by: Phyllida Law
Length: 7 hours 36 minutes

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny, and bitterness.Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it... Read more

Bad Naturalist

One Woman's Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop

By: Paula Whyman
Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
Length: 10 hours 15 minutes

In this awe-inspiring memoir, a woman attempts to restore land in the Blue Ridge Mountains, facing her own limitations while getting to know a breathtaking corner of the natural world.  

When empty nester Paula Whyman climbs to a peak in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, her plans for a backyard ecology project quickly morph into... Read more

The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter

The Continuing Adventures of Judith Shakespeare

By: Grace Tiffany
Narrated by: Mary Jane Wells
Length: 7 hours 49 minutes

“Some books are clever in print but brilliant as audiobooks. This is such a one. Listening to this story of a seventeenth century woman in the accent she most likely had, down to pronouncing words like “inspiration” as “in-spi-RASS-ee-un,” delighted and illuminated. Well worth a listen! Read more

Hunger of Memory

The Education of Richard Rodriguez

By: Richard Rodriguez
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
Length: 6 hours 7 minutes

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just fifty words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.



Here is the poignant journey of a "minority student" who pays the cost of his social... Read more

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

By: Cynthia Ozick
Narrated by: Donna Postel
Length: 7 hours 12 minutes

If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared—if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity—could the novel survive? In a gauntlet throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great... Read more

Swimming Between Worlds

By: Elaine Neil Orr
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 12 hours 30 minutes

From the critically acclaimed writer of A Different Sun, a Southern coming-of-age novel that sets three very different young people against the tumultuous years of the American civil rights movement...

Tacker Hart left his home in North Carolina as a local high school football hero, but returns in disgrace after being fired from a prestigious... Read more

How to Be Safe

A Novel

By: Tom McAllister
Narrated by: Amy Landon
Length: 6 hours 34 minutes

FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her... Read more

The Year of the Horses

By: Courtney Maum
Narrated by: Courtney Maum
Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

There it was: the peat smell of an ending summer, oiled leather, hay wet with rain. The horse was as black as the sharp keys on a piano with magnificent brown eyes. My heart sang out to this great beast, and he answered with a toot through his gigantic nostrils. I was dressed. The horse was tacked. It was time to go.Courtney Maum is... Read more

Before and After the Book Deal

A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book

By: Courtney Maum
Narrated by: Courtney Maum
Length: 10 hours 35 minutes

“Even better than answering the questions a writer is afraid to ask, this book more importantly answers the questions a writer may not know to ask. Filled with anecdotal examples (both negative and positive), humor, and a lot of common sense advice, this book covers everything an aspiring writer might need to know, including how to deal with... Read more

Extended Stay

By: Juan Martinez
Narrated by: Lee Osorio
Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

In a rundown neighborhood in the heart of Las Vegas, the Alicia hotel awakens and beckons to the most vulnerable—those with something to hide.



After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new... Read more

Number One Chinese Restaurant

A Novel

By: Lillian Li
Narrated by: Nancy Wu
Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

From Lillian Li comes an exuberant and wise multigenerational debut audiobook about the complicated lives and loves of people working in everyone’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, is not only a beloved go-to setting for hunger pangs and celebrations; it is its own world, inhabited by waiters and kitchen... Read more

The Civil War of Amos Abernathy

By: Michael Leali
Narrated by: Mark Sanderlin
Length: 6 hours 29 minutes

An ALA Rainbow Book List Top 10 Selection * Golden Kite Award Winner * New York Public Library Best Books for Kids * ALA Booklist Top 10 First Novels for Youth * Jane Addams Award finalist * Lambda Literary Award FinalistA heartfelt debut novel about a boy’s attempt to find himself in the history he loves—perfect for fans of Dear Sweet Pea and... Read more

Real Americans

A novel

By: Rachel Khong
Narrated by: Louisa Zhu, Eric Yang & Eunice Wong
Length: 14 hours 40 minutes

“Real Americans is a novel about people doing their best for the people they love, the vast spectrum of what that can mean, and how anyone lives with the impossible choices they make in pursuit of that noble goal. This is also a novel about what makes a person who they are - their experiences, genetics, community, environment, place in history,... Read more

If the Ice Had Held

By: Wendy J. Fox
Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
Length: 7 hours 30 minutes

Melanie Henderson's life is a lie. The scandal of her birth and the identity of her true parents is kept from her family's small, conservative Colorado town. Not even she knows the truth: that her birth mother was just fourteen and unmarried to her father, a local boy who drowned when he tried to take a shortcut across an icy river.



Thirty-five... Read more

The Family Chao

By: Lan Samantha Chang
Narrated by: Brian Nishii
Length: 10 hours 57 minutes

“An expertly crafted novel of literary family intrigue. Full of character depth and a mysterious death, The Family Chao is a page-turner on immigration, family turmoil, racism, small-town drama, and revenge. It will keep you guessing. Read more

The Boys of My Youth

By: Jo Ann Beard
Narrated by: Jo Ann Beard
Length: 7 hours 52 minutes

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation.

Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men... Read more

The Doubt Factory

By: Paolo Bacigalupi
Narrated by: Emma Galvin
Length: 11 hours 44 minutes

In this contemporary thriller, National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestselling author Paolo Bacigalupi explores the timely issue of how public information is distorted for monetary gain, and how those who exploit it must be stopped.

Everything Alix knows about her life is a lie. At least that's what a mysterious young man... Read more

Another Appalachia

Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place

By: Neema Avashia
Narrated by: Jeed Saddy
Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves... Read more

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

By: Hanif Abdurraqib
Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
Length: 8 hours 37 minutes

“For anyone who has ever felt our collective beating heart in the crowd of a concert. Read more