Women in Translation

The Eighth Life

By: Nino Haratischvili
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Length: 40 hours 55 minutes

At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste... Stasia learns it from her Georgian... Read more

There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

By: Kikuko Tsumura
Narrated by: Cindy Kay
Length: 9 hours 41 minutes

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig—watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods—turns out to be inconvenient. (When can she go to the... Read more

The Sea-Ringed World

Sacred Stories of the Americas

By: Maria Garcia Esperon
Narrated by: David Bowles
Length: 5 hours 3 minutes

Fifteen thousand years before Europeans stepped foot in the Americas, people had already spread from tip to tip and coast to coast. Like all humans, these Native Americans sought to understand their place in the universe, the nature of their relationship with the divine, and the origin of the world into which their ancestors had emerged. The... Read more

Where the Wild Ladies Are

By: Aoko Matsuda
Narrated by: Sarah Skaer
Length: 6 hours 36 minutes

A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women-who also... Read more

Blood Feast

The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf

By: Malika Moustadraf
Narrated by: Amin El Gamal & Lameece Issaq
Length: 2 hours 58 minutes

Malika Moustadraf (1969–2006) is a feminist icon in contemporary Moroccan literature, celebrated for her stark interrogation of gender and sexuality in North Africa. Blood Feast is the complete collection of Moustadraf’s published short fiction: haunting, visceral stories by a master of the genre. A teenage girl suffers through a dystopian rite... Read more

Three Apples Fell from the Sky

By: Narine Abgaryan
Narrated by: Anoush NeVart
Length: 8 hours 10 minutes

In an isolated village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips, and laughs. Their only connection to the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even goats struggle to navigate. As they go about their daily lives—harvesting crops, making baklava, tidying houses—the villagers... Read more

I Belong to Vienna

A Jewish Family's Story of Exile and Return

By: Anna Goldenberg & Alta L. Price
Narrated by: Christa Lewis
Length: 5 hours 22 minutes

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg’s great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, survives by hiding in an apartment in the middle of Nazi-controlled Vienna. But this is no Anne Frank-like existence; teenage Hans passes time in the municipal library and buys standing-room... Read more

Even the Women Must Fight

Memories of War from North Vietnam

By: Karen Gottschang Turner
Narrated by: Stephanie Nguyen
Length: 7 hours 18 minutes

A searing chronicle of wartime experiences, Even the Women Must Fight probes the cultural legacy of North Vietnam's American War. Unflinching in its portrayal of hardship, valor, and personal sacrifice, this wrenching account is nothing short of a revelation, banishing in one bold stroke the familiar image of Vietnamese women as passive... Read more

Triumph of Hope

From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel

By: Ruth Elias
Narrated by: Rebecca Gallagher
Length: 11 hours 5 minutes

Ruth Elias, a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, recounts her challenging and unthinkable story of confronting perhaps the most agonizing choice so that she and her newborn infant would not die. Taken for Nazi medical experimentation, she confronted the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele and saved the life of not only... Read more

Autopsy of a Boring Wife

By: Marie-Renée Lavoie
Narrated by: Justine Eyre
Length: 5 hours 1 minute

Diane is forty-eight years old and—according to her husband—boring…which is apparently the reason that he had an affair and left her. After taking the charge to heart, Diane decides to undertake a ribald and highly entertaining journey that will help her restore trust in herself and others. An astute commentary on women and girls, gender... Read more

A Boring Wife Settles the Score

By: Marie-Renée Lavoie
Narrated by: Justine Eyre
Length: 5 hours 56 minutes

A Boring Wife Settles the Score marks the return of Diane, the raunchy and entertaining heroine of the prize-winning and bestselling Autopsy of a Boring Wife. Despite the end of her marriage, Diane still has plenty of love to give. Determined not to waste her days—that’s just not her style—she finds a job in a daycare and solace in cocktails... Read more

My Soul Twin

By: Nino Haratischvili
Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
Length: 11 hours 26 minutes

Eight years have passed since Stella last saw Ivo, but when he returns, the reunion of their unconventional family will change the course of her ordinary life. As children, Stella and Ivo grew close as their parents embarked on an affair that would shatter both families. Later, as teenagers, their own relationship would be the cause of further... Read more

Getting Lost

By: Annie Ernaux
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Length: 7 hours 10 minutes

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries, it is 1989, and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris,... Read more

The Piano Tuner

By: Chiang-Sheng Kuo
Narrated by: Fernando Chien
Length: 2 hours 57 minutes

A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York. At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is... Read more

Sweetlust

Stories

By: Asja Bakić
Narrated by: Katherine Littrell
Length: 5 hours 5 minutes

In a dystopian world with no men, women are “rehabilitated” at an erotic amusement park. Climate change has caused massive flooding and warming in the Balkans, where one programmer builds a time machine. And a devious reimagining of The Sorrows of Young Werther refocuses to center a sexually adventurous Charlotte. Asja Baki? deploys the... Read more

The Young Man

By: Annie Ernaux
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Length: 34 minutes

This is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some thirty years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and, at the same time, leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time—together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a... Read more

Her Side of the Story

By: Alba De Céspedes
Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
Length: TBA

As she looks back on her life, Alessandra Corteggiani recalls her youth during the rise of fascism in Italy, the resistance, and the fall of Mussolini, the lives of the women in her family and her working-class neighborhood, rigorously committed to telling “her side of the story.” Alessandra witnesses her mother, an aspiring concert pianist,... Read more

A Woman of Pleasure

By: Kiyoko Murata
Narrated by: Susan Momoko Hingley
Length: 7 hours 32 minutes

In 1903, a fifteen-year-old girl named Aoi Ichi is sold to the most exclusive brothel in Kumamoto, Japan. Despite her modest beginnings in a southern fishing village, she becomes the protégée of an oiran, the highest-ranking courtesan at the brothel. Through the teachings of her oiran, Shinonome, Ichi begins to understand the intertwined power... Read more

The Singularity

By: Balsam Karam
Narrated by: Mara Wilson
Length: 3 hours 24 minutes

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another... Read more

Juja

By: Nino Haratischvili
Narrated by: Helen Day
Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

In 1953, a teenage girl, Jeanne Saré, jumps in front of a train at the Gare du Nord station. She leaves behind writings that to some are unreadable, but to others tell universal, unspoken truths about the lives and struggles of women. When published in the 1970s, her work triggers a rash of copycat suicides. It is hastily withdrawn from sale and... Read more