Category: Audiobooks

This week on the main site, I shared “7 Nonfiction Books for Disability Pride Month,” which included one of my favorite disability memoirs, A Face for Picasso. Henley and her twin sister were born with Crouzon Syndrome, a condition where the bones of their skulls fused too soon. They spent much of their childhood in the hospital, undergoing dozens of procedures to save their lives and to try to make their faces more “aesthetically pleasing.”

Henley gives us a look into her childhood. Of trying to just be a kid when the world around her constantly reminded her that she looked different than everyone else. Adults doubted her intelligence and other kids made fun of her and her sister. But we also see Henley’s joy of playing with her friends and the love she received from her family.

As Henley reaches young adulthood, she finds herself transitioning from a child where adults made a lot of the decisions about her health to an adult who makes her own decisions about her body and what procedures she wants to undergo. She discovers a new confidence in herself and her body.

In her performance of the audiobook, Henley gives us additional emotional insight into her story. I cried when she cried. I felt joy when she felt joy recounting her happiest memories.

The Costa Book of the Year, The Mermaid of Black Conch, is finally available in the US! This novel follows David, a man who rescues a woman caught on a fisherman’s hook. Once out of the water the mermaid begins to change. David must work to help hide the mermaid and tries to help her adjust to life on land.

I love Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s debut novel, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, and I’ve been so excited for her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. Her memoir goes back to her childhood in Columbia. Her grandfather was a community healer, a man said to possess incredible abilities. Rojas Contreras examines her family legacy and what her role in the family mysteries might be.

In the sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built, we once again return to the world of Panga. The monk Sibling Dex and the robot Mosscap return from their travels to try to live a life that is filled with friends and goes along with their principles.

Hannah Jones had a core group of friends in college. After one of her friends, April Clarke-Cliveden, is murdered, Hannah eventually marries April’s boyfriend. A decade after the murder, Hannah is expecting her first child. More secrets about April’s death are revealed, turning April’s world upside down.

The queen of historical fiction is back with her latest novel Sister Mother Warrior. This novel focuses on two women during the Haitian revolution. Marie-Claire Bonheur, the first Empress of Haiti, grew up a free Black woman with immense privilege. Gran Toya is a warrior born in West Africa and brought to Haiti as an enslaved woman. Both women have an important role to play in Haiti’s revolution.

I loved I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, so I’ve been highly anticipating Erika L. Sánchez’s new memoir, Crying in the Bathroom. Her memoir discusses everything from white feminism to depression as she shares more about what it was like for her growing up in Chicago as the daughter of Mexican immigrants.

Chloé Cooper Jones is an academic working on her second PhD when she finds herself in a bar watching two men debate on whether or not she should exist. Oddly, she feels removed from the situation. How many times has she had to prove she’s worthy of existence? Far too many to count.

Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a condition that impacted her height and way of walking. Moving through the world as a visibly disabled person has meant Jones faces ableist comments from strangers on a daily basis. But this moment in the bar felt different. Was it because they were trying to be academic or did she just expect more of them? Jones starts searching for answers. She travels the world and enters the field of journalism just for a new challenge.

From its first few paragraphs, Jones’ prose captures your attention. As she performed the text, I couldn’t help but think of how fantastic her prose is, how each word has its place. Jones forced me to think about disability in a new way, questioning the way disabled people are forced to move through the world.

Ever since I finished this book, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. There’s an entire section of disabled motherhood, and Jones shares what it was like for her to surprise doctors when she wanted to have her baby. Admittedly, I found myself tearing up at different parts. Though Jones and I have different conditions, we both share many similar experiences, and I appreciated her thought-provoking takes on how those experiences impacted her life.

In his debut collection, Penobscot author Morgan Talty writes about a Native community in Maine. These twelve stories feature characters encountering mysterious things like a jar filled with a curse or a friend stuck with his hair frozen in the snow. Everyone and their mother’s brother has been gushing about this book and I can’t wait to listen!

Matt Rowland Hill grew up in the UK as a pastor’s kid. As he grows older, Hill realizes he doesn’t share the same faith as his conservative parents. Unsure of where to turn next, Hill finds himself feeling stuck, addicted to whatever he can get his hands on and attending too many funerals of his friends who have overdosed.

On TikTok, there’s nothing like Mamadou Ndiaye explaining his latest fascination with yet another ferocious creature that will be more than happy to end you. Narrated by Ndiaye himself, listeners get to experience the audiobook equivalent of his videos on TikTok.

Waking from a strange dream, Elango feels the urge to create something new like nothing else he has crafted. The potter constructs a terracotta horse, but then doesn’t know what to do with it. Should he display it in a temple? Or maybe give it to the woman he loves? Whatever decision he makes, he knows that from the moment he makes the horse, Elango’s life will be forever changed.

The author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is back with her new novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Sam Masur and Sadie Green start an epic partnership to create their masterpiece, Ichigo, a game that’s everything they always wanted. The novel spans thirty years, showing us the long after effects of their work. I’m always here for a novel about gaming, so I’m thrilled for this novel to finally be out in the world.

With over one million users, The StoryGraph is a reading tracker that allows bookworms to record their reading habits in a wide range of ways. The StoryGraph will then take this date and create easy to understand graphs and charts. I love how easy StoryGraph is to use!

Just in time for this year’s Audiobook Appreciation Month in June, The StoryGraph released its new audiobook feature that allows users to track their listening. You can track your audiobook listening using several different data points, allowing audiobook lovers to customize their experience.

When I asked Nadia, The StoryGraph’s Founder, what challenges they ran into when creating the feature, she said that they had to consider the different ways that The StoryGraph’s users wanted to track their audiobooks and what data users wanted to see. This led them to use a more customizable approach to give their users the best experience possible.

In the future, keep your eye out for new updates from The StoryGraph, like their upcoming book club feature. Plus, they have a new dark mode and a new book scanning feature in the works too!

A family moves from Taiwan to America where the entire family lives in one tiny apartment. Anna thought that moving to “the beautiful” (what they call America in Chinese) would be like a dream. But so far, it’s just been disappointing. Anna can’t help but wonder, is all of her family’s sacrifice really worth it?

Perfect for fairytale lovers, Elsewhere is set in a town where it’s just accepted that some mothers disappear. Vera grows up knowing that for her, motherhood is inevitable. But when the time comes, she has nothing but questions for what her own experience with motherhood will bring.

Set in two time periods, Our Crooked Hearts possesses that creepy magical vibe Melissa Albert is known for. In the present day, Ivy is spending her summer break in the suburbs running into creepy figures and disturbing ruins with strangers. In the past, Dana is a city girl looking to connect with the supernatural with the help of her two friends. These two stories come together in the darkest, most delightfully sinister way possible.

Bernadette and Melvin are a Black couple just trying to make a life for themselves in America in the 1960s. But after being attacked, the couple moves to Ghana in hopes of escaping the racial violence. There they meet Kwesi, a charming man who seems to rule the night life in their new city. When Bernadette experiences an immediate attraction to Kwesi, Melvin begins to worry that he might lose the woman he loves most.

Cat lives in her high school. In fact, she and several other students are trapped. As time passes, they begin to slowly transform into something else. None of them remember why exactly they are there. They just know that if they don’t figure out how to leave, they may lose what’s left of their memories.

After reading Book Lovers by Emily Henry, I knew I wanted more love stories about people in the book industry. As a huge history of publishing nerd, there’s just something about people who love books falling in love that hits the white hot center of my wheelhouse. (I’m sure that it has nothing to do with the fact that I married a guy in my creative writing program in college.)

Izzy feels stuck in her job as an editor’s assistant. As one of the only Black people in her office, she often feels tokenized for the benefit of her white coworkers. So when an opportunity occurs to prove herself and get promoted, she jumps at the chance. That’s how she finds herself on the front steps of the house of Beau Towers, one of the most difficult authors from her publishing house. Beau’s memoir is way overdue, but if Izzy can get him to turn in his pages, she feels she just might finally get noticed by her boss.

I loved this Beauty and the Beast retelling that centers around books. Jasmine Guillory is already one of my favorite romance authors, and her love for her characters shines through Izzy and Beau’s story. Guillory’s characters are full of life, encompassing all its complications and messiness. The two lovebirds have to each work through their own issues before they can finally create a life together.

Sarah Hollis does a brilliant job of narrating the audiobook edition, embodying Izzy’s narrative voice perfectly. I love when a narrator can get me completely engrossed in the story.

A  world of goblins lives beneath the city of York. May comes from a family of witches. But when she falls for a goblin girl, her entire world is turned upside down. Years later, Lou, May’s niece, has no idea about her family’s history. When one of her family members is abducted by goblins, Lou must uncover her family’s past to save her loved one.

The bestselling thriller writer Riley Sager is back with The House Across the Lake, a suspenseful story about an actress who finds herself wrapped up in her neighbors’ lives. Casey flees the paparazzi and hides out in her family’s vacation house in Vermont. She spends her days watching her neighbors, a husband and wife who seem to have a perfect life. But as she views their life through her binoculars, she realizes their relationship might not be as perfect as it appears.

The first in a trilogy, The Final Strife follows three young women whose friendship threatens to bring down the empire as they know it. Sylah and Anoor come from very different parts of society, but their love knows no bounds. Hassa is used to being invisible to the privileged, but the thing she hated most about herself becomes a priceless skill.

Ghanaian American Angela Appiah has tried to be the perfect daughter. She has a great career, an amazing boyfriend, and suitable friends. But when her boyfriend dumps her and her friends pull away, Angie feels like her life is out of control. Plus, she never planned for Ricky Gutierrez to come into her life. And she certainly didn’t plan to fall in love with him.

Ed Yong, the author of We Contain Multitudes, is back with another book about the fascinating living world around us. This time, Yong shares how animals experience the world around them, and how animal senses are often very different from our own. This book is perfect for any animal lover or science enthusiast.

Lucie Yi’s plans for a family with her boyfriend implode after their breakup. Deciding that she isn’t going to wait any longer, she decides to become a parent with a platonic co-parent. When she begins looking for a co-parent, she finds Collin, a man who checks all of her boxes. While she hoped that they could start a family together, she never expected to fall in love.

This month, I decided to participate in Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsOfSummer initiative, which encourages participants to write 1000 words a day over the course of two weeks. She sends out one email a day to encourage writers and often brings on guests to add their two cents about writing. I’ve enjoyed Attenberg’s writing for several years, so I thought now would be the perfect time to pick up her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You.

Attenberg loosely follows her writing career in the memoir, jumping back and forth in time to add context and to flesh out the people in her life. In her writing, she describes life while trying to find her way as a writer, the many jobs she’s worked, and the places she’s traveled to visit. Throughout the memoir, you can feel a sense of unsettledness, that all this time, Attenberg was just looking for a place to feel the most herself.

Attenberg describes her struggle with who she feels she’s supposed to be as a writer vs who she wants to be. She’s supposed to want to live in New York, working night and day if that’s what it takes to live there. She’s supposed to find a long term partner, to want to travel the world. But she finally realizes she feels the most at home in her little house in New Orleans, just her and her dog.

Xe Sands performs the audiobook with an incredible sense of intimacy. I think memoirs can be some of the most difficult audiobooks to narrate because they are so deeply personal for their authors. But Sands rises to the challenge, beautifully capturing Attenberg’s narrative voice.

Iris and a group of other women create a Facebook group as a place to air out all of their bridesmaid grievances. But as the group grows, Iris finds it harder and harder to keep the group under control. With her sister’s wedding coming up, Iris worries that her online life will spill over to her offline one. Full of the very specific brand of family and wedding chaos, The Bridesmaid Union is sure to delight anyone who loves stories full of drama.

In the summer of 1999, Fe Fe and her friends Precious and Stacia form a trio, friends forever. But when a new girl arrives in the neighborhood, the three friends find their dynamic suddenly changed. As their Chicago neighborhood changes around them, the girls find their friendship changing as well. Years later, Fe Fe returns to the neighborhood and is flooded with memories from that one fateful summer.

Bonnie just wants to live her life alone, sitting in front of her TV watching her favorite show, Three’s Company. But Bonnie’s life is irrevocably changed when she wins the lottery. She decides to move to a house in the mountains where she can recreate the set of Three Company and live out her own dreams by imagining herself in the TV show.

Ibram X. Kendi gives parents and guardians the tools they need to have important conversations with the kids in their lives. Using both research and personal stories from his life, Kendi shares a guide on how to teach kids to be antiracist at different stages of their lives.

Last year, I had the wonderful pleasure of interviewing Kristen Arnett about her second novel With Teeth. Sammie is raising her son Sam with Monika, her wife. But when Sam bites Sammie in the car during a disagreement, Sammie’s entire perception of herself begins to change. Instead of the perfect queer family that she and Monika had always dreamed of, Sammie must come to terms with the fact that her family life might not be as idealic as they imagined. As Sam continues to act out during public outings and at school, Sammie and Monika’s marriage begins to crumble.

Arnett possesses the brilliant ability to capture what it’s like for a lesbian couple to try to parent in a time when there’s so much pressure for lesbian queer parents to act as a “good” example of queer parenting. But Arnett makes a point of illustrating that Sammie and Monika are just as flawed as everyone else. 

Kristen Sieh performs the audiobook with such great vocal characterization of Sammie’s narrative voice as she deals with all of her confusion and anxiety over her son’s behavior. When I listened to the audiobook, I became engrossed in this family’s story. I had no idea what on earth Monika and Sammie could do for their son or how their marriage would turn out. So prepare yourself for a rollercoaster of a family novel.

This Oprah’s Book Club pick will capture your attention from the first few minutes. Kiara and her brother are trying to make ends meet in Oakland, California. Kiara also tries to take care of the boy next door. Through a strange set of circumstances, Kiara ends up in a line of work she never expected. Plus, she’s a key witness in a case against the corrupt local police department.

Nevada is the story of Maria, a trans woman working in a bookstore. She loves her job, but is slowly admitting to herself that she doesn’t love her girlfriend Steph. After Maria and Steph break up, Maria finds herself  traveling to Star City, Nevada. This is a road trip book for a new generation now on audio for the first time.

One night while in New York City’s Chinatown, Lola runs into one ex and then another. What might have been coincidence turns into something a little supernatural as memories begin to swirl about her. This fantastical literary novel is sure to amaze at it tackles ideas around memory, identity, and love.

As a huge fan of Kirsten Chen, I couldn’t be more thrilled that she has a brand new novel. In Counterfeit, we meet Ava, a Chinese American woman whose life feels like it’s crumbling apart. But her college best friend, Winnie Fang, appears on the scene, full of confidence that Ava didn’t know she had. But how did Winnie gain so much confidence and an eye for top-tier fashion?

Malak, Kees, and Jenna feel like it’s them against the world. Taught a certain way to be good Muslim women by their families, they always expected their lives to go a certain way. But as they grow closer to adulthood, they begin to see that their lives are going to be more complicated than they first imagined.