With the right posh British accent, even lying, cheating, and all sorts of promiscuity somehow don’t seem as unforgivable. Life, death, and plenty of bed-swapping happen in Tessa Hadley’s latest, elucidated by English actor Abigail Thaw, who reads with such perfect enunciation and elegant control...
In Fiona Barton’s third “Kate Waters” full-audio-cast thriller, Susan Duerden assumes tenacious journalist Kate Waters from Mandy Williams who previously voiced Kate in The Widow and The Child. This time the mystery gets personal – and far-flung. Two British teens traveling in Thailand turn up as victims in...
Cycles of violence dominate the graphic novel Two Dead – whether at home or on so-called enemy territory. Traumatized by a World War II friendly-fire fatality, Sergeant Gideon Kemp returns stateside, eschews his law degree, and begins his police career in 1946 in his hometown...
He’s been called “Twitter Monk” and “mega-Monk” for his million-plus followers. That his Berkeley/Harvard Divinity Master’s/Princeton PhD-pedigree plus seven years professor-ing at Hampshire College led him to become a world-famous Buddhist monk seems an unlikely path. Yet his success only spreads with Imperfect, his follow-up to...
Originally from Somalia, Mugdi and Gacalo have now spent the majority of their lives in Norway, where they’ve been productive citizens, raising two children. Their quiet, middle-aged calm is shattered when their son Dhaqaneh commits a suicide bombing in Somalia. Gacalo’s only way forward after the...
Boratin is "back at zero" since his unsuccessful suicide has landed him in a hospital bed instead of Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait. He's broken a rib but lost his memory. Strangers – even though they aren't – assure him he's "a brilliant singer and songwriter" for...
In his mid-60s, Myshkin is finally about to understand what he’s been yearning to know almost his entire life. Since age 9, he’s been “known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman,” never mind that he is actually German. Except for...
“In the aging port city of an island nation near the start of the new millennium,” Idra Novey (Ways to Disappear) introduces her taut, haunting novel, giving it a foreboding sense of taking place anywhere close, anytime near. Student activist Maria P. has been dead...
Readers have an easy choice here: to read this resonating six-chapter collection as an entertaining, albeit sobering, manga about the middle-aged life of a seeming slacker, or approach it as a prominent, pivotal example of 20th-century graphic literary history. Originally published as a magazine serial...
*STARRED REVIEW Valeria Luiselli’s spectacular latest – her first fiction in English – also marks her co-narrator debut. The Mexican-born Luiselli is the dominant voice here; her accent slight, her enunciation careful. Only her collaboration could have enabled the affecting print-to-audio metamorphosis, choosing how photos, drawings,...
*STARRED REVIEW Two star-crossed seniors just want to dance together at prom. Emma lives with her grandmother since her parents rejected her when she came out, but the bullying at school has never stopped. She and student council president Alyssa are in love, but Alyssa’s fear of...
One of Thailand’s most prominent writers, Pimjai Juklin – who publishes as Duanwad Pimwana – presents 13 resonating stories featuring the everyday lives of Thai citizens of diverse backgrounds, each confronting entrapment physically, emotionally, and socially. In “The Attendant,” an elevator operator enclosed daily in a...
For readers in search of a tautly streamlined, deeply resonating, contemporary family story, Big Familia by Tomas Moniz (Bellies and Buffalos) won't disappoint. In this short novel, Juan Gutiérrez is a longtime Berkeley resident, the amicably divorced father to high school senior Stella and a self-described Chicano...
*STARRED REVIEW Being born on the wrong side of the wall means Dani’s parents took impossible risks to give her every opportunity for a better life. Despite her indigent origins, well-forged documents granted Dani access to the elite Medio School for Girls; as top graduate, Dani’s...
After making her author and narrator debut with The Ghost Bride (2014), Yangsze Choo reprises her double-duty with this equally intriguing sophomore title. With her crisp, British colonial inflections, Choo is her own ideal reader, knowing exactly how her characters should sound. Set in 1930s British...
*STARRED REVIEW Sure, the book is great. But the audio? It’s some sort of spectacular. In October 2018, bestselling Jarrett J. Krosoczka debuted his graphic memoir – about being raised by his grandparents when his single mother’s heroin addiction made her an unreliable parent; it was...
*STARRED REVIEW The story starts at the end – “Today Su Lan begins to die” – and finishes at the beginning – “her new American life.” In between, multiple fragments pieced together from various points of view present an immigrant teenager’s quest to understand who she...
*STARRED REVIEW Although set in a coastal suburb outside Seoul, the cycle of neglect by stressed or careless adults can and does happen anywhere. In such an all-too-familiarly indifferent environment, lauded Korean writer Kim Sagwa (Mina, 2018) introduces three misfits: two teen girls and a socially-outcast,...
“They were best friends at Dartmouth who had decided to take the summer and fall quarters off.” Jack and Wynn are like brothers, “but better, because [they] didn’t have to grow up fighting.” After working as wilderness instructors in the Adirondacks, they embark on a...
*STARRED REVIEW Kimberly Farr returns for a fourth propitious audiobook pairing with Elizabeth Strout, her second as the title character in this conclusion-of-sorts to the 2008 Pulitzer Prized novel Olive Kitteridge. Both books follow a similar format – both are comprised of 13 interlinked stories mostly...
