Best-Selling Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Memoirs

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/551801 to listen full audiobooks. Title: A Nurse’s War: A Diary of Hope and Heartache on the Home Front Author: Patricia Malcolmson, Robert Malcolmson Narrator: Emma Pallant Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 4 minutes Release date: July 21, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: The remarkable wartime diary of nurse Kathleen Johnstone ‘Warm, chatty and endlessly absorbing, this delightful diary brims with intelligence and humour.’ Wendy Moore, author of Endell Street: The Women Who Ran Britain’s Trailblazing Military Hospital The second world war could not have been won without the bravery and selflessness of women on the Home Front. Women like Kathleen Johnstone. This first-hand story of one extraordinary but unheralded member of Britain’s ‘Greatest Generation’ brings home with extraordinary lucidity and compassion the realities of wartime Lancashire. In 1943, Kathleen, then thirty, was a nurse-in-training at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary. For the next three years she kept a meticulous diary of her day-to-day existence, leaving behind a vivid record of the real-time concerns of a busy, thoughtful woman on the frontline of the war at home. Kathleen’s days were never the same. She writes in clear and lively prose about life in the hospital: of her fellow nurses, her patients, about death and dying, and the progress of the war as wounded soldiers returned from Normandy in the summer of 1944. She muses on being working class, wartime austerity, and her anxiety about examinations. Here too are dances, Americans and a POW boyfriend in Germany. Kathleen’s observations are witty, wry and astute – but above all relatable, even today. Poignant and engrossing, Kathleen Johnstone’s tale of trauma, romance and friendship will leave a lasting impression.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/554030 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story Author: Lis Smith Narrator: Jean Ann Douglass Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 33 minutes Release date: July 19, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: New York Times Bestseller An irreverent look behind the scenes of American politics from one of the most sought-after operatives in the Democratic Party Lis Smith isn’t your average political strategist and Any Given Tuesday isn’t your typical political memoir. At once a revealing look at human nature at the highest levels of power and an intimate portrayal of a sometimes rocky personal journey, it breaks all the rules. Smith doesn’t pretend to be perfect—she owns the controversial choices that landed her in the tabloids, as well as the unorthodox ones that have paid off and defined her successful career.  Any Given Tuesday follows Smith from her earliest experiences as a college-aged intern to her days as a trusted adviser and confidante to some of the most high-profile politicians in the country—including her star turn as senior adviser on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign. Animated by Smith’s love for the hand-to-hand combat of politics and sustained by her deeply-held belief that it’s still possible to effect positive change, it’s an odyssey full of highs and lows and larger-than-life characters. Throughout, Smith shows what it’s really like behind the curtain: what happens when the lights go down and the cameras turn off, how it feels to be in the eye of the political media storm, and how the people responsible for heady, life and death decisions are as flawed as the rest of us. While the journey hasn’t always been smooth, Lis Smith has seen and learned a lot—and she shares it all in this eye-opening, entertaining memoir.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/552624 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays Author: Christina Joyce Hauser Narrator: Cj Hauser Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 3 minutes Release date: July 14, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realised she had almost signed up to live somebody else's life. In this intimate, frank and funny memoir in essays, CJ Hauser lets go of 'how life was supposed to be' and goes looking for more honest ways of living. She kisses internet strangers, officiates a wedding, visits a fertility clinic. She reads Rebecca in the house her new boyfriend shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to ask if you can ever have a fresh start with an old love. She writes about friends and lovers, grief and heartbreak, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all. The Crane Wife is a book for anyone whose life doesn't look the way they thought it would; for anyone trying, if sometimes failing, to find joy in the unexpected. 'Outstanding' Roxane Gay 'Funny, exciting, vulnerable - truly visionary' Alexander Chee 'What a fantastic, original, funny and touching voice! C J Hauser is a wondrous writer. This book will give so much happiness.' CRESSIDA CONNOLLY, author of AFTER THE PARTY 'Brilliant and beautiful... An absolute must-read' FRANCES CHA, author of IF I HAD YOUR FACE 'Compassionate and funny and brave. CJ is a master story weaver. I was left wanting more, in the best way possible.' CHARLIE GILMOUR, author of FEATHERHOOD 'A thrillingly original deconstruction of desire and its many configurations' Publishers Weekly 'Bold and brilliant and psychologically exquisite, CJ Hauser is a deeply gifted and generous writer. THE CRANE WIFE is enthralling.' CHARLOTTE FOX WEBER, author of WHAT WE WANT © Christina Joyce Hauser 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/555243 to listen full audiobooks. Title: All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir Author: Seán Hewitt Narrator: Seán Hewitt Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 40 minutes Release date: July 14, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. A luminous and haunting memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a fearless exploration of queer identity and trauma. When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face-to-face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is an unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's suffering. By turns devastating and soaring, it is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a work of rare and transcendent beauty. © Seán Hewitt 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/548758 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir Author: Erika L. Sánchez Narrator: Erika L. Sánchez Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 16 minutes Release date: July 12, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.2 of Total 5 Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 3 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: “Equal parts pee-your-pants hilarity and break your heart poignancy- like the perfect brunch date you never want to end!'--America Ferrera, Emmy award-winning actress in Ugly Betty From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an utterly original memoir-in-essays that is as deeply moving as it is disarmingly funny Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the ‘90s, Erika L. Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy and dreamed of an unlikely life as a poet. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression to the redemptive pursuits of spirituality, art, and travel, Sánchez reveals an interior life that is rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception—that of a woman who charted a path entirely of her own making. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best: a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/552823 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Why Didn't You Tell Me?: A Memoir Author: Carmen Rita Wong Narrator: Carmen Rita Wong Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 16 minutes Release date: July 12, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: An immigrant mother’s long-held secrets upend her daughter’s understanding of her family, her identity, and her place in the world in this powerful and dramatic memoir “Riveting . . . [Wong] tells her story in vivid conversational prose that will make readers feel they’re listening to a master storyteller on a long car trip. . . . Hers is a hero’s journey.”—The New York Times Book Review ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Kirkus Reviews My mother carried a powerful secret. A secret that shaped my life and the lives of everyone around me in ways she could not have imagined. Carmen Rita Wong has always craved a sense of belonging: First as a toddler in a warm room full of Black and brown Latina women, like her mother, Lupe, cheering her dancing during her childhood in Harlem. And in Chinatown, where her immigrant father, “Papi” Wong, a hustler, would show her and her older brother off in opulent restaurants decorated in red and gold. Then came the almost exclusively white playgrounds of New Hampshire after her mother married her stepfather, Marty, who seemed to be the ideal of the white American dad. As Carmen entered this new world with her new family—Lupe and Marty quickly had four more children—her relationship with her mother became fraught with tension, suspicion, and conflict, explained only years later by the secrets her mother had kept for so long. And when those secrets were revealed, bringing clarity to so much of Carmen’s life, it was too late for answers. When her mother passed away, Carmen wanted to shake her  soul by its shoulders and demand: Why didn’t you tell me? A former national television host, advice columnist, and professor, Carmen searches to understand who she really is as she discovers her mother’s hidden history, facing the revelations that seep out. Why Didn’t You Tell Me? is a riveting and poignant story of Carmen’s experience of race and culture in America and how they shape who we think we are.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/552825 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir Author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras Narrator: Marisol Ramirez Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 58 minutes Release date: July 12, 2022 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3 Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER   From the author of the “original, politically daring and passionately written” (Vogue) novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy. For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”: the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to “the secrets.” In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often hilarious guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe “the secrets” are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary. *Includes a downloadable PDF of the author’s personal photographs of family members, scenes, and mementos, from the printed book

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/552928 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir Author: Doreen Cunningham Narrator: Doreen Cunningham Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 19 minutes Release date: July 12, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: “A gorgeous journey…You will be glad you’ve joined her.” —Susan Orlean, author of On Animals and The Library Book In this lyrical memoir of motherhood, love, and resilience that “captures rarely observed natural places” (San Francisco Chronicle) a woman and her toddler son follow the grey whale migration from Mexico to northernmost Alaska. In this “striking, brave[,] and often lyrical” (The Guardian) blend of nature writing, whale science, and memoir, Doreen Cunningham interweaves two stories: tracking the extraordinary northward migration of the grey whales with a mischievous toddler in tow and living with an Iñupiaq family in Alaska seven years earlier. A story of courage and resilience, Soundings is about the migrating whales and all we can learn from them as they mother, adapt, and endure, their lives interrupted and threatened by global warming. It is also a riveting journey onto the Arctic Sea ice and into the changing world of Indigenous whale hunters, where Doreen becomes immersed in the ancient values of the Iñupiaq whale hunt and falls in love. Big-hearted, brave, and fearlessly honest, Soundings is an unforgettable journey.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/552795 to listen full audiobooks. Title: All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir Author: Seán Hewitt Narrator: Seán Hewitt Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 40 minutes Release date: July 12, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature • Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness • Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed • A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read • Observer Book of the Week • Lammy Finalist “The most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.”—Alexander Chee, The Atlantic • 'Rapturous...Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.'—Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review • “Exquisitely written.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis. All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot. Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty. Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/551604 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Stitched Up: Stories of life and death from a prison doctor Author: Shahed Yousaf Narrator: Homer Todiwala Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 24 minutes Release date: July 7, 2022 Genres: Memoirs Publisher's Summary: Brought to you by Penguin. Dr Shahed Yousaf is a prison doctor dedicated to caring for people on the margins of society. An outsider on the inside, in Stitched Up he introduces us to a cast of unforgettable characters, including killers, con men and auto-cannibals. To Dr Yousaf, they are patients first and prisoners second - because any one of us could end up on the wrong side of the law. He tells us honestly and compassionately what it's like to be their doctor in a system that's chronically overcrowded, drastically under-resourced and all too easy to ignore. Dr Yousaf spends his time running between emergencies - from overdoses to assaults, from cell fires to suicides - with one hand perpetually hovering over the panic button. It's not a job for the faint-hearted. But while the system is failing, he and his colleagues are doing their very best to prop it up. In stories that are frequently harrowing, sometimes humorous and always hard-hitting, we discover how difficult life is for those behind bars - but that there is still hope for all those who dare to care. © Dr Shahed Yousaf 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022