Get New Full Audiobooks in Fiction, Coming of Age

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/47112 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Sula

Author: Toni Morrison

Narrator: Toni Morrison

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Release date: August 14, 2007

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 79

Ratings of Narrator: 4.44 of Total 18

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom—a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma’s girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime—until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula’s anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness.  One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/46703 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Penny: A Novel

Author: Joyce Meyer, Deborah Bedford

Narrator: Ellen Archer

Format: Abridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 0 minutes

Release date: June 12, 2007

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.2 of Total 5

Ratings of Narrator: 3.5 of Total 2

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

Jenny Blake has a theory about life: big decisions often don't amount to much, but little decisions sometimes transform everything. Her theory proves true the summer of 1955, when 14-year-old Jenny makes the decision to pick up a penny imbedded in asphalt, and consequently ends up stopping a robbery, getting a job, and meeting a friend who changes her life forever. Jenny and Miss Shaw form a friendship that dares both of them to confront secrets in their pasts--secrets that threaten to destroy them. Jenny helps Miss Shaw open up to the community around her, while Miss Shaw teaches Jenny to meet even life's most painful challenges with confidence and faith. This unexpected relationship transforms both characters in ways neither could have anticipated, and the ripple effect that begins in the summer of the penny goes on to bring new life to the people around them, showing how God works in the smallest details. Even in something as small as a penny.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/143096 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: White Oleander

Author: Janet Fitch

Narrator: Oprah Winfrey

Format: Abridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 20 minutes

Release date: September 18, 2006

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.07 of Total 188

Ratings of Narrator: 4.4 of Total 30

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

The unforgettable story of a young woman's odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes on her journey to redemption. Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery - but their idyll is shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison. White Oleander is the unforgettable story of Astrid's journey through a series of foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become. Oprah Winfrey enjoyed this gripping first novel so much that she not only made it her book club pick, she asked if she could narrate the audio release.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/159549 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Veronica

Author: Mary Gaitskill

Narrator: Kathe Mazur

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 30 minutes

Release date: July 18, 2006

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of Bad Behavior and Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale. As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica—an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal “office kit” and a plaque that reads “Still Anal After All These Years.” Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison’s reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica’s terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time. Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul’s hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, Veronica is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love’s abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/159774 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Beloved: Pulitzer Prize Winner

Author: Toni Morrison

Narrator: Toni Morrison

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 0 minutes

Release date: May 16, 2006

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.36 of Total 388

Ratings of Narrator: 4.12 of Total 52

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.  This 'brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.  “A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/160212 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Queen of the Underworld: A Novel

Author: Gail Godwin

Narrator: Carrington MacDuffie

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 26 minutes

Release date: January 10, 2006

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

Here at last is the eagerly awaited new novel from New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin. Queen of the Underworld is sweeping and sultry literary fiction, featuring a memorable young heroine and engaging characters whose intimate dramas interconnect with hers. In the summer of 1959, as Castro clamps down on Cuba and its first wave of exiles flees to the States to wait out what they hope to be his short-lived reign, Emma Gant, fresh out of college, begins her career as a reporter. Her fierce ambition and belief in herself are set against the stories swirling around her, both at the newspaper office and in her downtown Miami hotel, which is filling up with refugees. Emma’s avid curiosity about life thrives amid the tropical charms and intrigues of Miami. While toiling at the news desk, she plans the fictional stories she will write in her spare time. She spends her nights getting to know the Cuban families in her hotel–and rendezvousing with her married lover, Paul Nightingale, owner of a private Miami Beach club. As Emma experiences the historical events enveloping the city, she trains her perceptive eye on the people surrounding her: a newfound Cuban friend who joins the covert anti-Castro training brigade, a gambling racketeer who poses a grave threat to Paul, and a former madam, still in her twenties, who becomes both Emma’s obsession and her alter ego. Emma’s life, like a complicated dance that keeps sweeping her off her balance, is suddenly filled with divided loyalties, shady dealings, romantic and professional setbacks, and, throughout, her adamant determination to avoid “usurpation” by others and remain the protagonist of her own quest.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/191637 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Highest Tide: A Novel

Author: Jim Lynch

Narrator: Fisher Stevens

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

Release date: September 8, 2005

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

A spellbinding first novel about a young boy's fascination with the wonders of the seashore during a summer that will change his life. One moonlit night, thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak and goes exploring on the flats of Puget Sound. But what begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish, snails, and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. As the first person to ever see a giant squid alive, the speed-reading Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac instantly becomes a local curiosity. When he later finds a rare deepwater fish in the tidal waters near his home, and saves a dog from drowning, he is hailed as a prophet. The media hovers and everyone wants to hear what Miles has to say. But Miles is really just a teenager on the verge of growing up, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his bickering parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting from him. While the sea continues to offer up discoveries from its mysterious depths, Miles struggles to deal with the difficulties that attend the equally mysterious process of growing up. In this unforgettable, beguiling novel, we witness the dramatic sea change for both Miles and the coastline that he adores over the course of a summer—one that will culminate with the highest tide in fifty years.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/159615 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Thread of Grace: A Novel

Author: Mary Doria Russell

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 0 minutes

Release date: February 15, 2005

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 4

Ratings of Narrator: 1 of Total 1

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A powerfully imagined novel . . . [a] profoundly moving book that engages the heights and depths of human experience.”—Los Angeles Times It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to find safety now that the Italians have broken from Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it quickly becomes an open battleground for the Nazis, the Allies, Resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive. Tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters—a charismatic Italian Resistance leader, a priest, an Italian rabbi’s family, a disillusioned German doctor—Mary Doria Russell tells the little-known story of the vast underground effort by Italian citizens who saved the lives of 43,000 Jews during the final phase of World War II. A Thread of Grace puts a human face on history. Praise for A Thread of Grace “An addictive page-turner . . . [Mary Doria] Russell has an astonishing story to tell—full of action, paced like a rapid-fire thriller, in tense, vivid scenes that move with cinematic verve.”—The Washington Post Book World “Hauntingly beautiful, utterly unforgettable.”—San Francisco Chronicle  “Rich . . . Based on the heroism of ordinary people, [A Thread of Grace] packs an emotional punch.”—People  “[A] deeply felt and compellingly written book . . . The progress of each character’s life is marked or measured by acts of grace. . . . Russell is a smart, passionate and imaginative writer.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer  “A feat of storytelling . . . an important book [that] needs to be widely read.”—Portland Oregonian “Mary Doria Russell’s fans (and aren’t we all?) will rejoice to see her new novel on the shelves. A Thread of Grace is as ambitious, beautiful, tense, and transforming as any of us could have hoped.”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club “A story of love and war, A Thread of Grace speaks to the resilience and beauty of the human spirit in the midst of unimaginable horror. It is, unquestionably, a literary triumph.”—David Morrell, author of The Brotherhood of the Rose and First Blood

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/33047 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Author: Carson McCullers

Narrator: Cherry Jones

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 29 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2004

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.08 of Total 126

Ratings of Narrator: 3.5 of Total 4

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century. “A remarkable book…From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader.” In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/151457 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Kite Runner

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Narrator: Khaled Hosseini

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 0 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2003

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.47 of Total 813

Ratings of Narrator: 4.56 of Total 108

Genres: Coming of Age

Publisher's Summary:

A Stunning Novel of Hope and Redemption Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara -- a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him. The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship and betrayal, and about the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons -- their love, their sacrifices, and their lies. Written against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But through the devastation, Khaled Hosseini offers hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows us for redemption.