Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649846 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Others Were Emeralds: A Novel Author: Lang Leav Narrator: Shiromi Arserio Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 7 hours 33 minutes Release date: September 5, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: “Others Were Emeralds kept me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. With lyrical and moving prose, Lang tells a stunning tale of love, loss, and the true power of friendship. A deep, beautiful novel.'' — Etaf Rum, New York Times bestselling author of A Woman is No Man Internationally acclaimed poet Lang Leav’s debut adult novel combines her poetical lyricism and emotional acumen to create an enthralling coming of age narrative set against the backdrop of anti-Asian sentiment sweeping Australia in the late 90’s. A stirring portrayal of guilt, loss, and memory, Others Were Emeralds explores the inherent danger of allowing our misconceptions to shape our reality. What comes first, the photograph or the memory? The daughter of Cambodian refugees, Ai grew up in the small Australian town of Whitlam populated by Asian immigrants who once fled war-torn countries to rebuild their shattered lives. It is now the late '90s and despite their parents' harrowing past, Ai and her tightknit group of school friends: charismatic Brigitte, sweet, endearing Bowie, shy, inscrutable Tin, and politically minded Sying, lead seemingly ordinary lives, far removed from the unimaginable horrors suffered by their parents. But that carefree innocence is shattered in their last year of school when Ai and her friends encounter a pair of racist men whose cruel acts of intimidation spiral into senseless violence. Grappling with the magnitude of her grief at such a young age, Ai leaves Whitlam for college before her trauma has a chance to fully resolve.  In her second year of college Ai suffers a mental health crisis, driving her back home to Whitlam, a place she swore never to return. There, she reconnects with those she left behind and together they are compelled to look back on the tragedy that shaped their adolescence and examine the role they may have unwittingly played.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/650299 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Asking for a Friend Author: Kerry Clare Narrator: Kate Keenan Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 7 minutes Release date: September 5, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: For readers of J. Courtney Sullivan and Emma Straub, and for fans of Firefly Lane, comes a poignant and sweeping novel about life, love, and the ever-evolving nature of female friendship by the author of Waiting for a Star to Fall. The bottom of Jess’s world is falling out. Cocooned in her dorm in the winter of 1998, she’s reeling, and wants to be left alone. But a chance encounter with the older, otherworldly, elusive Clara has Jess awestruck. Clara, newly returned from a two-year trek drifting around the world, is taking a stab at normalcy for once, and the place she starts is university, where she struggles to fit in. Upon meeting Jess, though, Clara feels an instant connection, and everything seems brighter. Soon, the two are inseparable, undeniable necessities in each other’s lives. But when tragedy strikes, they are unceremoniously torn apart, sent tumbling down different paths. And with each passing day, their unbreakable bond is tested more and more. As they endure love and heartbreak, marriage, anxiety and isolation, and the complicated existence of motherhood, Jess and Clara must learn how to love each other through it all—and whether growing up inevitably means growing apart. Spanning two decades, Asking for a Friend follows the tempestuous journey of female friendship, exploring whether its fundamentals—history, familiarity, loyalty—are enough to make the relationship everlasting.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/647892 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Terrace Story: A Novel Author: Hilary Leichter Narrator: Xe Sands Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 4 hours 44 minutes Release date: August 29, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 1 of Total 1 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: From the author of the acclaimed novel Temporary, an intimate exploration of time, a fable about love, an epic daydream for a broken-hearted world Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller’s dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world. Terrace Story follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations: the little family of three, their future now deeply uncertain, and those who orbit their fragile universe. The distance and love between these characters expands limitlessly, across generations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing, and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death? Based on the National Magazine Award–winning story, Hilary Leichter’s profound second novel asks how we nurture love when death looms over every moment. From one of our most innovative and daring writers, Terrace Story is an astounding meditation on loss, a reverie about extinction, and a map for where to go next.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/657846 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Breakaway: A Novel Author: Jennifer Weiner Narrator: Nikki Blonsky, Santino Fontana, Joy Osmanski, Jenni Barber, Soneela Nankani Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 13 hours 30 minutes Release date: August 29, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.94 of Total 16 Ratings of Narrator: 3.11 of Total 9 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner comes a warmhearted and empowering new novel about love, family, friendship, secrets, and a life-changing journey. Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she’s lived since college still looks like she’s just moved in. But she’s got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia. She’s at peace with her plus-size body—at least, most of the time—and she’s on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend. Fifteen years after her final summer at Camp Golden Hills, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, it feels like the happy ending she’s always wanted. Yet Abby can’t escape the feeling that something isn’t right...or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously. When Abby gets a last-minute invitation to lead a cycling trip from NYC to Niagara Falls, she’s happy to have time away from Mark, a chance to reflect and make up her mind. But things get complicated fast. First, Abby spots a familiar face in the group—Sebastian, the one-night stand she thought she’d never see again. Sebastian is a serial dater who lives a hundred miles away. In spite of their undeniable chemistry, Abby is determined to keep her distance. Then there’s a surprise last-minute addition to the trip: her mother, Eileen, the woman Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she’s still trying to undo. Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways...and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649336 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Under the Tamarind Tree Author: Nigar Alam Narrator: Sneha Mathan Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 13 minutes Release date: August 15, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: A compellingly heartbreaking debut novel about the echoes of Partition and four friends whose dark secrets lead to a life-changing night that comes back to haunt them decades later. One night. Four friends. Countless secrets. 1964. Karachi, Pakistan. Rozeena is running out of time. She'll lose her home—her parents' safe haven since fleeing India and the terrors of Partition—if her medical career doesn't take off soon. But success may come with an unexpected price. Meanwhile the interwoven lives of her childhood best friends—Haaris, Aalya, and Zohair—seem to be unraveling with each passing day. The once small and inconsequential differences between their families' social standing now threaten to divide them. Then one fateful night someone ends up dead and the life they once took for granted shatters. 2019. Rozeena receives a call from a voice she never thought she’d hear again. What begins as an ask to look after a friend’s teenaged granddaughter struggling with her own demons grows into an unconventional friendship—one that unearths buried secrets and just might ruin everything Rozeena has worked so hard to protect.  Captivating and atmospheric, Under the Tamarind Tree shows us the high-stakes ripple effects of generational trauma, and the lengths people will go to protect the ones they love.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/650360 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Wolf Hunt: A Novel Author: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Narrator: Gilli Messer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 27 minutes Release date: August 15, 2023 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: Award-winning author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen returns with a timely exploration of the fault lines in a community, a school, and a family, as a mother begins to suspect her teenage son of committing a terrible crime. Lilach has it all: a beautiful home in the heart of Silicon Valley, a successful husband and stable marriage, and a teenage son, Adam, with whom she has always felt a particular closeness. Israeli immigrants, the family has now lived in the U.S. long enough that they consider it home. But after a brutal attack on a local synagogue shakes their sense of safety, Adam enrolls in a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer. There, for the first time, he finds a sense of confidence and belonging. Then, tragedy strikes again when an African American boy dies at a house party, apparently from a drug overdose. Though he was a high school classmate, Adam claims not to know him. Yet rumors begin to circulate that the death was not accidental, and that Adam and his new friends had a history with Jamal. As more details surface and racial tensions in the community are ignited, Lilach begins to question everything she thought she knew about her son. Could her worst fears be possible? Could her quiet, reclusive child have had something to do with Jamal’s death? Praised for “instilling emotional depth into a thriller plot” (New York Times Book Review on Waking Lions), Ayelet Gundar-Goshen once again brings together taut, page-turning suspense, superb writing, and razor-sharp insight into the fault lines of race, identity, and privilege and the dark secrets we hide from those we love most.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/652135 to listen full audiobooks. Title: California Golden: A Novel Author: Melanie Benjamin Narrator: Christine Lakin Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 12 hours 17 minutes Release date: August 8, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: Two sisters navigate the thrilling, euphoric early days of California surf culture in this dazzling saga of ambition, sacrifice, and the tangled ties between mothers and daughters from the New York Times bestselling author of The Aviator’s Wife. “A shimmering rendering . . . pairs the surf culture of the Beach Boys with the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll of Daisy Jones & The Six.”—Entertainment Weekly (“Best Books of the Summer”) Southern California, 1960s: endless sunny days surfing in Malibu, followed by glittering neon nights at Whisky a Go Go. In an era when women are expected to be housewives, Carol Donnelly breaks the mold as a legendary female surfer struggling to compete in a male-dominated sport—and her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, bear the weight of Carol’s unconventional lifestyle. The Donnelly sisters grow up enduring their mother’s absence—physically, when she’s at the beach, and emotionally, the rare times she’s at home. To escape questions about Carol’s whereabouts—and to chase her elusive affection—they cut school to spend their days in the surf. From her first time on a board, Mindy is a natural, but Ginger, two years younger, feels out of place in the water. As they grow up and their lives diverge, Mindy and Ginger’s relationship ebbs and flows. Mindy finds herself swept up in celebrity, complete with beachside love affairs, parties at the Playboy Club, and a USO tour in Vietnam. Meanwhile, Ginger, desperate for a community of her own, is tugged into the dangerous counterculture of drugs and cults. But through it all, their sense of duty to each other survives, as the girls are forever connected by the emotional damage they carry from their unorthodox childhood. A gripping, emotional story set at a time when mothers were expected to be Donna Reed, not Gidget, California Golden is an unforgettable novel about three women living in a society that was shifting as tempestuously as the breaking waves.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649349 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Disruptions: Stories Author: Steven Millhauser Narrator: Vas Eli, Gisela Chípe, Arthur Morey Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 2 minutes Release date: August 1, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: AN NPR AND NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An exquisite new collection from a Pulitzer Prize–winning master of the short story, the culmination of a five-decade career: work that takes us beneath the placid surface of suburban life into the elusive strangeness of the everyday Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle that is at once instantly recognizable and profoundly unsettling. Disruptions is a collection of provocative, bracingly original new work from a writer at the peak of his form.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649328 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The End of August: A Novel Author: Yu Miri Narrator: Sue Jean Kim Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 28 hours 17 minutes Release date: August 1, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation. In 1930s Japanese-occupied Korea, Lee Woo-cheol was a running prodigy and a contender for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. But he would have had to run under the Japanese flag. Nearly a century later, his granddaughter is living in Japan and training to run a marathon herself. She summons Korean shamans to hold an intense, transcendent ritual to connect with Lee Woo-cheol. When his ghost appears, alongside those of his brother Lee Woo-Gun, and their young neighbor, who was forced to become a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers stationed in China during World War II, she must uncover their stories to free their souls. What she discovers is at the heart of this sweeping, majestic novel about a family that endured death, love, betrayal, war, political upheaval, and ghosts, both vengeful and wistful. A poetic masterpiece that is a feat of historical fiction, epic family saga, and mind-bending story-telling acrobatics, The End of August is a marathon of literature.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/649109 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Speech Team: A Novel Author: Tim Murphy Narrator: Daniel Henning Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 58 minutes Release date: July 25, 2023 Genres: Drama Publisher's Summary: “A tender-hearted novel and a dream to read. I loved this book.” -- Matt Haig #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library “so so so so good…[Speech Team] is a MUST…It has all the feels and brilliant writing to boot.”  -- Elin Hilderband (on Instagram) #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Five Star Weekend A funny, gossipy and ultimately poignant novel about four Gen X teen friends turned 21st-century adults who awkwardly come back together to confront an influential teacher whose brutal remarks have haunted them all for years. In his early forties, nonprofit writer Tip Murray is just getting past the wreckage of his youth and settling into semi-humdrum married New England domesticity. Things take an unusual turn when he receives shocking news from his high school best friend, hippie farmer Natalie, that one of their former teammates from speech team, Pete, has committed suicide. Surprisingly mentioned in Pete’s final Facebook post?  A devastating comment made to him by their speech team coach, Gary Gold. Feeling nostalgic for their 80s adolescence, Tip and Nat decide to reconnect with two long lost friends from the team, haughty menswear designer Anthony and tightly wound college professor Jennifer. The reunited quartet quickly discover an unsettling thread: all were quietly wounded by Mr. Gold’s deeply cutting remarks. The silver lining? Gold is still alive, and a quick Google search shows that he has retired to Florida. There’s only one thing left to do: fly down to a posh resort to confront him. What happens next is far from what any of them could have imagined. Fueled by cringe-y confrontations and 80s nostalgia, a literary mashup of The Breakfast Club and The Big Chill, Speech Team explores what it means to take account of the pain that can suffuse a life and what it means, years on, to move forward. 'Tim Murphy is a genius at sweeping, character-driven stories that suck you in until the very last page, and Speech Team is no exception.' —Andy Cohen