Listen to Best Sellers Audiobooks in Fiction, Literary

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Title: My Education

Author: Susan Choi

Narrator: Tavia Gilbert

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-27-13

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 62 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. Hes said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. Hes condemned on the walls of the womens restroom and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty - or his charismatic, volatile wife.

My Education is the story of Reginas mistakes, which begin in the bedroom and end - if they do - 15 years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Reginas misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

Members Reviews:

A bit navel-gazey, but overall enjoyable

I thought this book offered a really honest view of what it feels like to be 23-ish and in love, albeit not with the right person. My life at university was not filled with nearly as much adultery (that I knew of, maybe), but I think Susan Choi got so much absolutely spot-on. Everything burns brighter when you are that age, and then you lose that intensity as you get older, which is a little bit sad but mostly comfortable and ultimately good. The characters are all annoyingly selfish, I don't think I'd want to be friends with any of them, but I did enjoy this listen very much.

Not what you think

Rarely do I hate a book, but I hated this book.

I got nothing out of it except that I wish I never came across it.

First, it was not what I expected from the description.

I decided upon the book thinking it would be about a girl/boy affair.

However, it is mostly about a girl/girl affair not a girl/boy which is fine if that interests you,

but it's not what interests me.

BIG part of why I hated it also (SPOILER) was there were no grounds for why Regina

all the sudden was struck by Martha. And also never went into why she was so taken with her

other than their times in bed.

The ending just sealed it as an awful book.

Hated the part where they meet 14 years later, but I guess being the kind of people they are

it wasn't surprising.

Furthermore, it didn't make sense. I find it very hard to believe in such relationships.

For example, how Dutra could find no one else in his life after so many years. Just a little ridiculous.

Lastly, it was disjointed in the way that the bits of philosophical musings did not pair up well with the story.

That is to say that they stood better alone because they were not illuminated by the story.

The reader's voice of Regina is a bit annoying, took me a while to get used to.

However, the reader did a great performance in finding a distinguishing voice for all the characters.

tiring and pretentious

I did not finish this book. Phrases like "connubial bliss" made me roll my eyes. Give me a break. And who says, "masterbated himself"? The writing, story and narration are snobbish and self-important.

Still listing but the narrator...

I may change my overall review of the story after I finish the piece, but right now the reader is driving me crazy.

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Title: A Change of Climate

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Hilary Mantel

Narrator: Sandra Duncan

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-21-13

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 44 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.

Members Reviews:

Beautifully written

I read again immediately on finishing as time frames rolled forward and back again. ...and because I wanted to live the story itself again.

Moving tale of a family who try to "do good."

Believable people in a family story that includes a season in South Africa under apartheid. I listened to it twice.

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Title: Queer

Author: William S. Burroughs

Narrator: T. Ryder Smith, Andrew Garman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-20-13

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 31 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

For more than three decades, while its writer's world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the '40s, Queer is the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton. The narrative is punctuated by Lee's outrageous "routines" - brilliant comic monologues that foreshadow Naked Lunch - yet the atmosphere is heavy with foreboding.

Members Reviews:

Junky 2

Queer is a wonderful follow up to Junky. While not quite as biting as Junky, it still delivers that very Burroughs feeling. The narrator returns from Junky and does a wonderful job.

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Title: Golden Boy

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Abigail Tarttelin

Narrator: Christian Coulson, James Langton, Abigail Tarttelin, Keith Nobbs, Kate Reading, Anita Sabherwal

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-21-13

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 100 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

The Walker family is good at keeping secrets from the world. They are even better at keeping them from each other.

Max Walker is a golden boy. Attractive, intelligent, and athletic, he's the perfect son, the perfect friend, and the perfect crush for the girls in his school. He's even really nice to his little brother. Karen, Max's mother, a highly successful criminal lawyer, is determined to maintain the facade of effortless excellence she has constructed through the years. Now that the boys are getting older, now that she won't have as much control, she worries that the facade might soon begin to crumble. Adding to the tension, her husband, Steve, has chosen this moment to stand for election to Parliament. The spotlight of the media is about to encircle their lives.

The Walkers are hiding something, you see. Max is special. Max is different. Max is intersex. When an enigmatic childhood friend named Hunter steps out of his past and abuses his trust in the worst possible way, Max is forced to consider the nature of his well-kept secret. Why won't his parents talk about it? What else are they hiding from Max about his condition and from each other? The deeper Max goes, the more questions emerge about where it all leaves him and what his future holds, especially now that he's starting to fall head over heels for someone for the first time in his life. Will his friends accept him if he is no longer the Golden Boy? Will anyone ever want him - desire him - once they know? And the biggest one of all, the question he has to look inside himself to answer: Who is Max Walker, really?

Written by 25-year-old rising star Abigail Tarttelin, Golden Boy is a novel you'll read in one sitting but will never forget; at once a riveting tale of a family in crisis, a fascinating exploration of identity and a coming-of-age story like no other.

Members Reviews:

Full-Cast Audio you won't want to miss

Golden Boy is an intense and emotional read that centers on Max Walker, an intersex teen. We follow Maxs story through the eyes of the important people in Maxs life: Maxs parents, brother, doctor, and girlfriend, and Max as well. This book provides food for thought about gender roles and identity, and this book really stretched my mind. Maxs story is inspiring, heartbreaking, and thought provoking. If youre interested in crossover books, gender issues and just great storytelling I think youll really respond to Golden Boy.

The multi-POV format works very well in Golden Boy. Its enlightening to get different reads on Max and see that how people react is not necessarily what youd expect. The parents (Karen and Steve) provide the history and why they made certain medical and gender choices about Max from the beginning, and where there was conflict between them. Steves POV comes in late in the story, and before that we have to rely on only Karens side of the story. Maxs younger brother Daniel is quite a character he says just what he means, and hero worships Max. Archie is Maxs doctor and is one of the first in Maxs circle of trust. And Sylvie is Maxs love interest.

This was my first book on intersexuality and it opened my eyes about my own gender assumptions.

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Title: Odds Against Tomorrow

Author: Nathaniel Rich

Narrator: Kirby Heyborne

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-06-13

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 58 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of an empty office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe - ecological collapse, war games, natural disasters - he becomes obsessed by a culture's fears.

Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell's predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realizes he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost?

At once, an all-too-plausible literary thriller, an unexpected love story, and a philosophically searching inquiry into the nature of fear, Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow poses the ultimate questions of imagination and civilization. The future is not quite what it used to be.

Editorial Reviews:

Editors Select, May 2013 - I was interested in Nathaniel Richs

Odds Against Tomorrow because it sounded like an off-centered, dark, and altogether odd story. What Ive read so far has proven me right, but theres so much more to be discovered that Im thoroughly intrigued by what lies ahead. Mitchell Zukoff is in the insurance business, and a recent catastrophe has driven a huge demand for his work. Hes good at selling fear because he himself is intensely fearful of carbon monoxide poisoning, tidal waves, fault lines, and other disasters and their probabilities. While Richs tone gives a sense of impending doom, there is an optimistic lightness in Mitchells unusual correspondence with an old friend, and its this light/dark contrast that I find most interesting about the book so far. Im also very interested to hear what narrator Kirby Heybourne does with this book, as his performances of

Gone Girl and

Cloud Atlas are loved by our listeners.

Chris, Audible Editor

Critic Reviews:

"It is almost impossible to read this novel without indelible images of Hurricane Sandy coming to mind. The novel succeeds on its own terms in envisioning such a disaster in terrifyingly visceral terms. And Mitchell's intensely fraught journey from man of intellect to man of action is one the [listener] will not soon forget." (

Publishers Weekly)

"Let's just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is...Rich is a gifted caricaturist and a gifted apocalyptist. His descriptions of the vagaries of both nature and human nature are stark, fresh, and convincing, full of surprise and recognition as both good comedy and good terror must be." (

The New York Review of Books)

"This literary thriller is blessed with a propulsive plot, macabre humor, several richly developed characters, and serious ethical and philosophical issues, all lightly clothed in skillful writing.

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Titel: A Long Way Down

Autor:: Nick Hornby

Erzähler: Julia Hummer, Andreas Petri, Stefan Kaminski

Format: Abridged

Spieldauer: 4 hrs and 58 mins

Sprache: Deutsch

Veröffentlichungsdatum: 03-27-13

Herausgeber: Der Hörverlag

Bewertung: 1 von 5 von 1 Stimmen

Kategorien: Fiction, Literary

Zusammenfassung des Herausgebers:

Was machen vier schräge Vögel in der Silvesternacht zusammen auf dem Dach eines Londoner Hochhauses? Party? Weit gefehlt! Zufällig wollen sie sich alle gleichzeitig vom Dach stürzen. Doch, dass andere zusehen, macht die Sache nicht leichter. Also erstmal eine Runde plaudern - und sich dann verabreden, für den Valentinstag. Ereignisreiche Wochen machen aus Fremden Freunde fürs Leben...

©2005 Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch Köln (P)2005 Der Hörverlag

Mitglieder Bewertungen:

Not in English

This book is not narrated in English and there was no indication of this before I purchased it

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Title: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Author: Kristopher Jansma

Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-21-13

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 43 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

An inventive and witty debut about a young mans quest to become a writer and the misadventures in life and love that take him around the globe

From as early as he can remember, the hopelessly unreliable - yet hopelessly earnest - narrator of this ambitious debut novel has wanted to become a writer.

From the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka, Kristopher Jansma's irresistible narrator will be inspired and haunted by the success of his greatest friend and rival in writing, the eccentric and brilliantly talented Julian McGann, and endlessly enamored with Julian's enchanting friend, Evelyn, the green-eyed girl who got away. After the trio has a disastrous falling out, desperate to tell the truth in his writing and to figure out who he really is, Jansma's narrator finds himself caught in a never-ending web of lies.

As much a story about a young man and his friends trying to make their way in the world as a profoundly affecting exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards will appeal to listeners of Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists and Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize - winning A Visit from the Goon Squad with its elegantly constructed exploration of the stories we tell to find out who we really are.

Members Reviews:

Clever, but much ado...

I give the book 3 stars because it kept me interested to the end. I could not like the main character, finding him with little or no foundation, (which is a key theme of the book), and ultimately disappointing as a man, friend, lover and son.

Ballerini was excellent, however, a true master of characters.

What kept me interested was the hero's inevitable self discovery. The cleverness of the book is how he comes to this discovery.

In the meantime we are treated to an extraordinary cast of characters. The wealthy, genius, arrogant, and suicidal author and best friend. (I can't use names for reasons that will become evident should you read or listen to this book.) The beautiful actress and lover, another clever clue to his self discovery. An unforgettable patriarch holed up in Sudan and ravaged with dementia.

In the end as shallow as I am, I look to fall in love with the main character as well as the story. As a boy, he won my heart, only to break it as he does his own and all who love him.

Mind-numbing boredom. Hours of it.

I bought this book because Edoardo Ballerini reads it. I had never heard of Mr. Jansma. Now I know why I've never heard of him. His writing is the definition of boredom. I listened to three and a half hours of it, giving it the old college try, but after that I could take no more. There are a few cute scenes in it, as near the beginning when the narrator describes himself as a boy, watching an old watchmaker in an airport kiosk fixing watches. I should have stopped there. By the time I quit it, I did not care a whit about any of the characters, and I could not, or did not, follow the plot at all. It seems to be something of an F. Scott Fitzgerald wannabe. It becomes very trite very quickly, piling up all sorts of artsy, wealthy Manhattan socialites of many nationalities, all of whom meet at cocktail parties. One of them opens up the trunk of his car and finds cases of caviar, which he and the narrator eat while they sit on the car's bonnet.

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Title: Ruined City

Author: Nevil Shute

Narrator: Gareth Armstrong

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-16-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 68 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Through a series of mishaps, Henry Warren, a recently divorced City financier, ends up in hospital in a Northern town ruined by the closure of its shipyard. Moved by the fate of the town's inhabitants, Warren risks his fortune and reputation to save the shipyard and restore the town to its former prosperity. In seeking to change the fate of the town, he radically changes his own.

Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 - 12 January 1960) was a popular British-Australian novelist and a successful aeronautical engineer. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons, but after the conflict he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death on 12 January 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), No Highway (1948), A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).

Critic Reviews:

Immensely readable (Guardian)

Not only a brilliant fluent storyteller but also an ironic commentator on the world scene (Harpers & Queen)

There is little that Shute does not know about choosing an appealing story and telling it in a gripping way (The Times)

Members Reviews:

Another Uplifting Shute Novel

Totally satisfying novel of one man going to extraordinary lengths to resurrect a dying town. Few writers capture the indomitable human spirit as does Nevil Shute. I've read many of his books and this is one of his best. The narrator is also perfect for the book.

A wonderful story

I am a fan of Nevil Shute and the marathons usually match the stories. This narrator was impossible do me to listen to. Had to go to .75. It did drone on a bit and with the accent made some words harder but so much better than regular speed. It took longer but it was a good story.

About the only book left for me is On The Beach. I found the move so upsetting I don't think I can listen to it.

Everything about this was nice, now how often can we say that.

Ruined City

This is my first time with Nevil Shute and I'm glad I went with it and persevered. The begining was a little dry but I was soon engrossed in the story and the characters. And what a different story for me. It's a little short but I liked the pictures painted of the lives and times - grim times too for the out of work men & women but it shows not to loose all hope, ever.

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Title: Urien's Voyage

Author: André Gide, Wade Baskin (translator)

Narrator: Lori Blanchard

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 12 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-12-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Nobel Prize-winning writer André Gide marks his voyage toward self-discovery in this imaginative allegorical work.

When Urien and his sailing companions begin their voyage, it is to places unknown and, perhaps, only dreamed. This allegorical masterpiece from André Gide, a key figure of French letters, deftly illustrates the techniques and doctrine of the Symbolist movement - and the dual nature of Gides own psyche. Written at a crucial time in his artistic development, this imaginative work signals his gradual abandonment of acetic celibacy toward an embrace of pleasure and carnal desires, revealing a Gide more transparent in this early work than in his mature writings.

Translator and scholar Wade Baskin annotates the work, connecting Gides life and bibliography to the text.

Members Reviews:

Priggish Symbolist Wheezing

The book of less than a hundred pages, first published in 1893 with illustrations by Nabis artist Maurice Denis (not reproduced when it was finally rendered into English in 1964) has in English the subtitle "A semi-autobiographic novel." It seems to me that this subtitle is apt in that the imagined voyage from tropical islands to becalmed Sargasso and on to the Arctic cannot stand on its own. That is, it is only of interest to those who are interested in its author (or historians of symbolist literature, I guess). Probably inadvertently, it showed Gide's lack of heterosexual interest. More obliquely, it showed his interest in naked or nearly naked bodies of young males. Perhaps if his future wife had been able to read between the lines, she would have realized that they were never going to have a sex life. Her figure, called Ellis in the second and third parts of the book, a woman of "disturbing superficiality" and untutorable, is loved in some perverse sense, but neglected, abandoned, and killed off (though still haunting the narrator after her death, also prefiguring the (distant) future of the author. Their real-life simultaneous miseries ("where compassion turns to self-pity) were also foreshadowed.

Beyond intimations of Gide's sexual orientation and priggishness, the novel lacks interest. Try to imagine (Against Nature: A Rebours)written by someone hating and fearing sensuality, even while invoking imaginary places appealing to the senses. The narrator/author is afraid even to taste fruits (forbidden or other ones)

Although there are a number of character names, none of the characters other than Ellis (and indirectly, Urien) is developed. There are a dozen, including Urien, who resist the sexual importuning of the queen of what has become a city of women (the men having fled to the hills) and at least one (Angaire) who shares the narrator's horror of naked female bodies (he only liked them veiled and otherwise covered).

Although, as I've noted, the only interest of the novel is as disguised self-portraiture, I find the notes of translator Wade Baskin prissy (too). For instance, "He preferred pleasurable fantasies to painful realities": yeah, but who doesn't!

For early Gide, I much prefer the satiresMarshlands and Prometheus Misbound.

Andre's Travels

I have read a couple of books by Andre Gide and I wasn't overly impressed. I still have a copy of "The Counterfeiters" which, I understand, is more worthy of the author that the other two I read.

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Title: Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth

Author: Robert Graves

Narrator: Sean Barrett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-28-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 12 votes

Genres: Fiction, Literary

Publisher's Summary:

Robert Graves first came across the name of Roger Lamb in 1914, when he was an English officer instructing his platoon in regimental history. Lamb was a British soldier who had served his king during the American War of Independent, and whose claim to a footnote in history is that he managed to escape twice from American prison camps. When Graves went to American in the 1930s, he remembered Sergeant Lamb, investigated his story and created this fictionalized memoir stretching from Lambs Irish childhood to war and revolution, weaving a mesmerizing tale of courage and adventure.

Critic Reviews:

Among the most generous, self-willed, unseemly and brilliant writers of our century (New York Times)

Members Reviews:

First person account of the Revolutionary war

This book was full of gems of information that I have found nowhere else in my extensive study on the subject. The author (A World War I British infantry officer and later scholar and writer) makes a few predictable errors, such as saying rifle when he means musket, but the excellent details given by the author greatly fill in the background of the war from the grunt's point of view. Before I can use this book as a reference in my own writing, I will have to wheedle out which parts are from the original memoir.

Wonderful adaptation of a great Robert Graves book

Sean Barrett does a superb job of bringing to life this fictionalized first person account of Roger Lamb .

This is one of the very few first person accounts of an individual fighting in the American Revolutionary War. Even more rare is that this account is from a British Soldier.

Robert Graves has taken Roger Lamb's memoir and given it his "treatment" , turning it into excellent Historical Fiction. That said, it stays mostly true to the source material. The result is an outstanding account of the American Revolutionary War.

This is a top-notch Audible title. I heartily recommend it to anyone not just those interested in history.

So stilted and long-winded as to be un-listeanble

What disappointed you about Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth?

It is written in the voice of a semi-educated 18th century Irishman trying to be literary. The result is pompous, stilted and utterly dull. The pace is wrong. It even manages to make battle scenes boring.

Would you ever listen to anything by Robert Graves again?

Possibly. Goodbye to All that was much better than this as it is written in the author's own voice

You didnt love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

It seems to be based on good historical research. However, the view expressed of the American revolution is so pro-British, we can only take it as an accurate reflection of the narrator's prejudices, not of actual history.