Top-Rated Free Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/721837 to listen full audiobooks. Title: The Lucky Ones: A Memoir Author: Zara Chowdhary Narrator: Zara Chowdhary Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 9 hours 30 minutes Release date: July 16, 2024 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: A moving memoir by a survivor of anti-Muslim violence in contemporary India that delicately weaves political and family histories in a tribute to her country’s unique Islamic heritage—“a must-read in our warring world today” (NPR) “A harrowing survivor’s tale, an important history lesson, and a desperate warning from someone who has seen the tragic effects of ethnic violence.”—Time In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India’s fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, will later be accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, will rise to become India’s prime minister, sending the “world’s largest democracy” hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism.    The Lucky Ones traces the past of a multigenerational Muslim family to India’s brave but bloody origins, a segregated city’s ancient past, and the lingering hurt causing bloodshed on the streets. Symphonic interludes offer glimpses into the precious, ordinary lives of Muslims, all locked together in a crumbling apartment building in the city’s old quarters, with their ability to forgive and find laughter, to offer grace even as the world outside, and their place in it, falls apart.   The Lucky Ones entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, examines forgotten myths, prods a family’s secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. It is a warning thrown to the world by a young survivor, to democracies that fail to protect their vulnerable, and to homes that won’t listen to their daughters. It is an ode to the rebellion of a young woman who insists she will belong to her land, family, and faith on her own terms.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/798969 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Shifting Gears: Coast to Coast on the Trans Am Bike Race Author: Meaghan Marie Hackinen Narrator: Holly Adams Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 8 hours 43 minutes Release date: July 16, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2 Ratings of Narrator: 4.5 of Total 2 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: Meaghan Marie Hackinen's follow-up to her award-nominated debut South Away charts her unforgettable, twenty-five-day journey on the Trans Am Bike Race: a coast-to-coast ride across the entire North American continent from Oregon to Virginia. Without the aid of a support crew, Hackinen must rely entirely on her wits, ingenuity, and sheer determination to finish this extremely challenging feat. A sports story with a unique theme, Hackinen writes about the Trans Am Bike Race as a cultural whole, as she encounters consequences and unforeseen repercussions of an underground, unregulated athletic endeavor. Shifting Gears is another expertly-delivered travelogue and a thrilling glimpse into a world of athletes driven to impossible lengths.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/765316 to listen full audiobooks. Title: True Gretch: What I've Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between Author: Gretchen Whitmer Narrator: Gretchen Whitmer Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 21 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.1 of Total 10 Ratings of Narrator: 4.11 of Total 9 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: From trailblazing Michigan governor and rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer comes an unconventionally honest, personal, and funny account of her remarkable life and career, full of insights that guided her through a global pandemic, showdowns with high-profile bullies, and even a kidnapping and assassination plot. When Gretchen Whitmer was growing up, her beloved grandmother Nino taught her that you can always find something good in other people. “Even the meanest person might have pretty eyes,” she would say. Nino’s words persuaded Whitmer to look for the good in any person or situation—just one of many colorful personal experiences that have shaped her political vision. (And, as Whitmer writes, one that resonated more than another piece of advice her grandmother offered, to “never part your hair in the middle.”) In this candid and inspiring book, Whitmer reveals the principles and instincts that have shaped her extraordinary career, from her early days as a lawyer and legislator and her 2018 election as governor of Michigan, to her bold and innovative actions as she led the state through a series of unprecedented crises. Her motto in politics, she writes, is to “get shit done.” Whitmer shares the lessons in resilience that steered her through some of the most challenging events in Michigan’s history, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, a five-hundred-year flood, the rise of domestic terrorism, and the fierce fight to protect reproductive rights. Along the way, she tells stories about the outsize characters in her family, her lifelong clumsy streak, the wild comments she’s heard on the campaign trail, her self-deprecating social media campaigns (including her star turn as a talking potato with lipstick), and the slyly funny tactics she deploys to neutralize her opponents. Written with Whitmer’s trademark sense of humor and straight-shooting style, True Gretch is not only a compelling account of her remarkable journey, but also a blueprint for anyone who wants to make a difference in their community, their country, or the world. It is a testament to the power of humor, perseverance, and compassion in the face of darkness.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/783017 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable Author: Sarah Gerard Narrator: Sarah Gerard Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 10 hours 39 minutes Release date: July 9, 2024 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: Acclaimed author Sarah Gerard turns her keen observational eye and penetrating prose to the 2016 murder of her friend Carolyn Bush, examining the multi-faceted reasons for her death?personal and societal, avoidable and inevitable?as “nuanced and subtly intimate” (NPR) as her lauded essay collection, Sunshine State.   On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?   This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah’s exploration of Carolyn’s life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn's and Render’s friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn’s memorials and Render’s trial.   What emerged from Sarah’s relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn’s life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/703273 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale Author: Miranda Seymour Narrator: Elaine Claxton Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 23 hours 22 minutes Release date: July 4, 2024 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: ‘A kind of blissography, teeming with bon mots’ Sunday Times A celebrated modern classic that has revolutionised our understanding of the Bloomsbury group and remains the definitive biography of the group’s gloriously eccentric patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell. Met with widespread acclaim and translated into fifteen languages, this seminal book provoked a rethinking of the traditional Bloomsbury narrative and the rewriting of some major biographies. For decades, Ottoline Morrell was grossly misunderstood. The artists and writers who benefited from her generous patronage and friendship helped to create the false and vicious image of a nymphomanical aristocrat with cultural aspirations. This landmark literary biography presents Morrell in an entirely new light, rightly setting her centre-stage as the brilliant and courageous lynchpin of the Bloomsbury group. She counted T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Siegfried Sassoon, Augustus John, Katherine Mansfield and W.B. Yeats among her closest friends and houseguests. A legendary and agonisingly protracted love-affair with Bertrand Russell never undermined this unlikely couple’s deep and understanding friendship. Ottoline’s loyalty to her own promiscuous husband survived public humiliation and private crises. Overhauling the long-held conventional view of Morrell as a victim, a creature of her class who was born to be exploited and derided by her wittier friends, Seymour repaints the world of the Bloomsberries and rescues the grand life of Ottoline Morrell from the depths of historical obscurity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769365 to listen full audiobooks. Title: With and Without You Author: Kelsey Parker Narrator: Kelsey Bowden Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 5 hours 3 minutes Release date: July 4, 2024 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: “They say the first year is the hardest.” Kelsey Parker's world was turned upside down in the summer of 2020 when her husband Tom, singer in boyband The Wanted, was cruelly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. Heavily pregnant with their second child and coping with her own heartache at losing her partner of 13 years, Kelsey remained a tower of strength and positivity for Tom during his darkest days. When traditional treatments stopped working, she spent hours researching alternative therapies to give her husband extra time with his young children Aurelia and Bodhi. Hope came late in 2021 when Tom's tumour became stable, but sadly his condition quickly deteriorated and on March 30, 2022, aged just 33, he died surrounded by his loyal wife, family and friends. With And Without You is her moving, deeply personal story of the first 12 months since Tom's tragic passing. An intimate diary of how she coped with a year of unwanted firsts – first birthdays, first Christmas, first Valentine's Day – all without the love of her life. It is the story of how she rebuilt her life, and bravely found a way to face the future. Since Tom's death, Kelsey has been an inspiration to many and a rock to the couple's children. She has sought to raise awareness of glioblastoma and has bravely campaigned for vital funds for more research into the disease. She has also found spirituality – following Tom's long held belief there is something greater than just one life. With And Without You is not only a story of coping with unimaginable heartbreak and grief, but how your love for someone you've lost can be turned into something positive and bring hope and light into your life as you carry on your journey without them.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/796764 to listen full audiobooks. Title: [Dutch; Flemish] - Daten is (nog steeds) k*t: Over dickpicks, dertigersdilemma's en daddy issues Author: Laura De Hoog Narrator: Judith Amsenga Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 3 hours 40 minutes Release date: July 4, 2024 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: Daten als dertiger is nét even anders, maar daten blijft k*t. Vlak voor haar dertigste verjaardag heeft Laura de Hoog alles op een rijtje: een leuke baan als contentcreator, fijne mensen om zich heen, een goede gezondheid en na een turbulent liefdesleven lijkt ze ook de man van haar dromen tegen het gespierde lijf te zijn gelopen. Lijkt, helaas, want haar prins op het witte paard galoppeert toch weg, en laat haar met een gebroken hart achter. En dus gaat Laura door met daten. Tenslotte is de beste manier om over iemand heen te komen onder iemand anders. In dit boek kun je álles maar dan ook álles, dus ook wat op TikTok gecensureerd wordt, lezen. Hoewel daten in je dertiger jaren wat nieuwe uitdagingen met zich mee blijkt te brengen – van (wel of geen) kinderen tot botox – blijft Laura even openhartig, herkenbaar en grappig als altijd. Laura de Hoog (1992) begon ooit een blog over haar liefdesleven, maar stapte na de zoveelste mislukte relatie over op TikTok waar ze in minivlogjes haar ongezouten mening geeft over wat ze in het dagelijks leven tegenkomt. Ondertussen is ze meer dan 300.000 volgers en een succesvol boek – Daten is k*t – verder.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/723282 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed Author: Maureen Callahan Narrator: Gabra Zackman Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 11 hours 18 minutes Release date: July 2, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.53 of Total 30 Ratings of Narrator: 4.92 of Total 12 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: From New York Times bestseller Maureen Callahan, a fierce, character-driven exposé of the real Kennedy Curse—the family’s generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem. The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women and girls, leaving a trail of ruin and death in each generation’s wake. Through decades of scandal after scandal—from sexual assaults to reputational slander, suicides to manslaughter—the family and their defenders have kept the Kennedy brand intact. Now, in Ask Not, bestselling author and journalist Maureen Callahan reveals the Kennedys’ hidden history of violence and exploitation, laying bare their unrepentant sexism and rampant depravity while also restoring these women and girls to their rightful place at the center of the dynasty’s story: from Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe to Carolyn Bessette, Martha Moxley, Mary Jo Kopechne, Rosemary Kennedy, and many others whose names aren’t nearly as well known but should be. Drawing on years of explosive reportage and written in electric prose, Ask Not is a long-overdue reckoning with this fabled family and a consequential part of American history that is still very much with us. At long last, Callahan redirects the spotlight to the women in the Kennedys’ orbit, paying homage to those who freed themselves and giving voice to those who, through no fault of their own, could not.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/794628 to listen full audiobooks. Title: From the Summer of Love to the Valley of the Moon: A Memoir Author: Nancy J Martin Narrator: Carol Wrobleski Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 38 minutes Release date: June 20, 2024 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: San Francisco, 1967. A teenager comes of age during the Summer of Love at her rock & roll wedding. Her story relates the saga of life and relationships from then until the present through many lessons learned the hard way, until when, in 2005 she transitioned into yet another challenging marriage to the founder of an iconic winery in the Valley of the Moon. An inspirational narrative of one woman’s perseverance, creativity and stamina to overcome the cultural norms of patriarchy through years of controlling abuse and moving on through the learning curve of personal growth. The publication of this story was inspired and encouraged by the now prominent #MeToo Movement.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/715823 to listen full audiobooks. Title: Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People Series: Part of Significations Author: Tiya Miles Narrator: Janina Edwards Format: Unabridged Audiobook Length: 6 hours 5 minutes Release date: June 18, 2024 Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1 Genres: Women Publisher's Summary: From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path. © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY