Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
LGBTQIA+ Authors
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Bookseller pick
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowWho Is Vera Kelly?
The Vera Kelly Series: Book #1
Narrator
Elisabeth Rodgers
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
6 hours 49 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“This book gives an amazing new twist to spy fiction! Absolutely captivating and keeps you on the edge of your seat. Vera is such a unique character living so much of her life in secrecy. This book has been on so many anticipated lists, and now I see exactly why.”
— Shane • Left Bank Books
New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She’s working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA.
Next thing she knows she’s in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams.
When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows, and she’s forced to take extreme measures to save herself.
An exhilarating coming-of-age story, Who Is Vera Kelly? introduces an original, wry, and whip-smart female spy for the twenty-first century.
Rosalie Knecht is the author of Who is Vera Kelly? and Relief Map, and the translator of César Aira’s The Seamstress and the Wind. She lives in New Jersey.
What do you do with a BA in English from Princeton University? You go to New York to pursue an acting career, and end up putting all of your skills together as an audiobook narrator. Elisabeth Rodgers first started recording audiobooks for the National Library Service of the Library of Congress at the American Foundation for the Blind (Talking Book Productions) in New York City. After she had numerous titles under her belt, she branched out, and has since narrated over 100 titles for a variety of publishers. She was the recipient of an Audie Award for the full-cast recording of Sherlock's Secret Life in 2000. Her work on The Last Chinese Chef, Annexed, The Naked Eye, and Mapping the Heavens garnered AudioFile magazine's prized Earphones Awards, and she was lucky enough to join the star-studded cast of Audible, Inc.'s Audie-nominated production of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, as well as the Earphones-winning MetaBook audio-drama production of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Elisabeth continues to work both onstage and in the studio. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York City.
Featured in these playlists...
Reviews
"[A] gripping, subtle, magnificently written new spy novel.”
“A slow-burn espionage thriller, a complex treatment of queer identity, and an immersive period piece all rolled into one delectable page-turner.”
“Narrator Elisabeth Rodgers’…facility with the Spanish phrases and place names brings to life Vera’s experience in Argentina. The result is a captivating listening experience. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“This is the literary spy novel you need in your life.”
“There’s political intrigue, spy craft, solid location work, and all the things you would want from espionage fiction.”
“Noir and full of ambiguities, doubles, and double-crosses.”
“A buzzing, smoky, gin-soaked charmer…[with] all the edgy fun of classic noir but in an original voice that’s fresh, brisk, and snappy.”
“By the end of Who is Vera Kelly? the reader is rooting for Vera to claim her much deserved personal freedom as much as succeed as a spy.”
“The character readers have been waiting for. A riveting, satisfying novel.”
“A tangled, atmospheric story that gradually builds suspense to a satisfyingly surprising denouement.”
“The twisty, literary, woman-driven spy novel you’ve always wanted to read.”
“A truly fresh and original take on the spy novel..[with] a memorable heroine who seems destined to become an icon of the genre.”
“Sardonic, intelligent, and thrillingly original. I loved this book and I loved Vera.”
“Knecht imbues the novel with emotional depth that allows for meditation on human connection and the ties that bind us to life’s worth.”
Expand reviews