PB Book Club - Summer 2023 Recommendations

The Guest

A Novel

By: Emma Cline
Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan
Length: 8 hours 36 minutes

“In what is becoming Emma Cline’s signature fashion, The Guest is grating and disturbing but just gripping enough that once you start you won’t be able to press pause. The novel follows the tumbling days of Alex after she flirts with the wrong person for too long and her thinly held-together life crumbles. The reader is left to watch in... Read more

Chain Gang All Stars

A Novel

By: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Narrated by: Shayna Small, Aaron Goodson, Michael Crouch & Lee Osorio
Length: 13 hours 38 minutes

“If you've read Friday Black (The Book Table staff's Best Book of 2018) you're should be excited for this. Nana's debut novel, is about prisoners who sign up for death matches to have their sentences commuted. This book is written with all of the passion and creativity and empathy that Nana applies to his short stories, but it's an idea that... Read more

On Our Best Behavior

The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good

By: Elise Loehnen
Narrated by: Elise Loehnen
Length: 11 hours 54 minutes

“Whether you identify as a Christian or not, you will be persuaded by Loehnen's argument that the centuries old Seven Deadly Sins continue to exert harmful power over the behavior and lives of women causing us to suppress our healthy desires for agency, autonomy and personal power. Read more

The Postcard

By: Anne Berest
Narrated by: Barrie Kealoha
Length: 13 hours 5 minutes

“A powerful personal account of a family’s history over multiple generations with a stunning ending that resolves the mystery of the postcard’s sender! The author launches her family research and investigation of who could have written the anonymous, unsigned postcard a decade earlier when her daughter experiences an anti-semitic incident at... Read more

Demon Copperhead

A Novel

By: Barbara Kingsolver
Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
Length: 21 hours 2 minutes

WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTIONA New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2022" • An Oprah’s Book Club Selection • An Instant New York Times Bestseller • An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller • A #1 Washington Post Bestseller "Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even... Read more

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

A novel

By: Lorrie Moore
Narrated by: Sophie Amoss
Length: 6 hours 16 minutes

A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • From “one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation” (The New York Times)—a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things—seen and unseen.

“Who else but Lorrie Moore could... Read more

Family Lore

A Novel

By: Elizabeth Acevedo
Narrated by: Elizabeth Acevedo, Sixta Morel & Danyeli Rodriguez del Orbe
Length: 9 hours 49 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLERA GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK!Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel PrizeFrom National Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo comes the story of one Dominican American family told through the voices of its womenFlor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she... Read more

The End of August

A Novel

By: Yu Miri
Narrated by: Sue Jean Kim
Length: 28 hours 16 minutes

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... Read more

Horse

A Novel

By: Geraldine Brooks
Narrated by: James Fouhey, Lisa Flanagan, Graham Halstead, Katherine Littrell & Michael Obiora
Length: 14 hours 5 minutes

“This book centers on Lexington, often considered the greatest horse in history. But this book is much more than the story of a horse. Brooks writes of slavery, the Civil War, academia, art and publishing, love and loyalty, and racism in history and today. I loved the bond between Jarret, an enslaved boy, and Lexington. I will be thinking of this... Read more

Stay True

A Memoir

By: Hua Hsu
Narrated by: Hua Hsu
Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

“Stay True is a beautiful memoir and tribute to Hua Hsu's late friend, Ken. I listened to this memoir as an audiobook and I loved hearing Hsu narrate his own story. His accounts of friendship and loss are raw and emotional, taking the reader on a journey with Hsu as he processes his grief and finds hope in writing and art. Read more

You Could Make This Place Beautiful

A Memoir

By: Maggie Smith
Narrated by: Maggie Smith
Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

“The story of Maggie Smith's divorce (the American poet, not the British actress) is absolutely breathtaking. I sent it immediately to my best friend, labeled 'Required Reading Drop Everything'! If you like Glennon Doyle's books and podcast, if you liked Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, you will love this. I can not recommend more highly. Read more