Audiobooks for Arab American Heritage Month

The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick

A Novel

By: Laila Lalami
Narrated by: Frankie Corzo & Barton Caplan
Length: 11 hours 41 minutes

“I was blown away by this book! It's a cross between EE Cummings' The Enormous Room, Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, and Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. It's a strange combo, but it works! In the near future, the Risk Assessment Administration assigns all citizens a risk assessment score. If your score exceeds 500, you are subject to... Read more

Too Soon

A Novel

By: Betty Shamieh
Narrated by: Betty Shamieh, Jacqueline Antaramian & Lameece Issaq
Length: 12 hours 35 minutes

“Three brilliant and complicated Palestinian women contend with the frustrations of motherhood, family, discrimination, ambition, tradition, and love, all while trying to figure out what home means when your people have been forcibly removed from their homeland. Read more

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

By: Omar El Akkad
Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
Length: 5 hours 20 minutes

“This book is a vital contribution to the ongoing conversation on this topic. Omar El Akkad's ruminations on the West will reflect the inner turmoil many people are feeling now, opening the door our personal reckonings. The author's narration is stunning, making it hard to put down despite the difficult subject matter. Read more

I'll Tell You When I'm Home

By: Hala Alyan
Narrated by: Hala Alyan
Length: TBA

The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future.

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by... Read more

What Will People Think?

A Novel

By: Sara Hamdan
Narrated by: Reem Edan
Length: 9 hours 23 minutes

Mia’s secret comedy career, forbidden office crush, and a long-guarded family secret take center stage, threatening her newfound confidence and her one shot at fame in this hilarious, heartfelt coming-of-age story perfect for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld and Etaf Rum.

Mia Almas has a secret. By day, she works at a respectable job as a media fact... Read more

A Tempest of Tea

Blood and Tea: Book #1

By: Hafsah Faizal
Narrated by: Maya Saroya
Length: 11 hours 1 minute

“Spindrift is a teahouse for the high elite by day and an illegal bloodhouse by night, serving the population of vampires of White Roaring. After being threatened with closure, Spindrift's owner Arthie is offered a chance to save her establishment, but it requires a risky heist. Hafsah Faizal’s writing is deeply enjoyable and quickly draws you... Read more

The Arabic Quilt

An Immigrant Story

By: Aya Khalil
Narrated by: Full Cast
Length: 12 minutes

Kanzi's family has moved from Egypt to America, and on her first day in a new school, what she wants more than anything is to fit in. Maybe that's why she forgets to take the kofta sandwich her mother has made for her lunch, but that backfires when Mama shows up at school with the sandwich. Mama wears a hijab and calls her daughter Habibti (dear... Read more

The Skin and Its Girl

A Novel

By: Sarah Cypher
Narrated by: Victoria Nassif & Haneen Arafat Murphy
Length: 12 hours 50 minutes

A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt’s secrets in this “enchanting, memorable” (Bustle) debut, confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage.
 
“As beautifully detailed as a piece of Palestinian embroidery, this bold, vivid novel will speak to readers across genders, cultures, and... Read more

The Arsonists' City

By: Hala Alyan
Narrated by: Leila Buck
Length: 19 hours 34 minutes

A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home

The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of... Read more

The Bird Tattoo

By: Dunya Mikhail
Narrated by: Vaneh Assadourian
Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

Helen is a young Yazidi woman, living with her family in a mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. One day she finds a local bird caught in a trap and frees it, just as the trapper, Elias, returns. At first angry, he soon sees the error of his ways and vows never to keep a bird captive again. Helen and Elias fall deeply in love, marry and... Read more

A History of the Arab Peoples

By: Albert Hourani
Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
Length: 21 hours 5 minutes

Despite the turmoil of Arab nationalism and fundamentalism, Middle Eastern wars, and oil crises, the history of the Arab world has been little known and poorly understood in the West. One reason may be that, for more than half a century, there has been no up-to-date single-volume work that chronicles the story of Arab civilization—until... Read more

Behind You Is the Sea

A Novel

By: Susan Muaddi Darraj
Narrated by: Rasha Zamamiri & Ali Nasser
Length: 6 hours 30 minutes

“Each chapter is like opening a new door. Each of the stories is connected, but you experience them individually. As you go further along in the book, it carries on in the timeline, and you see the characters change and read about what happens to the characters over the years. Being Palestinian and Palestinian-American, each chapter addresses the... Read more

Leap of Faith

Memoirs of an Unexpected Life

By: Noor al-Hussein
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
Length: 16 hours 5 minutes

Leap of Faith is the dramatic and inspiring story of an American woman’s remarkable journey into the heart of a man and his nation.Born into a distinguished Arab-American family and raised amid privilege, Lisa Halaby joined the first freshman class at Princeton to accept women, graduating in 1974 with a degree in architecture and urban planning.... Read more

Birds of Paradise

By: Diana Abu-Jaber
Narrated by: Tamara Marston
Length: 14 hours 38 minutes

Avis Muir is a brilliant pastry chef, Brian Muir a corporate real estate attorney. Their son, Stanley, is the proprietor of a trendy food market. Their beautiful daughter, Felice, is missing. A runaway at 13, Felice has spent five years modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach. She’s about to turn... Read more

Salt Houses

By: Hala Alyan
Narrated by: Leila Buck
Length: 12 hours 15 minutes

Winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award A Best Book of the Year: NPR • NYLON • Kirkus • Bustle • BookPage "What does home mean when you no longer have a house—or a homeland? This beautiful novel traces one Palestinian family's struggle with that question and how it can haunt generations. … This is an example of... Read more

Dearborn

By: Ghassan Zeineddine
Narrated by: Sarab Kamoo & Qarie Marshall
Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Spanning several decades, Ghassan Zeineddine’s debut collection examines the diverse range and complexities of the Arab-American community in Dearborn, Michigan. In ten tragicomic stories, Zeineddine explores themes of identity, generational conflicts, war trauma, migration, sexuality, queerness, home and belonging, and more. In Dearborn, a... Read more

Six Truths and a Lie

By: Ream Shukairy
Narrated by: Rasha Zamamiri, Ali Nasser & Lameece Issaq
Length: 10 hours 49 minutes

Six Muslim teens are falsely accused of a deadly attack in this timely and harrowing examination of America’s justice system, perfect for fans of Angie Thomas and Samira Ahmed.

As fireworks pop off at a rowdy Fourth of July bonfire party, an explosion off the California coast levels an oil rig—resulting in chaos and worse, murder.
 
At the... Read more

But You Don't Look Arab

And Other Tales of Unbelonging

By: Hala Gorani
Narrated by: Hala Gorani
Length: 8 hours 47 minutes

Emmy Award-winning international journalist Hala Gorani weaves stories from her time as a globe-trotting anchor and correspondent with her own lifelong search for identity as the daughter of Syrian immigrants. What is it like to have no clear identity in a world full of labels? How can people find a sense of belonging when they have never felt... Read more

Evil Eye

A Novel

By: Etaf Rum
Narrated by: Vaneh Assadourian & Gail Shalan
Length: 11 hours 13 minutes

“A moving meditation on motherhood, inter-generational trauma and how surface appearances often obscure a deeper truth. . . . A stunning second novel from a writer who set the bar very high with her first!”—Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics and Community BoardThe acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of... Read more

Sword and Scimitar

Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

By: Raymond Ibrahim
Narrated by: John McLain
Length: 14 hours 1 minute

A sweeping history of the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilitiesThe West and Islam—the sword and scimitar—have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad’s order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam,... Read more