As recommended by NPR

American Spirits

By: Russell Banks
Narrated by: Danny Campbell
Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

From one of America’s most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies.

A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A... Read more

All We Were Promised

A Novel

By: Ashton Lattimore
Narrated by: Shayna Small & Ashton Lattimore
Length: 12 hours 44 minutes

“This is my kind of book! I love historical fiction that makes me want to befriend some characters and fight others. There are so many historically accurate elements throughout and a tiny bit of romance. Such a great listen! No swearing. No sex. Some violence of the times. Read more

Adam & Evie's Matchmaking Tour

A Novel

By: Nora Nguyen
Narrated by: Ewan Chung & Viet Thanh Nguyen
Length: 10 hours 38 minutes

A rollicking, unforgettable romance about two strangers finding love despite their best efforts as they embark on a sweeping matchmaking tour through Việt Nam, perfect for readers of Carley Fortune and Abby Jimenez. What’s a few weeks to a lifetime of promise?Evie Lang’s life is in shambles. On the heels of losing her beloved aunt, she's... Read more

Accordion Eulogies

A Memoir of Music, Migration, and Mexico

By: Noé Álvarez
Narrated by: Asa Siegel
Length: 5 hours 41 minutes

Searching, propulsive, and deeply spiritual, Accordion Eulogies is an odyssey to repair a severed family lineage, told through the surprising history of a musical instrument



Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez never knew his grandfather. Stories swirled around this mythologized, larger-than-life figure: That he had abandoned his family,... Read more

A Wilder Shore

The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson

By: Camille Peri
Narrated by: Jeanette Illidge
Length: 16 hours 14 minutes

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE PICK

“Engrossing . . . [A] richly researched and vivid double portrait.” —Phyllis Rose, The Atlantic

“A love story, an adventure story, two literary biographies in one; A Wilder Shore is these things and more—and it's very, very good.” —Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha... Read more

A Very Private School

A Memoir

By: Charles Spencer
Narrated by: Charles Spencer
Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

“A tour de force.” —The Washington Post

In this poignant memoir, Charles Spencer recounts the trauma of being sent away from home at age eight to attend boarding school.

A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of a culture of cruelty at the school Charles Spencer attended in his youth and provides... Read more

A Thousand Times Before

A Novel

By: Asha Thanki
Narrated by: Priya Ayyar
Length: 11 hours 19 minutes

“A rich family saga about art and memory's power to inform the present, make peace with the past, and maybe even alter the future.” — Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts

“[Asha] Thanki reinvents generational memory, conjuring inheritance as a tapestry of love, trauma, and choices that echo through blood. A... Read more

A Talent for Murder

A Novel

By: Peter Swanson
Narrated by: Sophie Amoss, Stephen Graybill, Saskia Maarleveld, Graham Halstead, Kathleen Early & Keith Szarabajka
Length: 8 hours 24 minutes

“I've read four Peter Swanson books now, and each one has elicited some variation of the 'what am I reading/ what the hell just happened?' response from me. Master of the unreliable narrator, the surprise ending, the unexpected (maybe even bizarre) plot twist, he's THE ONE: my favorite mystery author. Period. Read more

A Sorceress Comes to Call

By: T. Kingfisher
Narrated by: Eliza Foss & Jennifer Pickens
Length: 11 hours 7 minutes

“One of the most striking things about this book is just how every chapter is captivating. Not bogged down in overly described scenes, it is focused on the characters to the point you feel everything the characters are feeling. While there isn't much traveling and sometimes not much action, you are still on the edge of your seat for what comes... Read more

A Short Walk Through a Wide World

A Novel

By: Douglas Westerbeke
Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

“The author (who is a librarian) wove themes of adventure, mysterious places, suspense and fantasy together. His character Aubrey has a disease that will kill her if she stays too long in one place. She moves from one unique place to another, encountering mystical symbols and intriguing people. Locations and characters are vividly written. The... Read more

A Shore Thing

By: Joanna Lowell
Narrated by: Ros Watt
Length: 13 hours 12 minutes

“Macho bicycle jousting, trans joy, a super steamy bathtub scene, seaweed inspections - what a delight! This charming romp of a queer Victorian romance will have you cycling across the British seaside with an enterprising botanist and the rakish artist she needs to illustrate her upcoming lecture. This is what I love to have in a historical... Read more

A Map of Future Ruins

On Borders and Belonging

By: Lauren Markham
Narrated by: Gilli Messer
Length: 7 hours 22 minutes

“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
 
When and how did migration become a crime? Why does ancient Greece remain so... Read more

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

By: Tia Williams
Narrated by: Mela Lee & Preston Butler
Length: 11 hours 42 minutes

In this sexy modern-day fairytale from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Days in June, a free-spirited florist and an enigmatic musician share a soul mate connection told through the history, art, and the magic of Harlem.

The daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, Ricki Wilde is the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. In her... Read more

A Fatal Inheritance

How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery

By: Lawrence Ingrassia
Narrated by: Roger Wayne
Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

Weaving his own moving family story with a sweeping history of cancer research, Lawrence Ingrassia delivers an intimate, gripping tale that sits at the intersection of memoir and medical thriller

Ingrassia lost his mother, two sisters, brother, and nephew to cancer—different cancers developing at different points throughout their lives. And while... Read more

A Better World

A Novel

By: Sarah Langan
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Sean Patrick Hopkins & Sura Siu
Length: 14 hours 4 minutes

One of NPR’s Best Books of 2024

For fans of Nightbitch and While No One Is Watching, comes “one of the best books this year, or any year” (Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World)—a disturbing dystopian thrillfest about a woman moving to a glittering town of the future, whose investigation of a local tragedy puts a target on... Read more

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

By: Nam Le
Narrated by: Nam Le
Length: 1 hour 17 minutes

An explosive, devastating debut book of poetry from the acclaimed author of The Boat

In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature—in a virtuosic array of forms and registers—before shattering the... Read more

The Women

A Novel

By: Kristin Hannah
Narrated by: Julia Whelan & Kristin Hannah
Length: 14 hours 56 minutes

“This book wrecked me. Julia Whelan's narration is compassionate, loving, and dramatic - as always. Kristin Hannah is an author who has a true gift for telling women's stories and The Women is, arguably, her best work. I grew up in an era of children whose parents served in Vietnam (my parents didn't, but my uncle did) and I will never know what... Read more

Real Americans

A novel

By: Rachel Khong
Narrated by: Louisa Zhu, Eric Yang & Eunice Wong
Length: 14 hours 40 minutes

“Real Americans is a novel about people doing their best for the people they love, the vast spectrum of what that can mean, and how anyone lives with the impossible choices they make in pursuit of that noble goal. This is also a novel about what makes a person who they are - their experiences, genetics, community, environment, place in history,... Read more

Martyr!

A novel

By: Kaveh Akbar
Narrated by: Arian Moayed
Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

“I honestly have a hard time verbalizing exactly what I love about this novel, except to say that I am writing this staff pick months after reading it because it's still on my mind. Cyrus Shams was a baby when his mother's plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. Following her death, Cyrus and his father move to Indiana; his father dies as... Read more

The Ministry of Time

A Novel

By: Kaliane Bradley
Narrated by: George Weightman & Katie Leung
Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

“This book was so great and very different than anything I have ever read before. With many genres comedy, romance, sci-fi, time travel and a whole lot of speculative fiction, it was very fast-paced and entertaining! I became very attached to the main and side characters. It made me laugh out loud and cry. I was on my edge on the edge of my seat... Read more