The World Literature category has 530 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 7,472 ratings. The most-rated is Indian Horse.
I Am a Pole (And So Can You!)
Summary
The story of a pole, searching for his purpose in life. "The perfect gift to give a child or grandchild for their high school or college graduation. Also Father's Day. Also, other times." —Stephen Colbert PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©2012 Stephen Colbert (P)2012 Hachette
The Wolf in the Whale
Summary
A sweeping tale of clashing cultures, warring gods, and forbidden love: In AD 1000, a young Inuit shaman and a Viking warrior become unwilling allies as war breaks out between their peoples and their gods - one that will determine the fate of them all. "There is a very old story, rarely told, of a wolf that runs into the ocean and becomes a whale." Born with the soul of a hunter and the spirit of the wolf, Omat is destined to follow in her grandfather's footsteps - invoking the spirits of the land, sea, and sky to protect her people. But the gods have stopped listening, and Omat's family is starving. Alone at the edge of the world, hope is all they have left. Desperate to save them, Omat journeys across the icy wastes, fighting for survival with every step. When she meets a Viking warrior and his strange new gods, they set in motion a conflict that could shatter her world...or save it. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Jordanna Max Brodsky (P)2019 Hachette Audio
Car Fever
Summary
From political correctness to cars, Top Gear's James May is back with his hilarious and controversial opinions on...just about everything. As well as writing about his first love, cars, James has a go at political correctness, the endless rules and regulations of daily life, the internal combustion engine, and traffic wardens. He discusses gastropubs, Jeremy Clarkson, and other trials of modern life. His highly entertaining observations from behind the wheel will have you laughing out loud, whether you share his opinions or not. Car Fever is an indispensable guide to life for the modern driver.
©2009 James May (P)2009 Hodder & Stoughton
Return of the Trickster
Summary
In the third book of her brilliant and captivating Trickster Trilogy, Eden Robinson delivers an explosive, surprising and satisfying resolution. All Jared Martin had ever wanted was to be normal, which was already hard enough when he had to cope with Maggie, his hard-partying, gun-toting, literal witch of a mother, Indigenous teen life, and his own addictions. When he wakes up naked, dangerously dehydrated and confused in the basement of his mom's old house in Kitimat, some of the people he loves - the ones who don't see the magic he attracts - just think he fell off the wagon after a tough year of sobriety. The truth for Jared is so much worse. He finally knows for sure that he is the only one of his bio dad Wee'git's 535 children who is a Trickster, too, a shape-shifter with a free pass to other dimensions. Sarah, his ex, is happy he's a magical being, but everyone else he loves is either pissed with him, or in mortal danger from the dark forces he's accidentally unleashed, or both. The scariest of those dark forces is his Aunt Georgina, a maniacal ogress hungry for his power, who has sent her posse of flesh-eating coy-wolves to track him down. Even though his mother resents like hell that Jared has taken after his dad, she is also determined that no one is going to hurt her son. For Maggie it's simple - Kill or be killed, bucko. Soon Jared is at the centre of an all-out war - a horrifying place to be for the universe's sweetest Trickster, whose first instinct is not mischief and mind games but to make the world a kinder, safer, place.
©2021 Penguin Random House Canada (P)2021 Knopf Canada
Snow Falling on Cedars
Summary
As a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial for murder on an island in Puget Sound, snow blankets the countryside. The whiteness covers the courthouse, but it cannot conceal the memories at work inside: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, an unrequited love, and the ghosts of racism that still haunt the islanders. First novels rarely attract as much attention as Snow Falling on Cedars. Remaining on best seller lists for months, it has cast a spell on listeners across the country.
©1994 David Guterson (P)1996 Recorded Books
How Much of These Hills Is Gold
Summary
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize Finalist for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize National best seller A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree A GOOP Book Club Pick "A fully immersive epic drama packed with narrative riches and exquisitely crafted prose." (San Francisco Chronicle) "Belongs on a shelf all of its own." (NPR) "Outstanding." (The Washington Post) "Arresting, beautiful." (The New York Times) "Revolutionary... A visionary addition to American literature." (Star Tribune) An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape - trying not just to survive but to find a home. Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their Western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
©2020 C Pam Zhang (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Summary
“One of the most dazzling and devastating novels I’ve read in a long time...Readers of Fruit of the Drunken Tree will surely be transformed.” (San Francisco Chronicle) “Simultaneously propulsive and poetic, reminiscent of Isabel Allende...Listen to this new author’s voice - she has something powerful to say.” (Entertainment Weekly) A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. But Petrona's unusual behavior belies more than shyness. She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the rip tide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction. As both girls' families scramble to maintain stability amid the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal. Inspired by the author's own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different but inextricably linked coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras has written a powerful testament to the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
©2018 Ingrid Rojas Contreras (P)2018 Random House Audio
Pigs in Heaven
Summary
Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver's best-selling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption, their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and to the heart.
©2016 Barbara Kingsolver (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
The Kitchen God's Wife
Summary
Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than 50 years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose all that has been concealed, when she decides to celebrate the Chinese New Year by unburdening herself of everybody's hidden truths - her own and Winnie's, as well as the dreadful news that Winnie's daughter, Pearl, has been keeping from her mother. So begins a series of comic misunderstandings and heartbreaking realizations about luck, loss, and trust, about the things a mother cannot tell a daughter, the secrets a daughter keeps, and the miraculous resiliency of love.
©1991 Amy Tan (P)2008, 2016 Phoenix Books
Okay Fine Whatever
Summary
The "hilarious and poignant" story of one chronically anxious woman's year-long quest to become braver by seeking out the kinds of experiences she's spent her life avoiding. (Cheryl Strayed) For most of her life (and even during her years as the host of a popular radio show), Courtenay Hameister lived in a state of near-constant dread and anxiety. She fretted about everything. Her age. Her size. Her romantic prospects. How likely it was that she would get hit by a bus on the way home. Until a couple years ago, when, in her mid-forties, she decided to fight back against her debilitating anxieties by spending a year doing little things that scared her - things that the average person might consider doing for a half second before deciding: "nope." Things like: attending a fellatio class. She did that. She also spent an afternoon in a sensory deprivation tank, got (legally) high in the middle of a workday, had a session with a professional cuddler, braved 28 first dates, and (perhaps scariest of all) actually met someone who might possibly appreciate her for who she is. Refreshing, relatable, and pee-your-pants funny, Okay Fine Whatever is Courtenay's hold-nothing-back account of her adventures on the front lines of Mere Human Woman vs. Fear, reminding us that even the tiniest amount of bravery is still bravery, and that no matter who you are, it's possible to fight complacency and become bold, or at least bold-ish, a little at a time.
©2018 Courtenay Hameister (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Mademoiselle Chanel
Summary
For readers of The Paris Wife and Z comes this vivid novel full of drama, passion, tragedy, and beauty that stunningly imagines the life of iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel - the ambitious, gifted laundrywoman's daughter who revolutionized fashion, built an international empire, and became one of the most influential and controversial figures of the twentieth century. Born into rural poverty, Gabrielle Chanel and her siblings are sent to an orphanage after their mother's death. The sisters nurture Gabrielle's exceptional sewing skills, a talent that will propel the willful young woman into a life far removed from the drudgery of her childhood. Transforming herself into Coco, a seamstress and sometime torch singer, the petite brunette burns with ambition, an incandescence that draws a wealthy gentleman who will become the love of her life. She immerses herself in his world of money and luxury, discovering a freedom that sparks her creativity. But it is only when her lover takes her to Paris that Coco discovers her destiny. Rejecting the frilly, corseted silhouette of the past, her sleek, minimalist styles reflect the youthful ease and confidence of the 1920s modern woman. As Coco's reputation spreads, her couturier business explodes, taking her into rarefied society circles and bohemian salons. But her fame and fortune cannot save her from heartbreak as the years pass. And when Paris falls to the Nazis, Coco is forced to make choices that will haunt her. An enthralling novel of an extraordinary woman who created the life she desired, Mademoiselle Chanel explores the inner world of a woman of staggering ambition whose strength, passion, and artistic vision would become her trademarks.
©2015 C. W. Gortner (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
The Sound of Waves
Summary
Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.
©1956 Copyright 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright renewed 1984 by Meredith Weatherby. Originally published in Japan as Shiosai. (P)2010 Audible, Inc
LaRose
Summary
In this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich, the best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Round House and the Pulitzer Prize nominee The Plague of Doves, wields her breathtaking narrative magic in an emotionally haunting contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture. North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence - but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich. The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux's five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides into town; their children played together despite going to different schools; and Landreaux's wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty's mother, Nola. Horrified at what he's done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition - the sweat lodge - for guidance and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. "Our son will be your son now," they tell them. LaRose is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce, rebellious new "sister", Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator who can ease her volatile mother's terrifying moods. Gradually he's allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the Raviches' own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain begins to heal. But when a vengeful man with a longstanding grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole. Inspiring and affecting, LaRose is a powerful exploration of loss, justice, and the reparation of the human heart and an unforgettable, dazzling tour de force from one of America's most distinguished literary masters.
©2016 Louise Erdrich (P)2016 HarperCollins Publishers
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling, Booker Prize - winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves — and our world today. For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art — namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible. This audiobook includes a PDF of the tables, outlines, figures, and appendices from the book.
©2021 George Saunders (P)2021 Random House Audio
Here I Am
Summary
A monumental and instantly best-selling novel from the author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, and Abraham replied obediently, "Here I am." This is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. Over the course of three weeks in present-day Washington, DC, three sons watch their parents' marriage falter and their family home fall apart. Meanwhile, a large catastrophe is engulfing another part of the world: A massive earthquake devastates the Middle East, sparking a pan-Arab invasion of Israel. With global upheaval in the background and domestic collapse in the foreground, Jonathan Safran Foer asks us: What is the true meaning of home? Can one man ever reconcile the conflicting duties of his many roles - husband, father, son? And how much of life can a person ultimately bear?
©2017 John Safran Foer (P)2017 Penguin Random House Canada
Way of the Immortals: Path of the Divine
Summary
Thrust by a mysterious portal into an unknown world, Nick Barnette does what anyone would do in his situation: he runs. Now separated from his friends, and being pursued by powerful forces he doesn’t understand, Nick must navigate the Kingdom of Lhasa and figure out how to get home. Through his trials and tribulations, Nick notices that he has developed a strange power that allows him to slow down time, vastly improving his combat ability. But he doesn’t have any control over the power. And as far as he knows, the only way to cultivate this new power and find his friends is by studying the Way of the Immortals, an ancient tradition practiced by monks and hermits high in the mountains of Lhasa. It won’t be an easy task, but if anyone is up to the challenge, it’s Nick, who might be the most unconventional hero the Kingdom of Lhasa has ever seen. Way of the Immortals: Path of the Divine is a western cultivation series weaving Tibetan and Bhutanese lore into a fast-paced novel that xianxia, wuxia and progression fantasy fans will love. Way of the Immortals is written by Harmon Cooper, best-selling science fantasy GameLit author of series like Fantasy Online, House of Dolls, Cherry Blossom Girls, the Feedback Loop, and Monster Hunt NYC.
©2019 Harmon Cooper (P)2019 Harmon Cooper
In the Shadow of the Banyan
Summary
Told from the tender perspective of a young girl who comes of age amid the Cambodian killing fields, this searing first novel - based on the author’s personal story - has been hailed by Little Bee author Chris Cleave as “a masterpiece… utterly heartbreaking and impossibly beautiful.” For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author’s extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyan is testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience.
©2012 Vaddey Ratner (P)2012 Simon & Schuster
The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave
Summary
The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave is a study of slave making. It describes the rationale and the results of Anglo Saxon's ideas and methods of insuring the master/slave relationship. The infamous Willie Lynch letter gives both African and Caucasian students and teachers some insight, concerning the brutal and inhumane psychology behind the African slave trade. The materialistic viewpoint of Southern plantation owners that slavery was a business and the victims of chattel slavery were merely pawns in an economic game of debauchery, crossbreeding, interracial rape and mental conditioning of a negroid race, they considered subhuman. Equally important is the international nature of the European economic, political and cultural climate that influenced the slave trade. Within the time scale of African History, it was a relatively short period, a mere one and a half centuries from the most intensive phase of the Atlantic slave trade to the advent of European administration and dominance. Long before that the Slave Coast had been chartered by the Portuguese and the people off the area west of Benin, between the Volta River and Lagos, European traders traced a cultural history which linked them with the earliest Yoruba settlements to the north and eastern borders of Africa.
©2013 Willie Lynch (P)2013 BN Publishing
The Sound of Glass
Summary
The New York Times best-selling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern family's buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it secret by shattering secret. It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward's husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news - Cal's family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal's reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt. Charting the course of an uncertain life - and feeling guilt from her husband's tragic death - Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal's unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt's, will change and define her as she navigates her new life - a new life complicated by the arrival of her too-young stepmother and 10-year-old half brother. Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country.
©2015 Harley House Books, LLC (P)2015 Recorded Books
Woman at Point Zero
Summary
'All the men I did get to know, every single one of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face. But because I am a woman, I have never had the courage to lift my hand. And because I am a prostitute, I hid my fear under layers of make-up.' So begins Firdaus' story, leading to her grimy Cairo prison cell, where she welcomes her death sentence as a relief from her pain and suffering. Born to a peasant family in the Egyptian countryside, Firdaus suffered a childhood of cruelty and neglect. Her passion for education was ignored by her family, and on leaving school she was forced to marry a much older man. Following her escapes from violent relationships, she finally met Sharifa, who told her that 'a man does not know a woman's value; the higher you price yourself, the more he will realise what you are really worth' and led her into a life of prostitution. Desperate and alone, she took drastic action. Saadawi's searing indictment of society's brutal treatment of women continues to resonate today. This classic audiobook has been an inspiration to countless people across the world.
©1975 Nawal el Saadawi (P)2016 Audible, Ltd