Amanda Carlin has narrated 28 audiobooks on Listento.it by 34 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 132 ratings. The most-rated is The Invited.
True Believer
Summary
This astonishing real-life spy thriller, filled with danger, misplaced loyalties, betrayal, treachery, and pure evil, with a plot twist worthy of John le Carré, is relevant today as a tale of fanaticism and the lengths it takes us to. True Believer reveals the life of Noel Field, an American who betrayed his country and crushed his family. Field, once a well-meaning and privileged American, spied for Stalin during the 1930s and '40s. Then a pawn in Stalin's sinister master strategy, Field was kidnapped and tortured by the KGB and forced to testify against his own Communist comrades. How does an Ivy League-educated, US State Department employee deeply rooted in American culture and history become a hardcore Stalinist? The 1930s, when Noel Field joined the secret underground of the International Communist Movement, were a time of national collapse: 10 million Americans unemployed, rampant racism, retreat from the world just as fascism was gaining ground, and Washington - pre-FDR - parched of fresh ideas. Communism promised the righting of social and political wrongs, and many in Field's generation were seduced by its siren song. Few, however, went as far as Noel Field in betraying their own country. With a reporter's eye for detail and a historian's grasp of the cataclysmic events of the 20th century, Kati Marton captures Field's riveting quest for a life of meaning that went horribly wrong. True Believer is supported by unprecedented access to Field family correspondence, Soviet secret-police records, and reporting on key players from Alger Hiss, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and World War II spy master "Wild Bill" Donovan to the most sinister of all: Josef Stalin. A story of another time, this is a tale relevant for all times.
©2016 Kati Marton (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
The Marriage of Sticks
Summary
Miranda Romanac is a successful 30-something woman in today's modern world, yet she feels alone and adrift on the sea of her life. At her high school reunion she makes a shattering discovery that further undermines her already shaky sense of who she is and where she is going. When she meets the remarkable Hugh Oakley, her life takes a 180-degree turn for the better - but at what price? When they move to a house in the country to start a new life together, the reality Miranda had once known begins to slip away. Miranda is haunted by alarming, impossible visions and strangers whom she feels certain she has known, although they are all from other times and places. As these phantom lives consume her own and begin to affect all that she knows and loves, Miranda must learn the truth to reclaim it. But sometimes the hardest truth to accept is the knowledge of who we really are.
©1999 Jonathan Carroll (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Northwest Corner
Summary
The New York Times Book Review called Reservation Road “a triumph”, and the novel was universally acclaimed. Now, in a brilliant literary performance by one of our most compelling and compassionate writers, John Burnham Schwartz reintroduces us to Reservation Road’s unforgettable characters in a superb new work of fiction that stands magnificently on its own. Northwest Corner is a riveting story about the complex, fierce, ultimately inspiring resilience of families in the face of life’s most difficult and unexpected challenges. Twelve years after a tragic accident and a cover-up that led to prison time, Dwight Arno, now 50, is a man who has started over without exactly moving on. Living alone in California, haunted yet keeping his head down, Dwight manages a sporting-goods store and dates a woman to whom he hasn’t revealed the truth about his past. Then an unexpected arrival throws his carefully neutralized life into turmoil and exposes all that he’s hidden. Sam, Dwight’s estranged college-age son, has shown up without warning, fleeing a devastating incident in his own life. In its way, Sam’s sense of guilt is as crushing as his father’s. As the two men are forced to confront their similar natures and their half-buried hopes for connection, they must also search for redemption and love. In turn, they dramatically transform the lives of the women around them: the ex-wives, mothers, and lovers they have turned to in their desperate attempts to somehow rewrite, outrun, or eradicate the past. Told in the resonant voices of everyday people gripped in the emotional riptide of lived life, Northwest Corner is at once tough and heart-lifting, an urgent, powerful story about family bonds that can never be broken and the wayward roads that lead us back to those we love.
©2011 John Burnham Schwartz (P)2011 Random House
Unsung
Summary
A new historical anthology from transatlantic slavery to the Reconstruction curated by the Schomburg Center, that makes the case for focusing on the histories of Black people as agents and architects of their own lives and ultimate liberation, with a foreword by Kevin Young This is the first Penguin Classics anthology published in partnership with the Schomburg Center, a world-renowned cultural institution documenting Black life in America and worldwide. A historic branch of NYPL located in Harlem, the Schomburg holds one of the world's premiere collections of slavery material within the Lapidus Center for Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery. Unsung will place well-known documents by abolitionists alongside lesser-known life stories and overlooked or previously uncelebrated accounts of the everyday lives and activism that were central in the slavery era, but that are mostly excised from today's master accounts. Unsung will also highlight related titles from founder Arturo Schomburg's initial collection: rare histories and first-person narratives about slavery that assisted his generation in understanding the roots of their contemporary social struggles. Unsung will draw from the Schomburg's rich holdings in order to lead a dynamic discussion of slavery, rebellion, resistance, and anti-slavery protest in the United States.
©2021 Schomburg Center, Michelle Commander, and Kevin Young (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait?
Summary
An eye-opening, inspiring, and timely account of the complex relationship between notable suffragist Alice Paul and President Woodrow Wilson in her fight for women’s equality. Woodrow Wilson lands in Washington, DC, in March of 1913, a day before he is set to take the presidential oath of office. Expecting a throng of onlookers, he is instead met with minimal interest as the crowd and media alike watch a 25-year-old Alice Paul organize 8,000 suffragists in a first-of-its-kind protest led by a woman riding a white horse just a few blocks away from the Washington platform. The next day, the New York Times calls the procession “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country”. Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? weaves together two storylines: Paul’s and Wilson’s, two seemingly complete opposites who had more in common than either one could imagine. Paul’s procession led her to be granted a one-on-one meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, one that would lead to many meetings and much discussion, though little progress. With no equality in sight and patience wearing thin, Paul organized the first group to ever picket on the White House lawn - night and day, through sweltering summer mornings and frigid fall nights. From solitary confinement, hunger strikes, and mental institutions to sitting right across from President Woodrow Wilson, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait? reveals the inspiring near-death journey it took, spearheaded in no small part by Paul's leadership, to grant women the right to vote in America. A rousing portrait of a little-known feminist heroine and an inspirational exploration of a crucial moment in American history - one century before the Women’s March - this is a perfect audiobook for fans of Hidden Figures.
©2019 Tina Cassidy (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
Mohawk
Summary
Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series - and reissued now in audiobook - Richard Russo’s Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles more than a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations - and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys - these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself. For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio, or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events, and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.
©1986 Richard Russo (P)2019 Random House Audio
Dream New Dreams
Summary
A remarkably frank, deeply moving, and inspiring memoir by Jai Pausch, whose husband, Randy, wrote the bestseller The Last Lecture while battling pancreatic cancer. "Jai is such a giver that she often forgets to take care of herself," Randy Pausch wrote about his wife. "Jai knows that she'll have to give herself permission to make herself a priority." In Dream New Dreams, Jai Pausch shares her own story for the first time: her emotional journey from wife and mother to full-time caregiver, shuttling between her three young children and Randy's bedside as he sought treatment far from home; and then to widow and single parent, fighting to preserve a sense of stability for her family, while coping with her own grief and the challenges of running a household without a partner. Jai paints a vivid, honest portrait of a vital, challenging relationship between two strong people who faced a grim prognosis and the self-sacrificing decisions it often required. As she faced life without the husband she called her "magic man" Jai learned to make herself a priority to create a new life of hope and happiness - as she puts it, to "feel a spark of my own magic beginning to flicker." Dream New Dreams is a powerful story of grief, healing, and newfound independence. With advice artfully woven into an intimate, beautifully written narrative, Jai's story will inspire not only the legions of readers who made The Last Lecture a bestseller, but also those who are embarking on a journey of loss and renewal themselves.
©2012 Jai Pausch (P)2012 Random House Audio
How to Make Your Money Last
Summary
With How to Make Your Money Last, you will learn how to turn your retirement savings into a steady paycheck that will last for life. Today people worry that they're going to run out of money in their older age. That won't happen if you use a few tricks for squeezing higher payments from your assets - from your Social Security account (find the hidden values there), pension (monthly income or lump sum?), home equity (sell and invest the proceeds or take a reverse mortgage?), savings (should you buy a lifetime annuity?), and retirement accounts (how to invest and - critically - how much to withdraw from your savings each year). The right moves will not only raise the amount you have to spend; they'll stretch out your money over many more years. You will also learn to look at your savings and investments in a new way. If you stick with super-safe choices, the money might not last. You need safe money to help pay the bills in your early retirement years. But to ensure that you'll still have spending money 10 and 20 years from now, you have to invest for growth today. Quinn shows you how. At a time when people are living longer yet retiring with smaller pots of savings than they'd hoped for, this book will become the essential guide.
©2016 Quinn Works (P)2016 Simon & Schuster, Inc.