Julia Whelan has narrated 233 audiobooks on Listento.it by 218 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 20,381 ratings. The most-rated is Educated.
Alone Together
Summary
Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort During the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. Ms. Haupt rallied a diverse roster of more than 90 authors to contribute their work to Alone Together, free of charge, including Kwame Alexander, Jenna Blum, Andre Dubus III, Jamie Ford, Nikki Giovanni, Pam Houston, Jean Kwok, Major Jackson, Caroline Leavitt, Ada Limón, Dani Shapiro, David Sheff, Garth Stein, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Yarbrough, and Lidia Yuknavitch. Alone Together is divided into five sections: What Now?, Grieve, Comfort, Connect, and Don't Stop. The overarching theme is how this age of isolation and uncertainty holds the possibility of changing us as individuals and a society. Narrated by a full cast, including Edoardo Ballerini, January LaVoy, Dion Graham, Julia Whelan, Adenrele Ojo, Emily Woo Zeller, Thérèse Plummer, Ron Butler, Adjoa Andoh, Christian Barillas, Almarie Guerra, Cynthia Farrell, and Dawn Harvey.
©2020 Podium Audio (P)2020 Podium Audio
We Are the Goldens
Summary
Nell worships her older sister, Layla. They're one unit, intertwined: Nellayla. As Nell and her best friend, Felix, start their freshman year in high school, on Layla's turf, there's so much Nell looks forward to: Joining Layla on the varsity soccer team. Parties. Boys. Adventures. But the year takes a very different turn. Layla is changing, withdrawing. She's hiding something, and when Nell discovers what it is, and the consequences it might have, she struggles. She wants to support Layla, to be her confidante, to be the good sister she's always been. But with so much at stake, what secrets should she keep? What lies should she tell? Award-winning young adult author Dana Reinhardt explores questions of loyalty, love, and betrayal in this provocative and intimate novel.
©2014 Dana Reinhardt (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved
Hidden Cove
Summary
Oscar-nominated actress Meg Tilly strikes again with the third gripping contemporary romantic suspense novel set on the idyllic Solace Island in the Pacific Northwest. When Solace Island gallery owner Zelia Thompson's close friend Alexus Feinstein of the prestigious art gallery Feinstein & Co. dies of a "drug overdose," Zelia's intuition sounds an alarm. The Alexus she knew didn't do drugs and had everything to live for. As Zelia begins looking into the circumstances of her friend's death, what she uncovers will put her life in imminent danger. Will Zelia - with the help of the reclusive crime fiction novelist Gabe Conaghan - be able to unravel the mysterious happenings surrounding Alexus's untimely death? Or will she become the bloodthirsty artist's next victim? Read by Abby Craden and Tad Branson, with Sile Bermingham, Steve Hendrickson, Meg Tilly, Neil Shah, and Julia Whelan
©2019 Meg Tilly (P)2019 Penguin Audio
Liner Notes
Summary
Side A: Laney's Going Solo Laney has just finished graduate school in California and sees her cross-country drive as the perfect chance to reflect on the past before facing her future back East. With 3,000 miles ahead of her and a box of mix tapes as her only companion, she envisions a trip spent reminiscing; whether it's her first camp kisses, high school parties and crushes, or college loves and losses, Laney's most treasured memories - good and bad - are all just a song away. Side B: A Change of Tune Laney's mother, in town for graduation, thinks a mother-daughter road trip sounds like much more fun than going it alone - and Laney can hardly refuse. Soon, she's giving her mother a crash course not only in pop music of the '70s and '80s but also in her own life... for somehow Mom doesn't know her daughter as well as she'd like to. Together, as America whizzes by, Laney and her mother are turning up the volume of their relationship... and learning that there's nothing more revealing than the soundtrack of our lives.
©2003 Emily Franklin (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Painted Horses
Summary
In the mid-1950s, America was flush with prosperity and saw an unbroken line of progress clear to the horizon, while the West was still very much wild. In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress. Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana with a huge task before her - a canyon "as deep as the devil's own appetites." Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove that nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar - the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there's John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the US Army's last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman's vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.
©2014 Malcolm Brooks (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
Die for Me
Summary
My life had always been blissfully, wonderfully normal. But it only took one moment to change everything. Suddenly, my sister, Georgia, and I were orphans. We put our lives into storage and moved to Paris to live with my grandparents. And I knew my shattered heart, my shattered life, would never feel normal again. Then I met Vincent. Mysterious, sexy, and unnervingly charming, Vincent Delacroix appeared out of nowhere and swept me off my feet. Just like that, I was in danger of losing my heart all over again. But I was ready to let it happen. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. Because Vincent is no normal human. He has a terrifying destiny, one that puts his life at risk every day. He also has enemies... immortal, murderous enemies who are determined to destroy him and all of his kind. While I'm fighting to piece together the remnants of my life, can I risk putting my heart - as well as my life and my family's - in jeopardy for a chance at love?
©2011 Amy Plum (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers
Loss of Innocence
Summary
From acclaimed author Richard North Patterson comes a sweeping family drama of dark secrets and individual awakenings, set against the backdrop of the tumultuous summer of 1968. America is in a state of turbulence, engulfed in civil unrest and uncertainty. Yet for Whitney Dane - spending the summer of her twenty-second year on Martha's Vineyard - life could not be safer, nor the future more certain. Educated at Wheaton, soon to be married, and the youngest daughter of the all-American Dane family, Whitney has everything she has ever wanted and is everything her all-powerful and doting father, Charles Dane, wants her to be. But the Vineyard's still waters are disturbed by the appearance of Benjamin Blaine. An underprivileged yet fiercely ambitious and charismatic figure, he is a force of nature neither Whitney nor her family could have prepared for. As Ben's presence begins to awaken independence within Whitney, it also brings deep-rooted family tensions to a dangerous head. And soon Whitney's set-in-stone future becomes far from satisfactory and her picture-perfect family far from pretty.
©2013 Richard North Patterson (P)2013 AudioGO
Forgotten
Summary
Every night, while 16-year-old London Lane is asleep, her memory of that day is erased. In the morning, all she can “remember” are events from her future. London is used to relying on reminder notes and a trusted friend to get through the day, but things get complicated when a new boy at school enters the picture. Luke Henry is not someone you’d easily forget, yet try as she might, London can’t find him in her memories of things to come. When London starts experiencing disturbing flashbacks, or flash-forwards, as the case may be, she realizes it’s time to learn about the past she keeps forgetting—before it destroys her future.
©2011 Cat Patrick (P)2011 Listening Library
If I Should Die
Summary
I will not lose another person I love. I will not let history repeat itself. Vincent waited lifetimes to find me, but in an instant our future together has been shattered. He was betrayed by Violette, someone we both called a friend, and I lost him. Now Violette is determined to rule over France's immortals, and she's willing to wage a war to get what she wants. It shouldn't be possible, none of it should be, but this is my reality. I know Vincent is somewhere out there, I know he's not completely gone, and I will do anything to save him. After what we've already fought to achieve, a life without Vincent is unimaginable. He once swore to avoid dying - to go against his nature and forsake sacrificing himself for others - so that we could be together. How can I not risk everything to bring my love back to me?
©2013 Amy Plum (P)2013 HarperCollinsPublishers
Pretty
Summary
An electrifying debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Some Girls. Jillian Lauren’s breathtakingly honest memoir, Some Girls, earned both critical praise and outstanding sales. In Pretty, Lauren delivers on her promise as a “natural storyteller” (Los Angeles Weekly) with a powerful novel about a broken girl looking to be saved.. Bebe Baker is an ex-everything: ex-stripper, ex-Christian, ex–drug addict, ex–pretty girl. It’s been one year since the car accident that killed her boyfriend left her scarred and shaken. Flanked by an eccentric posse of friends, she is serving out a self-imposed sentence at a halfway house while trying to finish cosmetology school. Amid the rampant diagnoses, over-medication, compulsive eating, and acrylic nails of Los Angeles, Bebe looks for something to believe in before something—her past, the dangerously magnetic men in her life, her own bad choices—knocks her off course again. Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls and has an MFA from Antioch University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Weezer bassist Scott Shriner, and their son.
©2011 Jillian Lauren (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
A Thread So Thin
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Marie Bostwick crafts a timeless tale of friendship, love, and the choices we must make in their name. While New Bern, Connecticut, lies under a blanket of snow, Cobbled Court Quilts remains a cozy haven for its owner, Evelyn Dixon, and her friends. Evelyn relishes winter’s slower pace—besides, Internet sales are hopping, thanks to her son Garrett’s efforts. In addition to helping out at the shop, Garrett has also been patiently waiting for his girlfriend, Liza, to finish art school in New York City. But as much as Evelyn loves Liza, she wonders if it’s a good idea for her son to be so serious so soon with a young woman who’s just getting ready to spread her wings. Liza’s wondering the same thing, especially after Garrett rolls out the red carpet for a super-romantic New Year’s Eve—complete with a marriage proposal. Garrett’s the closest thing to perfect she’s ever known, but what about her own imperfections? The only happy marriage Liza has ever seen is her aunt Abigail’s, and it took her decades to tie the knot. Soon Liza is not only struggling with her own fears but with the mixed reactions of her friends and family. And when she finds herself torn between a rare career opportunity and her love for Garrett, Liza must grasp at the thinnest of threads and pray it holds.
©2010 Marie Bostwick Skinner (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Fire Will Fall
Summary
ShadowStrike poisoned the water of Trinity Falls two months ago. Now the Trinity Four, the teens most affected by the poison, have been isolated in a remote mansion under 24-hour medical care while scientists on four continents rush to discover a cure. Meanwhile, US operatives scour the world for the bioterrorists responsible for this heinous crime as two teen virtual spies, also infected, hunt for the criminals on the Internet. The danger remains real - for ShadowStrike has every reason to pursue the Trinity Four, and their evil plan will unleash a new designer virus that’s even deadlier than the first. Carol Plum-Ucci is the author of numerous novels for teens, including The Body of Christopher Creed, a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book that was also nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Mystery.
©2010 Carol Plum-Ucci (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Last Summer at the Golden Hotel
Summary
A family reunion for the ages when two clans convene for the summer at their beloved getaway in the Catskills - perfect for fans of Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - from the acclaimed author of The Floating Feldmans. In its heyday, The Golden Hotel was the crown jewel of the hotter-than-hot Catskills vacation scene. For more than 60 years, the Goldman and Weingold families - best friends and business partners - have presided over this glamorous resort which served as a second home for well-heeled guests and celebrities. But the Catskills are not what they used to be - and neither is the relationship between the Goldmans and the Weingolds. As the facilities and management begin to fall apart, a tempting offer to sell forces the two families together again to make a heart-wrenching decision. Can they save their beloved Golden or is it too late? Long-buried secrets emerge, new dramas and financial scandal erupt, and everyone from the traditional grandparents to the millennial grandchildren wants a say in the hotel’s future. Business and pleasure clash in this fast-paced, hilarious, nostalgia-filled story, where the hotel owners rediscover the magic of a bygone era of nonstop fun even as they grapple with what may be their last resort.
©2021 Elyssa Friedland (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Identity Theft
Summary
Identity Theft is an award-winning book that follows Stanford professor Debra Meyerson’s journey to recover from a severe stroke that initially left her physically incapacitated and unable to speak. In addition to providing realistic expectations for the hard work needed to regain everyday capabilities, Meyerson focuses on the less frequently documented emotional journey in recovery. Virtually every survivor is haunted by questions like: “Who am I now?” and “How do I rebuild a meaningful and rewarding life?” after losing so much of what they had before - capabilities, careers and jobs, relationships, and more. This is a book full of hope for survivors - from stroke or other injuries - as well as their families and support networks. Debra Meyerson and her husband Steve Zuckerman have created Stroke Onward (www.strokeonward.org), a nonprofit initiative of the Social Good Fund, to provide stroke survivors, families, and caregivers with more resources to help them navigate the emotional journey to rebuild their identities and rewarding lives. Winner of the 2019 Silver Nautilus Book Award, Identity Theft centers on Debra’s experience: her stroke, her extraordinary efforts to recover, and her journey to redefine herself. But she also draws on her skills as a social scientist, sharing stories from several dozen fellow survivors, family members, friends, colleagues, therapists, and doctors she has met and interviewed. By sharing this diversity of experiences, Debra highlights how every person is different, every stroke is different, and every recovery is different. She provides a valuable look at the broad possibilities for successfully navigating the challenging physical recovery - and the equally difficult emotional journey toward rebuilding one’s identity and a rewarding life after a trauma like stroke. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Debra E. Meyerson (P)2019 Andrews McMeel Publishing
Slow Burn
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of We All Looked Up comes the second novel in the Anchor & Sophia trilogy, where the rules of humanity are called into question by two warring cities. After their devastating journey from the Anchor to Sophia, Clive and Clover Hamill, Gemma Poplin, and Paz Dedios have all been separated - not only in space, but in their convictions. In the Anchor, Clive would like nothing better than to never speak with Paz again, but when he is tapped to help with her interrogation, the two of them begin to reconcile their differences, which don’t run nearly as deep as they expected. In Sophia, as Clover learns more and more about the city and its enigmatic director, Zeno, his faith in his mission begins to waver. And Gemma embarks on a journey of self-discovery and spiritual expansion that will open her eyes…if it doesn't kill her first. In Slow Burn, the second book in the Anchor & Sophia trilogy, these four young people will be compelled to question everything they thought they believed - and the conclusions they reach could determine the fate of an entire civilization.
©2018 Tommy Wallach (P)2018 Simon & Schuster Audio
All We Have Is Now
Summary
From the author of The Bridge from Me to You, a groundbreaking novel about what matters most - when time is running out. What do you do with your last day on Earth? There are 27 hours and 15 minutes left until a meteor strikes North America, and for Emerson and everyone else who didn't leave, the world will end. But Emerson's world already ended when she ran away from home last year. Since then she has lived on the streets, relying on her wits and her friend, Vince, to help her find places to sleep and food to eat. The city's quieter now that most people are gone, and no one seems to know what to do as the end approaches. But then Emerson and Vince meet Carl, who tells them that he has been granting people's wishes. He gave his car away so a woman could take her son to see the ocean for the first time, and he gives Emerson and Vince all the money he has in his wallet. Suddenly this last day seems full of possibility. Emerson and Vince can grant a lot of wishes in 27 hours - maybe even their own.
©2015 Lisa Schroder (P)2015 Scholastic Inc.
The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine
Summary
A never-before-published, previously unfinished Mark Twain children's story is brought to life by Caldecott Medal winners Philip Stead and Erin Stead. In a hotel in Paris one evening in 1879, Mark Twain sat with his young daughters, who begged their father for a story. Choosing a picture from a magazine to get started, Twain began telling them the tale of Johnny, a poor boy in possession of some magical seeds, who finds himself on a quest to rescue a stolen prince. Later, Twain would jot down some rough notes about the story, but the tale was left unfinished...until now. Plucked from the Mark Twain archives at the University of California, Berkeley, Twain's notes now form the foundation of a fairy tale picked up over a century later. With only Twain's fragmentary script and a story that stops partway as his guide, author Philip Stead has written a tale that imagines what might have been if Twain had fully realized this work. This is a story that reaches through time and brings us the debut children's book of America's most legendary writer, envisioned by one of today's most important names in children's literature.
©2017 Philip C. Stead (P)2017 Listening Library
Exigency
Summary
Nine brilliant scientists travel light-years on a one-way trip to an Earthlike planet. Their mission is to study from orbit the two species of intelligent lifeforms on the surface. The first: an isolated people embarking on civilization and building their world's first city. The second: a brutal race of massive predators, spread thick and still growing across the dominant landmass - destined to breed and eat their way to extinction within a few centuries. After eight years of observation, disaster strikes the orbiting station, and only two crewmembers eject successfully. Drifting down through a dark, alien sky, the pair realizes their escape pod launched not toward the safety of the city but to the other side of the planet, touching down deep inside a land no human could possibly survive.
©2014 Michael Siemsen (P)2015 Podium Publishing
The Moon Sisters
Summary
After their mother’s probable suicide, Jazz and Olivia Moon struggle to move on with their lives. Olivia, an 18-year-old who can taste words and see sounds, blinds herself by staring at the sun, then decides to walk to the remote setting of her mother’s unfinished novel to resuscitate her hopes and dreams. Jazz, 22, plagued by unresolved conflict with her mother and a hidden trove of her unsent letters, takes a job in a funeral home before being forced back into the role of her sister’s keeper. The sisters’ journey through the wilds of West Virginia, disaster-prone from the start, takes a turn when they meet two train-hoppers with dangerous secrets, and Jazz learns that Olivia holds a dark secret of her own in the form of their mother’s final unread letter. Mistrust, resentments, and new attachments threaten to tear the two apart, until a final bizarre misadventure forces them to decide what’s really important. This mesmerizing coming-of-age novel, with its sheen of near-magical realism, is a moving tale of family and the power of stories.
©2018 Therese Walsh (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Butterfly Lampshade
Summary
The first novel in 10 years from the author of the beloved New York Times best seller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world. On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight-year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents - her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact - she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past, and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is: What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood? Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.
©2020 Aimee Bender (P)2020 Random House Audio