Matthew Edison has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 6 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 674 ratings. The most-rated is Women Talking.
Women Talking
Summary
A finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award
2020 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
A transformative and necessary work - as completely unexpected as it is inspired - by the award-winning author of the best-selling novels All My Puny Sorrows and A Complicated Kindness.
The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. Eight women - ordinary grandmothers, mothers, and teenagers; yet to August, each one extraordinary - will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day's true task will begin. This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation.
Thus begins Miriam Toews' spellbinding novel. Gradually, as we hear the women's vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale, and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have 48 hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony. And like a vast night sky coming into view behind the bright sparks of their voices, we learn of the devastating events that have led to this moment.
Acerbic, funny, tender, sorrowful, and wise, Women Talking is composed of equal parts humane love and deep anger. It is award-winning writer Miriam Toews' most astonishing novel to date, containing within its two short days and hayloft setting an expansive, timeless universe of thinking and feeling about women - and men - in our contemporary world.
©2018 Miriam Toews (P)2018 Knopf Canada
Make Me King
Summary
After the apocalypse, the world’s most valuable resource is the people that remain. And the knowledge and skills they possess. On the island of Big Tancook, Collie Jones is making plans. She informs the islanders that it’s time to resume her original mission - to find other survivors, screen them, and return them to the island. Every survivor she brings back is one more valuable addition to the skill and gene pool. But first, she must return to the place whence she came. She must secure the elaborate government bunker called Whitecap and its vast stores of munitions within. With a small group accompanying her - including Gus Berry, the Mountain Man - the islanders will once again return to the mainland and confront a new enemy. An enemy who has the very same goal of locating survivors, but for a different purpose. To build an empire. Contains coarse language and violence.
©2019 Keith C. Blackmore (P)2020 Podium Publishing
The Yellow Wife
Summary
"A fully immersive, intricately crafted story inspired by the pages of history. In Pheby, Sadeqa Johnson has created a woman whose struggle to survive and to protect the ones she loves will have readers turning the pages as fast as their fingers can fly. Simply enthralling." (Lisa Wingate, number one New York Times best-selling author of Before We Were Yours) Called "wholly engrossing" by New York Times best-selling author Kathleen Grissom, this harrowing story follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her 18th birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold every day. There, Pheby is exposed not just to her Jailer’s cruelty but also to his contradictions. To survive, Pheby will have to outwit him, and she soon faces the ultimate sacrifice.
©2021 Sadeqa Johnson. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Authenticity
Summary
From Dr. David Posen, the best-selling author of Is Work Killing You? and The Little Book of Stress Relief, comes a book about listening to your body, understanding your mind and making better choices in your life. For over 30 years, Dr. David Posen has counselled patients suffering from severe stress, anxiety and depression. Over that time, he noticed a pattern. As our lives have become faster and increasingly fragmented, many of us have become disconnected from our true selves. We’ve become round pegs trying to fit into square holes. And when we try to be what we’re not, the result isn’t surprising: we become unhappy, possibly depressed and, in extreme cases, burnt out. Using a holistic approach that combines elements of physiology, psychology and philosophy, Authenticity teaches readers to identify, acknowledge and accept their true selves in order to make better, more informed and realistic life choices. Drawing on real-life examples from his experience in stress management, Dr. Posen has identified five common sources of anxiety and unhappiness: personality traits, time and speed, sleep, values and passions. For each of these areas, the solution is surprisingly simple. We must learn to live in a way that is authentic and true to our unique selves; we must live in harmony with who we truly are.
©2018 David Posen, MD (P)2018 Anansi Audio
The Relatives
Summary
From the renowned author of Sweetness in the Belly, The Beauty of Humanity Movement and This Is Happy, comes a bold, urgent and richly imagined novel about what it means to be a family in our modern world. Lila is on a long, painful journey toward motherhood. Tess and Emily are reeling after their ugly separation and fighting over ownership of the embryos that were supposed to grow their family together. And thousands of miles away, the unknown man who served as anonymous donor to them all is being held in captivity in Somalia. While his life remains in precarious balance, his genetic material is a source of both creation and conflict. What does it mean to be a family in our rapidly shifting world? What are our responsibilities to each other with increasing options for how to create a family? As these characters grapple with life-altering changes, they will find themselves interconnected in ways they cannot have imagined, and forced to redefine what family means to them.
©2021 Camilla Gibb (P)2021 Penguin Random House Canada
Elephant in the Sky
Summary
A testament to the healing power of unconditional love. Widely acclaimed for her emotionally powerful stories that capture the real lives of women, Heather A. Clark, best-selling author of Chai Tea Sunday, tackles the subject of childhood mental illness and the impact it has on a close family. The story begins from nine-year-old Nate's point of view, etching the details of an unbalanced mind struggling to make sense of rampant thought patterns and heightened paranoia. Enter Ashley, Nate's mother and a hardworking advertising executive concerned that she's not giving her family enough of her time - especially now that she senses something might be wrong with her son. As the story moves deftly back and forth between the two perspectives, the narrative converges to reveal one family's journey of discovery as they strive to find balance in their lives. Based on a true story, Elephant in the Sky articulates a complicated, real-life subject with grace, wisdom, and sensitivity and beautifully explores the distance a mother will go to protect her child.
©2014 Heather A. Clark (P)2018 ECW Press