Tandy Cronyn has narrated 17 audiobooks on Listento.it by 15 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 42 ratings. The most-rated is Annabel.
Annabel
Summary
Kathleen Winter’s poignant debut novel was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In it, Winter explores society’s views of gender identity through the eyes of a child born with male and female sex organs. At their doctor’s urging, the Blakes decide to raise their child as a boy, Wayne, giving him hormones to suppress his feminine physical traits. But after discovering the secret about his body, Wayne decides to stop taking his medication and lets his body develop naturally.
©2010 Kathleen Winter (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Clockwork Lives
Summary
Additional Narrators: Luis Moreno Lynne McCullough Jonathan Todd Ross Neil Peart Kevin J. Anderson Some lives can be summed up in a sentence or two. Other lives are epics. In Clockwork Angels, number-one best-selling author Kevin J. Anderson and legendary Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart created a fabulous, adventurous steampunk world in a novel to accompany the smash Rush concept album of the same name. It was a world of airships and alchemy; clockwork carnivals; pirates; lost cities; a rigid Watchmaker who controlled every aspect of life; and his nemesis, the ruthless and violent Anarchist, who wanted to destroy it all. Anderson and Peart have returned to their colourful creation to explore the places and the characters that still have a hold on their imaginations. Marinda Peake is a woman with a quiet, perfect life in a small village; she long ago gave up on her dreams and ambitions to take care of her ailing father, an alchemist and an inventor. When he dies, he gives Marinda a mysterious inheritance: a blank book that she must fill with other people's stories - and ultimately her own. Clockwork Lives is a steampunk Canterbury Tales and much more, as Marinda strives to change her life from a mere "sentence or two" to a true epic.
©2015 Wordfire, Inc. and Pratt Music (P)2015 Recorded Books
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands
Summary
Outer Space, Inner Lands includes many of the best known Ursula K. Le Guin nonrealistic stories (such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Semley' s Necklace," and "She Unnames Them") which have shaped the way many listeners see the world. She gives voice to the voiceless, hope to the outsider, and speaks truth to power - all the time maintaining her independence and sense of humor. Companion volume Where on Earth explores Le Guin's satirical, risky, political and experimental earthbound stories. Both volumes include new introductions by the author.
©2012 Ursula K. LeGuin (P)2014 Recorded Books
Inside
Summary
A critically acclaimed, award-winning author, Alix Ohlin pens a masterpiece of emotional complexity with Inside. In this literary tour de force, a therapist named Grace attempts to help a man recover from his failed suicide attempt. Meanwhile, Grace’s teen patient Annie runs away from home to reinvent herself in New York, and Grace’s ex-husband leaves the comfort of a successful relationship to attempt to help native peoples in the bleak Arctic.
©2012 Alix Ohlin (P)2012 Recorded Books
The Unreal and the Real
Summary
The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.
©2012 Ursula K. Le Guin (P)2014 Recorded Books
Above the East China Sea
Summary
Set on the island of Okinawa today and during World War II, this deeply moving and evocative novel tells the entwined stories of two teenage girls - an American and an Okinawan - whose lives are connected across 70 years by the shared experience of both profound loss and renewal. Luz, a contemporary U.S. Air Force brat, lives with her no-nonsense sergeant mother at Kadena Air Base. Luz's older sister, her best friend and emotional center, has died in the Afghan war. Unmoored by her death, unable to lean on her mother, Luz contemplates taking her own life. In l945, Tamiko has lost everyone - the older sister she idolized and her entire family - and finds herself trapped between the occupying Japanese and the invading Americans whom she has been taught are demons that live to rape. On an island where the spirits of the dead are part of life and the afterworld reunites you with your family, suicide offers Tamiko the promise of peace. As Luz tracks down the story of her own Okinawan grandmother, she discovers that the ancestral spirits work as readily to save her as they do to help Tamiko find a resting place. And as these two stories unfold and intertwine, we see how war and American occupation have shaped and reshaped the lives of Okinawans.
©2014 Sarah Bird (P)2014 Recorded Books
The Disappeared
Summary
Acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin pens this Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist that Publishers Weekly calls a “powerful, transcendent love story.” The Disappeared follows two young lovers torn apart by political turmoil. At 16, Anne meets Serey—a Cambodian refugee—in Montréal and falls passionately in love. But Anne’s father does not approve of her new boyfriend. Then Serey leaves Anne for Cambodia to find his family, and Anne hears no news of him for years. Could her father be censoring her letters, or is Serey not receiving them? In search of answers, Anne travels to Cambodia herself—and witnesses the devastating fallout of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. Echlin has crafted a stunning portrait of love and courage played out against the horrors of genocide. A moving performance by narrator Tandy Cronyn elegantly captures the lyrical tone of Echlin’s story.
©2009 Kim Echlin (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
The Possible World
Summary
A richly compelling and deeply moving novel that traces the converging lives of a young boy who witnesses a brutal murder, the doctor who tends to him, and an elderly woman guarding her long buried secrets. Clare, one of the oldest women in Rhode Island, believes that all the painful secrets of her long life have been laid to rest, until an unexpected encounter with a piece of her past forces her to realize the time has come to tell her story. Ben, a shy, precocious six-year-old being gently raised by a devoted mom, witnesses a terrible crime and is taken to the hospital, bewildered and alone. Lucy, an overworked resident physician in Providence, meets Ben when he's brought into the ER. But between all-night shifts and trying to pick up the pieces of her failing marriage, she doesn't know how to help. In time, Ben begins to uncover pieces before, just half-memories at first, then it all comes rushing back: Mama, Clyde, Brother Timothy, a stone cottage, and the woman who loved and cared for him. His psychiatrist believes these are inventions triggered by the horror of what the little boy saw, but Ben is determined to find the one person who can rescue him. Bit by bit, Ben, Clare, and Lucy discover what they all have in common. An expertly stitched story that spans nearly a century - from the 1920s through the Vietnam War era and into the present, The Possible World is a gorgeous novel about the special relationships between mothers and sons, the complicated ways our pasts shape our identities, the loneliness born out of loss, and how the healing act of retelling can create timeless connection.
©2018 Liese O'Halloran Schwarz (P)2018 Recorded Books
Lament for Bonnie
Summary
Twelve-year-old Bonnie MacDonald - the beloved step dancing, fiddling youngest member of Cape Breton's famed Clan Donnie band - vanishes after a family party. There was no stranger spotted lurking around, but no one thinks for one minute that Bonnie ran away. Maura MacNeil, cousin to Clan Donnie, offers her husband's legal services to the family as the police search for the missing girl. But fame attracts some strange characters, and Clan Donnie has groupies. So, it turns out, does lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins. Monty and Maura's daughter, Normie, is much closer to the action as she gets to know her cousins, learns things she wishes she never had, and has nightmares - visions? - that bring her no closer to finding Bonnie. Her spooky great-grandmother makes no secret of the fact that she senses the presence of evil in their village - the kind of evil RCMP sergeant Pierre Maguire left Montreal to escape. But he finds that vein of darkness running beneath the beauty and vibrant culture of Cape Breton.
©2016 Anne Emery (P)2016 Recorded Books
Blue Territory
Summary
A poetic immersion into the life and art of Joan Mitchell, the great American abstract expressionist painter. A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell is not as well-known as her male counterparts, not only because she was a woman, but also because she spent most of her working life in France. Still, in 2013, Bloomberg listed Mitchell as the best-selling female artist of all time. When asked to talk about her paintings, Joan Mitchell often responded, "If I could say it in words, I'd write a book." Here is her book. At once unique and universal, Blue Territory is at its core an exploration of love and life, and what it means to love - and live - what you do. Meticulously researched and lyrically written, it will appeal to anyone interested in passionate engagement with the world.
©2016 Robin Lippincott (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Quartet for the End of Time: International Edition
Summary
Inspired by and structured around the chamber piece of the same title by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time is a mesmerizing story of four lives irrevocably linked in a single act of betrayal. The novel takes us on an unforgettable journey beginning during the 1930s Bonus Army riots, when World War I veteran Arthur Sinclair is falsely accused of conspiracy and then disappears. His absence will haunt his son, Douglas, as well as Alden and Sutton Kelly, the children of a powerful US congressman, as they experience each in different ways the dynamic political and social changes that took place leading up to and during World War II. From the New Deal projects through which Douglas, newly fatherless, makes his living, to Sutton's work as a journalist, to Alden s life as a code breaker and a spy, each character is haunted by the past and is searching for love, hope, and redemption in a world torn apart by chaos and war. Through the lives of these characters, as well as those of their lovers, friends, and enemies, the novel transports us from the Siberian Expedition of World War I to the underground world of a Soviet spy in the 1920s and 1930s, to the occultist circle of P. D. Ouspensky and London during the Blitz, to the German prison camp where Messiaen originally composed and performed his famous Quartet for the End of Time. At every turn, this rich and ambitious novel tells some of the less well-known stories of 20th-century history with epic scope and astonishing power, revealing at every turn the ways in which history and memory tend to follow us, and in which absence has a palpable presence.
©2014 Johanna Skibsrud (P)2020 Recorded Books, Inc.
Foreign Bodies
Summary
Longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction Pulitzer Prize finalist Cynthia Ozick’s fiction has been awarded multiple O. Henry Prizes. In Foreign Bodies, Ozick crafts a remarkable retelling of Henry James’ The Ambassadors—deftly using its plot, yet boldly infusing the novel with an all new place, time, and meaning. It’s 1952, and middle-aged Bea Nightingale reluctantly agrees to fly to Paris to help convince her estranged runaway nephew to return to his family. But Bea’s experiences abroad will change her forever.
©2010 Cynthia Ozick (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Salt
Summary
Anikwa and James, 12 years old in 1812, spend their days fishing, trapping, and exploring together in the forests of the Indiana Territory. To Anikwa and his family, members of the Miami tribe, this land has been home for centuries. As traders, James' family has ties to the Miami community as well as to the American soldiers in the fort. Now tensions are rising - the British and American armies prepare to meet at Fort Wayne for a crucial battle, and Native Americans from surrounding tribes gather in Kekionga to protect their homeland. After trading stops and precious commodities, like salt, are withheld, the fort comes under siege, and war ravages the land. James and Anikwa, like everyone around them, must decide where their deepest loyalties lie. Can their families - and their friendship - survive? In Salt, Printz Honor author Helen Frost offers a compelling look at a difficult time in history.
©2013 Helen Frost (P)2014 Recorded Books
Sisters of Heart and Snow
Summary
The award-winning author of How to Be and American Housewife returns with a poignant story of estranged sisters, forced together by family tragedy, who soon learn that sisterhood knows no limits. Rachel and Drew Snow may be sisters, but their lives have followed completely different paths. Married to a wonderful man and a mother to two strong-minded teens, Rachel hasn't returned to her childhood home since being kicked out by her strict father after an act of careless teenage rebellion. Drew, her younger sister, followed her passion for music but takes side jobs to make ends meet and longs for the stability that has always eluded her. Both sisters recall how close they were, but the distance between them seems more than they can bridge. When their deferential Japanese mother, Haruki, is diagnosed with dementia and gives Rachel power of attorney, Rachel's domineering father, Killian, becomes enraged. In a rare moment of lucidity, Haruki asks Rachel for a book in her sewing room, and Rachel enlists her sister's help in the search. The book - which tells the tale of real-life female samurai Tomoe Gozen, an epic saga of love, loss, and conflict during 12th-century Japan - reveals truths about Drew and Rachel's relationship that resonate across the centuries, connecting them in ways that turn their differences into assets.
©2015 Margaret Dilloway (P)2015 Recorded Books
Ashes of Fiery Weather
Summary
A debut novel about the passionate loves and tragic losses of six generations of women in a family of firefighters, spanning from famine-era Ireland to Brooklyn a decade after 9/11. "There isn't anything in the world that hurts like a burn." No one knows the pain of a fire more than the women of the Keegan/O'Reilly clan. Kathleen Donohoe's stunning debut novel brings to life seven unsentimental, wry, and evocative portraits of women from a family of firefighters. When we meet Norah - the first member of her family to move from Ireland to New York - she is a mother of three, contemplating her husband's casket as his men give him a full fireman's funeral, and faced with a terrible choice. Norah's mother-in-law, Delia, is stoic and self-preserving. Her early losses have made her keep her children close and her secrets closer. Eileen, Delia's daughter, adopted from Ireland and tough as nails, yet desperate for a sense of belonging, is one of the first women firefighters in New York. It is through her eyes that we experience 9/11, blindsided by the events of that terrible day along with her. Poignant, wise, and immersive, Ashes of Fiery Weather is a tour de force in the tradition of Let the Great World Spin, one that explores the emotional wounds and ultimate resilience of those drawn to fire, as well as the many ways we search for each other and the many ways we hope to be rescued.
©2016 Kathleen Donohoe (P)2018 Recorded Books
Signs and Wonders
Summary
Praised by Publishers Weekly for its “engrossing plot lines,” Alix Ohlin’s Signs and Wonders features 16 compelling tales about the connections between people - and the decisions that have the power to alter their lives. In the title story, a married couple decides to divorce. The next night, the man falls into a coma - and his wife is forced to make a difficult decision.
©2012 Alix Ohlin (P)2012 Recorded Books
The Possible World
Summary
Ben is the sole survivor of a crime that claims his mother and countless others. He’s just six years old, and already he must find a new place for himself in the world. Lucy, the doctor who tends to Ben, is grappling with a personal upheaval of her own. She feels a profound connection to the little boy who has lived through the unthinkable. Will recovering his memory heal him or damage him further? Clare has long believed that the lifetime of secrets she’s been keeping don’t matter to anyone anymore, until an unexpected encounter prompts her to tell her story. As they each struggle to confront the events that have defined their lives, something stronger than fate is working to bring them together.
©2018 Liese O'Halloran Schwarz (P)2018 Recorded Books Inc