
Bug Hollow
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Emily Rankin
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By:
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Michelle Huneven
About this listen
New York Times Summer Reading Pick • One of 50 books TODAY can't wait to read in 2025 • Oprah Daily Best Summer Reads of 2025 • Boston Globe Best of Summer 2025 • One of LitHub's Novels to Read This Summer • Kirkus 20 Best Books to Read in June
“Deeply satisfying…Feels like watching a master painter at work.”—Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
©2022 Michelle Huneven (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Not another novel about family dysfunction, secrets and lies. Rather, Huneven’s bighearted family is bound together by the power of love, and doing right by each other. In that way, Bug Hollow is of a piece with Huneven’s previous work, in which seemingly incompatible characters reach out across social and cultural divides in a bid to grasp some measure of redemption and comity . . . taut and compressed.”—Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times
“This transcendent novel has all the virtues associated with Huneven: attention to detail and a glimpse at how complicated the very act of living is . . . Readers of Elizabeth Strout or Mary Gaitskill will love this book. Huneven hits it out of the ballpark again.”—Library Journal (starred review)
“A gift: top-drawer fiction and a family story that speaks of the joys, sorrows, and surprising possibilities of human connection . . . Serendipitous meetings invite redos, showing the beauty of life’s circular nature. Readers will be charmed by a sense of nostalgia and interdependence that speaks to the best in humanity. Fans of Anne Tyler will enjoy Huneven’s strong sense of place, quirky menagerie of characters, and the intriguing, relevant issues the Samuelson family navigates through chapters of their life together.” —Booklist (starred review)
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- Unabridged
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A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter’s family, Rhys Kinnick snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law. Horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the country and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, off the grid and with no one around—except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now, seven years later, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep.
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Timely story- couldn’t put it down
- By Jan and ChrisB on 06-20-25
By: Jess Walter
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Among Friends
- A Novel
- By: Hal Ebbott
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s an autumn weekend at a comfortable New York country house where two deeply intertwined families have gathered to mark the host’s fifty-second birthday. Together, the group forms an enviable portrait of middle age. The wives and husbands have been friends for over thirty years, their teenage daughters have grown up together, and the dinners, games, and rituals forming their days all reflect the rich bonds between them.
By: Hal Ebbott
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Endling
- A Novel
- By: Maria Reva
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Saskia Maarleveld, Maria Reva
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
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This might be a really good book to read
- By A on 06-11-25
By: Maria Reva
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The Slip
- By: Lucas Schaefer
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Renata Friedman
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.
By: Lucas Schaefer
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I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness
- A Novel
- By: Irene Solà, Mara Faye Lethem - translator
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Dawn is breaking over the Guilleries, a rugged mountain range in Catalonia frequented by wolf hunters, brigands, deserters, race-car drivers, ghosts, and demons. In a remote farmhouse called Mas Clavell, an impossibly old woman lies on her deathbed. Family and caretakers drift in and out. Meanwhile, all the women who have lived and died in that house are waiting for her to join them. They are preparing to throw her a party.
By: Irene Solà, and others
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Search
- A Novel
- By: Michelle Huneven
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and food writer and a longtime member of a progressive Unitarian Universalist congregation in Southern California. Just as she’s finishing the book tour for her latest bestseller, Dana is asked to join the church search committee for a new minister. Under pressure to find her next book idea, she agrees, and resolves to secretly pen a memoir, with recipes, about the experience. That memoir, Search, follows the travails of the committee and their candidates—and becomes its own media sensation.
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Children Acting Out
- By Elaine Richards on 10-02-22
By: Michelle Huneven
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Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past.
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I want my 15 hours back
- By Amazon customer on 06-11-25
By: Susan Choi
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Fox
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Kirsten Potter, and others
- Length: 25 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.
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Intoxicating, Taboo, Hypnotic
- By Keijon Ford on 06-19-25
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People Like Us
- A Novel
- By: Jason Mott
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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Performance
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In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.
By: Jason Mott
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Days of Light
- By: Megan Hunter
- Narrated by: Stephanie Racine
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of The End We Start From, now a major film starring Jodie Comer, and taking inspiration from the influential artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group, Days of Light is a sweeping, sensual historical novel of art, desire, and faith set against the backdrop of a changing England.
By: Megan Hunter
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Hazel Says No
- A Novel
- By: Jessica Berger Gross
- Narrated by: Emma Galvin
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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When Hazel Blum’s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine. With her mother, Claire, a clothing designer, and her father, Gus, an American Studies professor, Hazel and her eleven-year-old brother, Wolf, spend the summer at the town pool, where they acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town’s sprawling community.
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Parallel Lines
- A Novel
- By: Edward St. Aubyn
- Narrated by: Benedict Cumberbatch
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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From the bestselling and award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose novels, a hilarious and moving story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked—a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss, written with St. Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style
By: Edward St. Aubyn
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Vera, or Faith
- A Novel
- By: Gary Shteyngart
- Narrated by: Shannon Tyo
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child.
By: Gary Shteyngart
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Fulfillment
- A Novel
- By: Lee Cole
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Fulfillment tells the story of two half brothers—Joel, a successful academic and author, whose marriage is in deep trouble, and his younger sibling, Emmett, paralyzed by indecision and working in a shipping warehouse—who find themselves at their family home in Kentucky and upend each other’s lives in devastating ways.
By: Lee Cole