
Heart Lamp
Selected Stories
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Pre-order for $16.81
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Deepti Gupta
-
Vikas Adam
About this listen
A monumental first collection in English from Banu Mushtaq: lawyer, activist, champion of Muslim women, and winner of India’s highest literary honors.
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving, and excoriating, it’s in her characters—the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost—that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style.
Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.
©2025 Banu Mushtaq. Translation © 2025 by Deepa Bhasthi (P)2025 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
-
Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
-
-
Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
-
On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
By: Solvej Balle
-
Tilt
- A Novel
- By: Emma Pattee
- Narrated by: Ariel Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
-
-
Over enthusiastic, snarky narrator who can't...
- By NMwritergal on 03-27-25
By: Emma Pattee
-
Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
-
-
Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
-
Mother Mary Comes to Me
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Arundhati Roy
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write.
By: Arundhati Roy
-
Lost & Found
- A Memoir
- By: Kathryn Schulz
- Narrated by: Kathryn Schulz
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.
-
-
Bored to death
- By Amazon Customer on 03-15-22
By: Kathryn Schulz
-
Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
-
-
Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
-
On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
By: Solvej Balle
-
Tilt
- A Novel
- By: Emma Pattee
- Narrated by: Ariel Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
-
-
Over enthusiastic, snarky narrator who can't...
- By NMwritergal on 03-27-25
By: Emma Pattee
-
Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
-
-
Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
-
Mother Mary Comes to Me
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Arundhati Roy
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write.
By: Arundhati Roy
-
Lost & Found
- A Memoir
- By: Kathryn Schulz
- Narrated by: Kathryn Schulz
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.
-
-
Bored to death
- By Amazon Customer on 03-15-22
By: Kathryn Schulz
-
Eurotrash
- A Novel
- By: Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Kemp
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.
-
-
I loved the interaction between mother and son
- By BBWrighter on 03-05-25
By: Christian Kracht, and others
-
Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
I want my 15 hours back
- By Amazon customer on 06-11-25
By: Susan Choi
-
We Do Not Part
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.
-
-
Powerful, Tough Listen
- By ncnickle on 01-26-25
By: Han Kang, and others
-
Raising Hare
- A Memoir
- By: Chloe Dalton
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.
-
-
A beautiful reading of a heartfelt story. I didn’t want it to end.
- By Sparrow on 04-02-25
By: Chloe Dalton
-
The Doorman
- A Novel
- By: Chris Pavone
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chicky Diaz is everyone’s favorite doorman at the Bohemia, the most famous apartment house in the world, home of celebrities, financiers, and New York’s cultural elite. Up in the penthouse, Emily Longworth has the perfect-looking everything, all except her husband, whom she’d quietly loathed even before the recent revelations about where all the money comes from. But his wealth is immense, their prenup is iron-clad, and Emily can’t bring herself to leave him. Yet.
-
-
Awful
- By C39LDUTBFFFQ on 06-06-25
By: Chris Pavone
-
Flights
- By: Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft - translator
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.
-
-
Curious and beautifully written
- By Alejandra on 10-24-18
By: Olga Tokarczuk, and others
-
Lincoln in the Bardo
- A Novel
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.”
-
-
"Where might God stand?"
- By Mel on 02-17-17
By: George Saunders
-
The Sea
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
-
-
OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
- By Karen on 07-20-07
By: John Banville
-
Enter Ghost
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Nadia Albina
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been back since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage.
-
-
Outstanding
- By Elizabeth on 02-07-25
By: Isabella Hammad
-
Whale Fall
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth O'Connor
- Narrated by: Dyfrig Morris, Gabrielle Glaister, Gwyneth Keyworth, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.
-
-
Excellent book for audible
- By Lilly on 01-01-25
-
The Sympathizer
- A Novel
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Francois Chau
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as seven other awards, and now an HBO® Original Limited Series on Max, The Sympathizer has sold over one million copies worldwide and is one of the most acclaimed books of the 21st century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal.
-
-
Recommended With No Reservations
- By SG68 on 05-13-25
-
Notes to John
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Julianne Moore
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.
-
-
This autobiography discusses notes from therapy regarding Joan’s daughter’s addiction. Very insightful!
- By Laura Borealis on 04-24-25
By: Joan Didion
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Perfection
- By: Vincenzo Latronico, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 3 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored.
By: Vincenzo Latronico, and others
-
The South
- A Novel
- By: Tash Aw
- Narrated by: Windson Liong
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
By: Tash Aw
-
Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
-
-
Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
-
Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
I want my 15 hours back
- By Amazon customer on 06-11-25
By: Susan Choi
-
On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
By: Solvej Balle
-
Eurotrash
- A Novel
- By: Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Kemp
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.
-
-
I loved the interaction between mother and son
- By BBWrighter on 03-05-25
By: Christian Kracht, and others
-
Perfection
- By: Vincenzo Latronico, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 3 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored.
By: Vincenzo Latronico, and others
-
The South
- A Novel
- By: Tash Aw
- Narrated by: Windson Liong
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When his grandfather dies, Jay travels south with his family to the property they’ve inherited, a once flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought. Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land, or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one.
By: Tash Aw
-
Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
-
-
Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
-
Flashlight
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 17 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
I want my 15 hours back
- By Amazon customer on 06-11-25
By: Susan Choi
-
On the Calculation of Volume, Book II
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first year of November eighteenth is coming to a close, and Tara Selter has returned to her hotel room in Paris, the place where it all began. As if perched at the edge of a precipice, she readies herself to leap into November nineteenth. Book II of Solvej Balle’s astounding seven-part series On the Calculation of Volume beautifully expands on the speculative premise of Book I, drawing us further into the maze of time, where space yawns open, as if suddenly gaining a new dimension, extending into ever more fined-grained textures.
By: Solvej Balle
-
Eurotrash
- A Novel
- By: Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Kemp
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.
-
-
I loved the interaction between mother and son
- By BBWrighter on 03-05-25
By: Christian Kracht, and others
-
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
- By: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Narrated by: Hanif Abdurraqib
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In an age of confusion, fear, and loss, Hanif Abdurraqib's is a voice that matters. Whether he's attending a Bruce Springsteen concert the day after visiting Michael Brown's grave, or discussing public displays of affection at a Carly Rae Jepsen show, he writes with a poignancy that resonates profoundly. In essays that have been published by the New York Times, MTV, and Pitchfork, among others—Abdurraqib uses music and culture as a lens through which to view our world so that we might better understand ourselves, and in so doing proves himself a bellwether for our times.
-
-
This is music
- By Jason Mccormick on 03-15-25
By: Hanif Abdurraqib
-
Solenoid
- By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
-
-
Our Universal Phantasmagoria
- By Isaac Linder on 03-11-24
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
-
The Book of Records
- By: Madeleine Thien
- Narrated by: Athena Karkanis, Richard Lam, Madeleine Thien, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A novel that leaps across centuries past and future, as if different eras were separated by only a door. Lina and her father arrive at an enclave called The Sea, a staging post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China.
-
-
The language is both brilliant and poetic
- By Robert M. Gordon, Ph.D. on 06-04-25
By: Madeleine Thien
-
Kairos
- By: Jenny Erpenbeck
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates.
-
-
Resonant Layers
- By Robert C. Ashley on 12-17-23
By: Jenny Erpenbeck
-
Endling
- A Novel
- By: Maria Reva
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Saskia Maarleveld, Maria Reva
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
This might be a really good book to read
- By A on 06-11-25
By: Maria Reva
-
Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
-
-
Painfully powerful Tale.
- By Tom on 01-30-24
By: Paul Lynch
-
A Tale for the Time Being
- By: Ruth Ozeki
- Narrated by: Ruth Ozeki
- Length: 14 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox - possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami.
-
-
Engaging story beautifully read
- By Karen on 01-30-14
By: Ruth Ozeki
-
We Do Not Part
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.
-
-
Powerful, Tough Listen
- By ncnickle on 01-26-25
By: Han Kang, and others
-
Strange Pictures
- A Novel
- By: Uketsu
- Narrated by: Andrew Grace
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Structured around nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue, Uketsu invites listeners to piece together the mystery behind each and the over-arching backstory that connects them all. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from mystery horror YouTube sensation Uketsu—an enigmatic masked figure who has become one of Japan's most talked about contemporary authors.
-
-
An eerie, logic grid puzzle of a novel
- By Jessica on 03-05-25
By: Uketsu
-
A Family Matter
- A Novel
- By: Claire Lynch
- Narrated by: Miranda Raison
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter. 2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible.
-
-
Powerful and emotional listen.
- By Sanmarpoopsie on 06-21-25
By: Claire Lynch
-
Renaissance: The Transformation of the West
- By: Jennifer McNabb, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Jennifer McNabb
- Length: 26 hrs and 35 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While it’s easy to get caught up - and, rightfully so - in the art of the Renaissance, you cannot have a full, rounded understanding of just how important these centuries were without digging beneath the surface, without investigating the period in terms of its politics, its spirituality, its philosophies, its economics, and its societies. Do just that with these 48 lectures that consider the European Renaissance from all sides, that disturb traditional understandings, that tip sacred cows, and that enlarges our understanding of how the Renaissance revolutionized the Western world.
-
-
Reads like a bad high school essay.
- By Matthew Dennis on 10-29-18
By: Jennifer McNabb, and others
-
Cloud Cuckoo Land
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Simon Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of 2021, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.
-
-
Academic Snobbery
- By TVR on 10-03-21
By: Anthony Doerr