
Zeal
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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January LaVoy
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Shayna Small
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By:
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Morgan Jerkins
About this listen
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Washington Post, People, Time
“A beautiful tale.” —Jason Reynolds, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Twenty-four Seconds from Now
?The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.
Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .
Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at a freedmen’s school, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.
Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.
When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?
Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.
©2025 Morgan Jerkins (P)2025 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Genevieve Francis, a 25-year-old Black reporter, assumed she’d go into her fourth year at her newspaper job with a bigger story than the latest seasonal ice cream flavor. Instead, she’s relegated to doing copy edits and sensitivity reads on the articles her white colleagues write. So when Gen finally gets the opportunity to cover a prominent CEO’s gala, she leaps at the chance—this will be her biggest assignment to date. The only problem: The CEO is her ex, Jude, whose marriage proposal she publicly rejected four years prior.
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Amazing story of truth setting you free
- By C. Spyn on 01-21-25
By: Alex Travis
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Mainline Mama
- A Memoir
- By: Keeonna Harris
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Keeonna and Jason met as young teens. Only fourteen, Keeonna had never had a boyfriend before, dreamed of attending Spelman to become an obstetrician, and thought she was “grown.” Within a year she was pregnant and Jason was in prison, convicted of a carjacking and sentenced to twenty-two years. Overnight Keeonna had become a “mainline mama,” a parent facing the task of raising a child—while still growing up herself—with an incarcerated partner.
By: Keeonna Harris
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Beauty in the Blood
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Carter
- Narrated by: Marie-Francoise Theodore
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sarah Toomey is a successful young black lawyer, lovely but straitlaced–and afraid that she is losing her mind. Since the death of her mother, a force she can neither understand nor control is manipulating her memory and driving her to unexplained acts of violence and destruction. At the same time, Sarah is swept up in a highly charged relationship with a work colleague that portends a danger of its own. As she moves through her privileged life in New York, Sarah comes to learn how her past—her haunted history—is intertwined with America’s.
By: Charlotte Carter
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People of Means
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Johnson
- Narrated by: Nancy Johnson, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University full of hope, carrying a suitcase and the voice of her father telling her she’s part of a family legacy of greatness. Soon, the ugliness of the Jim Crow South intrudes, and she’s thrust into a movement for social change. Freda is reluctant to get involved, torn between a soon-to-be doctor her parents approve of and an audacious young man willing to risk it all in the name of justice.
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Beautifully Told
- By Dr. Judy A. Alston on 02-19-25
By: Nancy Johnson
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This Will Be My Undoing
- Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America
- By: Morgan Jerkins
- Narrated by: Morgan Jerkins
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From one of the fiercest critics writing today, Morgan Jerkins' highly anticipated collection of linked essays interweaves her incisive commentary on pop culture, feminism, Black history, misogyny, and racism with her own experiences to confront the very real challenges of being a Black woman today - perfect for fans of Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist, Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me, and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists.
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LOVE!!!!! She could not be more different from me
- By Colleen on 02-10-18
By: Morgan Jerkins
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The Life of Herod the Great
- By: Zora Neale Hurston, Deborah G. Plant - editor
- Narrated by: Blair Underwood, Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the 1950s, as a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston penned a historical novel about one of the most infamous figures in the Bible, Herod the Great. In Hurston’s retelling, Herod is not the wicked ruler of the New Testament who is charged with the “slaughter of the innocents,” but a forerunner of Christ—a beloved king who enriched Jewish culture and brought prosperity and peace to Judea.
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like the lion needs no weapon but himself
- By william t. on 03-25-25
By: Zora Neale Hurston, and others
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Junie
- A Novel
- By: Erin Crosby Eckstine
- Narrated by: Angel Pean
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act.
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Junie's story
- By Becky Armstrong on 07-03-25
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Happy Land
- By: Dolen Perkins-Valdez
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Ashley J. Hobbs
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, due to a mysterious estrangement between her mother and grandmother, she’s determined to learn the truth while she still can. But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great grandmother, Luella, who would become its queen.
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Relatable
- By kathy w. on 05-24-25
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Small Worlds
- By: Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Narrated by: Caleb Azumah Nelson
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set over the course of three summers, this novel follows Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian immigrant parents, brother to Ray, and best friend to Adeline. On the cusp of big life changes, Stephen feels pressured to follow a certain path—a university degree, a move out of home—but when he decides instead to follow his first love, music, his world and family fracture in ways he didn’t foresee. Now Stephen must find a path and peace for himself: a space he can feel beautiful, a space he can feel free.
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I feel free when listening to him
- By Anonymous User on 11-14-23
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Homebodies
- A Novel
- By: Tembe Denton-Hurst
- Narrated by: Marcella Cox
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter, but, for now, her days are filled with listicles about lip gloss and click-bait articles about celebrity haircare. Still, the job is flashy and her girlfriend is steady and supportive. The path may be long, but Mickey’s well on her way, and it’s far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Everything finally seems to be falling into place—until she finds out she’s being replaced.
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I wanted more
- By Reya on 03-16-25
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The Door to Tamba
- A Short Story
- By: Ishmael Beah
- Narrated by: Maduka Steady
- Length: 51 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Award-winning author and human rights activist Ishmael Beah brings us The Door to Tamba, a powerful story centered on a mining village in West Africa where the destruction of earth and pollution of life impacts the mind, body, and soul of communities. Hindolo, a storyteller, returns to his hometown after 30 years and recalls the solitary and formidable old man who opened his home to him and introduced a world of literature and imagination, which for many years, was his only escape. Hindolo begins writing the stories down on paper stolen from a nearby mine to share with his classmates.
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Excellent
- By Tereza Jenkins on 02-04-24
By: Ishmael Beah
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Mirror Me
- A Novel
- By: Lisa Williamson Rosenberg
- Narrated by: Torian Brackett
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Eddie Asher arrives at Hudson Valley Psychiatric Hospital panicked that he may have murdered his brother’s fiancée, Lucy, with whom he shared a profound kinship. He can’t imagine doing such a terrible thing, but Eddie hasn’t been himself lately. Eddie’s anxiety is nothing new to Pär, the one Eddie calls his Other, who protects Eddie from truths he’s too sensitive to face. Or so Pär says. Troubled by Pär’s increasing sway over his life, Eddie seeks out Dr. Richard Montgomery, a specialist in dissociative identities.
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Good probably better to read than listen.
- By Lulu Dx on 12-05-24
Speechless
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Couldn't Stop
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Amazing Stories!!!
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Excellent!!
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Breath taking Story
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Absolutely beautiful!
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Beautiful
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The love of Terza and Harrison lasting centuries
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Emotionally Riveting
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