Audiobooks

Guests gather for the opening of the Manor hotel, the new jewel on the Dorset coastline. The wine is flowing, the guest list sparkling, the sun setting on a lovely summer solstice. But the Manor has a secret history, built in the shadows of an ancient wood. Now old friends and enemies are creeping out of the shadows. And they'll soon discover what else comes out at night.

Shiloh fled Omaha as soon as she could. So when a high school friend invites Shiloh to his wedding, the last thing she wants is to catch up with the old gang. But she buys a new dress, puts on some makeup, and pins a silk flower over her heart, hoping, and also worrying, that she might see Cary, the boy she never realized she loved until he was lost.

When seven-year-old Noa Flores falls overboard on a cruise ship, a shiver of sharks quickly converge on the helpless boy. His mother, without thinking, jumps into the Pacific to save her son and bears witness to what can only be described as a miracle -- Noa being gingerly delivered to safety in the jaws of a shark. Years later, the effects of this incident still ripple through the community and nest deep within the members of the Flores family. The parents, Malia and Augie, attempt to leverage Noa's status, and uproot themselves from their poverty-stricken life; Dean, the oldest son, struggles with the attention Noa receives, and places it upon himself to be the one to lift his family to higher means; Kaui, the youngest child, is often forgotten about, and she finds herself lost between being the brilliant student her family sees and expressing her true passions; and then there's Noa -- the prodigal child, tenaciously trying to uncover the full extent of his powers while dealing with a persistent sense of duty to his family and his home.

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties, successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women, his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude, a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force. But Pacino was in his mid-thirties by then, and had already lived several lives. A fixture of avant-garde theater in New York, he had led a bohemian existence, working odd jobs to support his craft. He was raised by a fiercely loving but mentally unwell mother and her parents after his father left them when he was young, but in a real sense he was raised by the streets of the South Bronx, and by the troop of buccaneering young friends he ran with, whose spirits never left him. After a teacher recognized his acting promise and pushed him toward New York's fabled High School of Performing Arts, the die was cast. In good times and bad, in poverty and in wealth and in poverty again, through pain and joy, acting was his lifeline, its community his tribe. Sonny Boy is the memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide. All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels. The book's golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose. Love can fail you, and you can be defeated in your ambitions, the same lights that shine bright can also dim. But Al Pacino was lucky enough to fall deeply in love with a craft before he had the foggiest idea of any of its earthly rewards, and he never fell out of love. That has made all the difference.

Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died. Greenberg's biography traces Lewis's life through the post-Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South. The book reveals the little-known story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta, and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the "conscience of the Congress." Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg's biography captures John Lewis's influential career through documents from dozens of archives, interviews with hundreds of people who knew Lewis, and long-lost footage of Lewis himself speaking to reporters from his hospital bed following his severe beating on "Bloody Sunday" in Selma. With new details about his personal and professional relationships, John Lewis: A Life is the definitive biography of a man whose heroism during the Civil Rights movement helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.

Charlie Webb is a third rate lawyer who graduated from a third rate law-school and, because he couldn't get hired by any of the major law firms, has opened his own law firm, where he gets by handling cases for dubious associates from his youth and some court appointed cases. Described as "a leaky boat floating down the stream of life," Charlie has led unremarkable life, personally and professionally. Until he's appointed to be the attorney for a decidedly crackpot artist who calls himself Guido Sabatini (born Lawrence Weiss). Sabatini has been arrested, again, for breaking into a restaurant and stealing back a painting he sold them because he was insulted by where it was displayed. But as Lawrence Weiss, he's also an accomplished card shark and burglar and while he was there, he stole a thumb drive from the owner's safe. Not knowing what else Sabatani has stolen, Webb negotiates the return of the painting and "other items' for the owner dropping charges against Sabatini. But the contents of the flash drive threatens very powerful figures who are determined to retrieve it, the restaurant owner (Gretchen Hall) and her driver (Yuri Makarov) are being investigated for the sex trafficking of minors, and there are others who have a violent grudge against Sabatini. When a minor theft case becomes a double homicide, and even more, Charlie Webb, an insignificant lawyer assigned to an insignificant case, is faced with the most important, and deadliest, case of his life.

Welcome to Eris: an island with only one house, one inhabitant, one way out. Unreachable from the Scottish mainland for twelve hours each day. Once home to Vanessa, a famous artist whose notoriously unfaithful husband disappeared twenty years ago. Now home to Grace, a solitary creature of the tides, content in her own isolation. But when a shocking discovery is made in an art gallery far away in London, a visitor comes calling.

Dr. Richmond Dougherty is dead. His neighbors point a finger at his recent wife, Addison, whose marriage to the doctor lasted only three months and who is now a very rich widow. But they're all wrong about Addison. Her plan to marry Richmond then ruin him was derailed by his unexpected death, but she's not done with him yet. She just has to find a new way to unravel his legacy.

In this decolonial retelling of Mansfield Park, Funke is dismayed when tragedy forces her from Nigeria to England, where she finds solace in her cousin Liv. But as they grow into adulthood, a second tragedy occurs and their friendship is torn apart.

Activist Nemonte Nenquimo shares an impassioned memoir about an Indigenous childhood, a clash of cultures, and the fight to protect the Amazon rainforest.