A Prayer for Owen Meany

• UNABRIDGED (26 hrs and 53 mins)
• By John Irving
• Narrated By Joe Barrett
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Of all of John Irving's books, this is the one that lends itself best to audio. In print, Owen Meany's dialogue is set in capital letters; for this production, Irving himself selected Joe Barrett to deliver Meany's difficult voice as intended. In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys – best friends – are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary and terrifying.

1Q84

• UNABRIDGED (46 hrs and 50 mins)
• By Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin (translator), Philip Gabriel (translator)
• Narrated By Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, Mark Boyett
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 - "Q" is for "question mark". A world that bears a question....

Nemesis

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 14 mins)
• By Philip Roth
• Narrated By Dennis Boutsikaris
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful 23-year-old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantors dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground and on the everyday realities he faces, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed.

Hyperion

• UNABRIDGED (20 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Dan Simmons
• Narrated By Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, and others
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.

The Winds of War

• UNABRIDGED (45 hrs and 53 mins)
• By Herman Wouk
• Narrated By Kevin Pariseau
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers. Like no other books about the war, Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events - and all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II - as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.

The Gray Man

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Mark Greaney
• Narrated By Jay Snyder
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Court Gentry is known as The Gray Man - a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible, and then fading away. And he always hits his target. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness. Now, he is going to prove that for him, there's no gray area between killing for a living-and killing to stay alive.