Catherine

The Winter of Our Discontent

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 22 mins)
• By John Steinbeck
• Narrated By David Aaron Baker
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of this classic novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With the decline in their status, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 17 mins)
• By Deborah Fallows
• Narrated By Catherine Byers

Deborah Fallows has spent a lot of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin - China's most common language - or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying learning the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering behavior and habits of its people, and its culture's conundrums.

The English American

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Alison Larkin
• Narrated By Alison Larkin

When Pippa Dunn, adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that "culture clash" has layers of meaning she'd never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang from Alison Larkin's autobiographical one-woman show of the same name.

The Garden of Evening Mists

• UNABRIDGED (15 hrs and 37 mins)
• By Tan Twan Eng
• Narrated By Anna Bentinck
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Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 24 mins)
• By Elizabeth George Speare
• Narrated By Mary Beth Hurt

Orphaned Kit Tyler knows, as she gazes for the first time at the cold, bleak shores of Connecticut Colony, that her new home will never be like the shimmering Caribbean islands she left behind. In her relatives' stern Puritan community, she feels like a tropical bird that has flown to the wrong part of the world, a bird that is now caged and lonely.

Catch of the Day

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 20 mins)
• By Marcia Evanick
• Narrated By Johanna Parker

When Gwen Fletcher moves to Misty Harbor, Maine to fulfill her dream of opening her own restaurant, she isn't prepared for the throng of suitors who want to pay homage to the town's only bachelorette. Much to the dismay of the town's gentlemen, Gwen has only two things on her mind - getting her restaurant open before the tourist season begins and getting to know carpenter Daniel Creighton. But the uncooperative Creighton's odd behavior may preclude her from doing either of these.

A Single Man

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 39 mins)
• By Christopher Isherwood
• Narrated By Simon Prebble

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, and determines to persist in the routines of his daily life; the course of A Single Man spans 24 hours in an ordinary day.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 39 mins)
• By Maria Semple
• Narrated By Kathleen Wilhoite
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.

In the Shadow of the Banyan: A Novel

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 19 mins)
• By Vaddey Ratner
• Narrated By Greta Lee
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labor, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father.

The Last Chinese Chef

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 54 mins)
• By Nicole Mones
• Narrated By Elisabeth Rodgers, James Chen
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

When recently widowed Maggie McElroy is called to China to settle a claim against her late husbands estate, she is blindsided by the discovery that he may have led a double life. Since work is all that will keep her sane, her magazine editor assigns her to profile Sam, a half-Chinese American who is the last in a line of gifted chefs tracing back to the imperial palace. As she watches Sam gear up for Chinas Olympic culinary competition by planning the banquet of a lifetime, she begins to see past the cuisines artistry to glimpse its coherent expression of Chinese civilization.

The Casual Vacancy

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 55 mins)
• By J. K. Rowling
• Narrated By Tom Hollander
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early 40s, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils.... Pagford is not what it at first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town's council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen.