R

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 15 mins)
• By Katherine Boo
• Narrated By Sunil Malhotra
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption.

Beautiful Ruins

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 53 mins)
• By Jess Walter
• Narrated By Edoardo Ballerini
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot - searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.

Heft

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Liz Moore
• Narrated By Kirby Heyborne, Keith Szarabajka

Forrmer academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career - if he can untangle himself from his family drama.

Shantaram

• UNABRIDGED (43 hrs and 9 mins)
• By Gregory David Roberts
• Narrated By Humphrey Bower

This mesmerizing first novel tells the epic journey of Lin, an escaped convict who flees maximum security prison in Australia to disappear into the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The keys to unlock the mysteries that bind Lin are held by two people: his mentor Khader Khan, mafia godfather and criminal-philosopher; and the beautiful, elusive Karla, whose passions are driven by dangerous secrets.

This Boy's Life

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 3 mins)
• By Tobias Wolff
• Narrated By Oliver Wyman
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.

All the Little Live Things

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 36 mins)
• By Wallace Stegner
• Narrated By Edward Herrmann
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s, Joe Allston and his wife, Ruth, have left the coast for a California retreat. And although their new home looks like Eden, it also has its serpents: Jim Peck, a messianic exponent of drugs, yoga, and sex, and Marian Catlin, an attractive young woman whose otherwordly innocence is far more appealing—and far more dangerous.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

• UNABRIDGED (9 hrs and 44 mins)
• By Stephen Greenblatt
• Narrated By Edoardo Ballerini
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.

Middlesex

• UNABRIDGED (21 hrs and 26 mins)
• By Jeffrey Eugenides
• Narrated By Kristoffer Tabori

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

1Q84

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

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....

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 59 mins)
• By David Mitchell
• Narrated By Jonathan Aris, Paula Wilcox
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In 1799, the artificial island of Dejima lies in Nagasaki Harbor as Japan’s outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company. There, Jacob de Zoet has come to make a fortune large enough to return to Holland and marry the woman he loves.