Narrated By Will Patton, Kate Mulgrew, Scott Shepherd, and others
Whispersync for Voice-ready
Overall
(41)
Performance
(33)
Story
(36)
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim. Spring, 1849: Eli McCullough is 13 years old when a marauding band of Comanches takes him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to life among the Comanches, learning their ways and waging war against their enemies, including white men - which complicates his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is.
Melinda says:
"Five Stars for the Lone Star, The Son, & Meyer"
Narrated By Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee, James Kyson Lee, and others
Whispersync for Voice-ready
Overall
(451)
Performance
(371)
Story
(377)
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
Lisa says:
"The most compelling listen I've ever owned"
When the young girl washed up on their shore, no one knew she had been a Vessel. That she had carried a Product. That it had been carved from her belly. Stolen. Claire had had a son. She was supposed to forget him, but that was impossible. When he was taken from their community, she knew she had to follow. And so her journey began. But here in this wind-battered village Claire is welcomed as one of their own. In the security of her new home, she is free and loved. She grows stronger.
Ten years after the publication of Wicked, beloved novelist Gregory Maguire returns at last to the land of Oz. There he introduces us to Liir, an adolescent boy last seen hiding in the shadows of the castle after Dorothy did in the Witch. Bruised, comatose, and left for dead in a gully, Liir is shattered in spirit as well as in form. But he is tended at the Cloister of Saint Glinda by the silent novice called Candle, who wills him back to life with her musical gifts.
Vernette says:
"A good writer does not a good reader make"
Narrated By Scott Brick, Gabrielle de Cuir, Stephen Hoye
Whispersync for Voice-ready
Overall
(858)
Performance
(289)
Story
(294)
Born into an alternative frontier America where life is hard, and folk magic is real, Alvin is gifted with power, but he must learn to use his gift wisely. Dark forces are arrayed against Alvin, and only a young girl with second sight can protect him.
Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family's back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael's father, was found alone near his car on Chicago's North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone.
At the high point of a soaring career in the US Army, Lt. Col. Mark Weber was tapped by General David Petraeus to serve in a high-profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Within weeks, a routine physical revealed Stage IV intestinal cancer in the 38-year-old father of three. Over the next two years he would fight a desperate battle he wasn't trained for, with his wife and boys as his reluctant but willing fighting force. When Mark realized that he was not going to survive this final tour of combat, he began to write a letter to his boys, so that as they grew up without him, they would know what his life-and-death story had taught him.
The first in a mesmerizing four-book original series, Prodigal Son is a brilliant re-imagining and updating of the classic Frankenstein story that only Dean Koontz could conceive. Two hundred years old, the "monster", Deucalion, is a monster no more. Literate and intelligent, he arrives in modern-day New Orleans, where he will join forces with a street-smart police detective and her partner on the trail of a macabre serial killer.
At the pinnacle of a soaring career in the U.S. Army, Lt. Col. Mark M. Weber was tapped to serve in a high-profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Weeks later, a routine physical revealed stage IV intestinal cancer in the 38-year-old father of three. Over the next two years he would fight a desperate battle he wasn’t trained for, with his wife and boys as his reluctant but willing fighting force....
Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction
UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 27 mins)
By David Sheff
Narrated By Anthony Heald
Whispersync for Voice-ready
Overall
(491)
Performance
(130)
Story
(127)
David Sheff's story is a first: a teenager's addiction from the parent's point of view, a real-time chronicle of the shocking descent into substance abuse and the gradual emergence into hope.
Before meth, Sheff's son, Nic, was a varsity athlete, honor student, and award-winning journalist. After meth, he was a trembling wraith who stole money from his eight-year-old brother and lived on the streets. With haunting candor, Sheff traces the first warning signs, the attempts at rehabilitation, and, at last, the way past addiction. He shows us that, whatever an addict's fate, the rest of the family must care for one another, too, lest they become addicted to addiction.
In this remarkable dual memoir, film legend Martin Sheen and accomplished actor/filmmaker Emilio Estevez recount their lives as father and son. In alternating chapters—and in voices that are as eloquent as they are different—they narrate stories spanning more than 50 years of family history, and reflect on their journeys into two different kinds of faith.
CyndiLooWho says:
"Hartwarming and Captivating but Fix the Audio!"
Magic is forbidden throughout the Four Realms. For decades, sorcerers and those associating with them were hunted to near extinction.But Seri, a Leiran noblewoman living in exile, is no stranger to defying the unjust laws of her land. She is sheltering a wanted fugitive who possesses unusual abilities-a fugitive with the fate of the realms in his hands...
The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming
UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 3 mins)
By Henri J. M. Nouwen
Narrated By Dan Anderson
Overall
(37)
Performance
(28)
Story
(28)
This powerful meditation illuminates the parable of the prodigal son found in Luke's Gospel. Nouwen discovers anew the reality that God's love is unconditional and shares his own spiritual journey with us. In this audiobook, Nouwen shares his own experience as the wayward son as well as the vengeful older brother and the compassionate father.
Tony Chiarilli says:
"Are You the Younger or Older Brother?"
Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's first major novel, was also the first in the English language to explore ordinary working-class life from the inside. No writer before or since has written so well about the intimacies enforced by a tightly knit mining community and by a family where feelings are never hidden for long. When the marriage between Walter Morel and his sensitive, high-minded wife begins to break down, the bitterness of their frustration seeps into their children's lives.
Second in the trilogy that began with The Good Earth, Buck's classic and starkly real tale of sons rising against their honored fathers tells of the bitter struggle to the death between the old and the new in China. Revolutions sweep the vast nation, leaving destruction and death in their wake, yet also promising emancipation to China's oppressed millions, who are groping for a way to survive in a modern age.
Narrated By Myra Lucretia Taylor, Lizian Mitchell, Cherise Booth, and others
Whispersync for Voice-ready
Overall
(89)
Performance
(46)
Story
(45)
The Preacher's Son captivates with all the intensity expected of a Weber novel. Bishop T.K. Wilson is a pillar of the community, pastor of the largest African-American church in Queens, NY, and has always tended to he needy. Running for borough president, he faces one shocking revelation after another that could not only derail his campaign, but also force him to reevaluate his family values.
How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else
UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 39 mins)
By Michael Gates Gill
Narrated By Dylan Baker
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Overall
(208)
Performance
(36)
Story
(38)
In his 50s, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned 60, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his 20-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son.
In 431 BC, ancient Greece experienced its own "Pearl Harbor" - a treacherous sneak attack that would mark the start of the bloody war between the democracy of Athens and the tyranny of Sparta. Caught between these superpowers, the independent city-state of Plataea became the arena where their battle for control of all of Greece would begin.
Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father, Jack, a hard-drinking womanizer who makes his living poaching illegal game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before.
Dennis says:
"Like having oatmeal for breakfast every day"