I listen to audiobooks when I walk my dog, usually on breaks from my own writing. I love listening to other authors voice their own work—they know where to place inflections, where to naturally pause and feel. Author-read audiobooks reveal the hidden secrets of the author, you can hear it in their voice—the lived experience, the emotion, everything is exposed in their spoken words. I didn’t think my audiobook collection had a theme until I wrote down my top five. Here is what emerged: belonging, perseverance, love, and identity. Mix it all together and you’ve got a guide on how to be you and survive in this chaotic world. —Tanya Talaga, author of The Knowing
Coates is a master orator and thinker. The Message reminds us about the power of words and story, of how they impact, how they hurt, and how they haunt. Stories shape the world we know and inform us on the world we don’t.
I was born in Scarborough, an urban neighbourhood [in Toronto] that is often written off as a troubled place, full of poverty, violence, and those who struggle. But Hernandez lovingly lays bare Scarborough’s beauty and crevices through families whose lives intersect via an early learning childcare centre. Scarborough inspires.
There is something about listening to the former US president tell his own story. You remember the power, the promise of his leadership, the great potential of the American state and the underlying message of never giving up hope.
This fictional book is told in an innovative, experimental way that had me hooked from the start as author Noor Naga and Amin El Gamal narrate a love story you won’t soon forget. Set in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Cairo, this is a story of desire, identity, and the tragic reality of two worlds colliding and the aftermath.
From the start, Whitehead’s rawness of prose grabs you as you listen to the coming of age of a two-spirit named Jonny. Sometimes I forgot this was fiction. Jonny’s journey is a poetic, lyrical story that screams out against erasure and centres two-spirit people as powerhouses who protect all of our spirits.
Tanya Talaga, a former award-winning journalist at the Toronto Star, is the author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which was the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and the First Nations Communities Read Award: Young Adult/Adult. Tanya is of Indigenous and Polish descent. Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor.
