10 Listens I Almost Missed in 2018

Keenly observed, bristling with humor, and set against the beauty of a little-known part of California, The Golden State is about class and cultural breakdowns and desperate attempts to bridge old and new worlds. But more than anything, it is about motherhood....

Joe Henry was the glue that held his family together. Now, he is dead, and his wife and sons are coming together for one final journey to scatter his ashes. First, however, his loved ones have some things to work out....

Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance....

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery....

London. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide - Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech....

Holed up with other mothers-to-be in a secret maternity home in Los Angeles, Scarlett Chen is far from her native China, where she worked in a factory and fell in love with the married owner, Boss Yeung. Now she’s carrying his baby....

The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud....

From the bestselling author of Yellow Crocus comes a heart-wrenching story about finding strength in a new world. Southern China, 1923. Desperate to secure her future, Mei Ling’s parents arrange a marriage to a widower in California....

Two sisters - Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister's protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing....

From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly new novel that spans seven transformative decades in England - from the 1940s to the present - as it plumbs the richly complex relationships of a remarkable family....