Audiobooks by Jane Mendelsohn

Burning Down the House: A Novel Audiobook

"It begins with a child . . ." So opens Jane Mendelsohn's powerful, riveting new novel. A classic family tale colliding with the twenty-first century, Burning Down the House tells the story of two girls. Neva, from the mountains of Russia, was sold into the sex trade at the age of ten; Poppy is the adopted daughter of Steve, the patriarch of a successful New York real estate clan, the Zanes. She is his sister's orphaned child. One of these young women will unwittingly help bring down this grand household with the inexorability of Greek tragedy, and the other will summon everything she's learned and all her strength to try to save its members from themselves. In cinematic, dazzlingly described scenes, we enter the lavish universe of the Zane family, from a wedding in an English manor house to the trans-global world of luxury hotels and restaurants-from New York to Rome, Istanbul to Laos. As we meet them all-Steve's second wife, his children from his first marriage, the twins from the second, their friends and household staff-we enter with visceral immediacy an emotional world filled with a dynamic family's loves, jealousies, and yearnings. In lush, exact prose, Mendelsohn transforms their private stories into a panoramic drama about a family's struggles to face the challenges of internal rivalry, a tragic love, and a shifting empire. Set against the backdrop of financial crisis, globalization, and human trafficking, the novel finds inextricable connections between the personal and the political. Dramatic, compassionate, and psychologically complex, Burning Down the House is both wrenching and unputdownable, an unforgettable portrayal of a single family caught up in the earthquake that is our contemporary world.

Jane Mendelsohn (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

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I Was Amelia Earhart

In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.There is her love affair with flying ("The sky is flesh") . . . .There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine ("Heroines did what they wanted") . . . her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out before Christmas.There is the flight itself -- day after magnificent or perilous or exhilarating or terrifying day ("Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life but not living it").And there is, miraculously, an island ("We named it Heaven, as a kind of joke").And, most important, there is Noonan . . .

Jane Mendelsohn (Author), Blair Brown (Narrator)

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American Music

This luminous love story centers on Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq war confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist. When Honor touches Milo's destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core. As Milo's treatment progresses, the images begin to weave together in an intricate, mysterious tapestry of stories that winds through several generations. There are Joe and Pearl, a husband and wife in the 1930s, whose marriage is tested by Pearl's bewitching artistic cousin, Vivian. There is the heartrending story of a woman photographer in the 1960s and the shocking theft of her life's work. And the story of a man and woman in seventeenth-century Turkey'a eunuch and a sultan's concubine'whose forbidden love is captured in music. The stories converge in a symphonic crescendo that reveals the far-flung origins of America's endlessly romantic soul and exposes the source of Honor and Milo's own love. A beautiful mystery and a meditation on love'its power and limitations'American Music is a brilliantly original novel told in Jane Mendelsohn's distinctive, mesmerizing style. 'Luminous'the relationship between a wounded Iraq War veteran and his physical therapist releases a torrent of memories, dreams, and alternate lives'a magically consoling reminder that beneath the starkest cases of wounding and healing is the music of love lost and found.' 'Kirkus

Jane Mendelsohn (Author), Carrington MacDuffie (Narrator)

Audiobook

Innocence

An electrifying follow-up to her bestselling I Was Amelia Earhart, Jane Mendelsohn's Innocence is a modern gothic coming-of-age story, a devastating X-ray of American culture, and a piercing exploration of a teenage girl growing up in New York City. Narrated with incisive wit by fourteen-year-old Becket, the novel traces her relationship with her widowed father, her encounters with the intimidating Beautiful Girls at school, her attraction to the mysterious and dangerous school nurse, her attachment to the raffish Tobey, and a series of devastating nightmares that threaten Becket's life as she moves from girl to woman. Mendelsohn has written an allegory about the precarious state of the American teenager in a culture that sucks the life force out of its young, who are nurtured by the movies and fantasy and narcissism rather than by values such as honesty and love. This is a world as startingly original and hauntingly familiar as our dreams, where the line between fantasy and reality, between sanity and insanity, is razor-thin. Playful, frightening, profound, and gripping, Innocence is the rare thing - a page turner with the depth of poetry and the immediacy of cinema.

Jane Mendelsohn (Author), Emily Schirner (Narrator)

Audiobook