Audiobooks by Jess Walter

"National Bestseller ''A warm, funny, loving novel. . . . It's an American original.''—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake ''Searing and sublime … Walter is a slyly adept social critic, and has clearly invested his protagonist with all of the outrage and heartbreak he himself feels about the dark course our world has taken ... What gets us all through … are novels like this one.” Leigh Haber, Los Angeles Times. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins—and in the propulsive spirit of Charles Portis’ True Grit—comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren. Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons. Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia? With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation, from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment” (Philadelphia Inquirer)."

Jess Walter (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022

"A collection of the year’s best mystery and suspense short fiction selected by #1 New York Times bestselling author and guest editor Jess Walter and series editor Steph Cha. New York Times bestselling author and “superb storyteller” (Boston Globe), Jess Walter flexes his genre chops and selects twenty short stories that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook."

Jess Walter, Steph Cha (Author), Chanté Mccormick, Christopher Salazar, Desean Terry, Frankie Corzo, Lindsey Dorcus, Max Meyers (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cold Millions

"Brought to you by Penguin. An enthralling novel of early 20th century America from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins It is 1909 in Spokane, Washington. The Dolan brothers live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. When Rye finds himself drawn to suffragette Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, her passion sweeps him into the world of protest and dirty business. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all . . . The Cold Millions is an intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early 20th century America. Jess Walter offers a stunning, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, dreams and reality, in a sensational tale that resonates powerfully with our own time. PRAISE FOR JESS WALTER 'A ridiculously talented writer' The New York Times 'An ambitious, large-hearted, exhilarating novel that leaves you wanting more . . . Very, very funny' The Times, on Beautiful Ruins 'Magic . . . A monument to crazy love with a deeply romantic heart' New York Times, on Beautiful Ruins © Jess Walter 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021"

Jess Walter (Author), Cassandra Campbell, Charlie Thurston, Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Macleod Andrews, Marin Ireland, Mike Ortego, Rex Anderson, Tim Gerard Reynolds (Narrator)

Audiobook

Beautiful Ruins

"Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, read by Amy Finegan. The story begins on the Italian coast in 1962. A young innkeeper watches in disbelief as a beautiful American girl gets out of a boat and climbs towards his hotel. She turns out to be an actress, on the run from the shenanigans going on down the coast in Rome at the filming of Cleopatra. A few days later international star Richard Burton, much the worse for wear, appears in the village too. Half a century later, and half a world away in Hollywood, an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot - searching for the woman he last saw in his hotel fifty years before. What unfolds is a dazzling novel teeming with unforgettable characters: the Italian and his long-lost love; the heroically cynical film producer who first brought them together, now a successful legend on the Hollywood scene, and his idealistic young assistant; and the husbands, wives and lovers, superstars and victims, who have populated their world since that summer day in 1962."

Jess Walter (Author), Amy Finegan (Narrator)

Audiobook

We Live in Water: Stories

"ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, the first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter—a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite These twelve stories—published over the last five years in Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Playboy, and other publications—veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing. We Live in Water is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of stories from a “ridiculously talented writer” (New York Times), “one of the freshest voices in American literature” (Dallas Morning News)."

Jess Walter (Author), Edoardo Ballerini, Jess Walter (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Zero: A Novel

"The Zero is a groundbreaking novel, a darkly comic snapshot of our times that is already being compared to the works of Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller. From its opening scene—when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head—novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all. The landscape around him is at once fractured and oddly familiar: a world dominated by a Machiavellian mayor, and peopled by gawking celebrities, anguished policemen, and real estate divas hyping the spoils of tragedy. Remy himself has a new girlfriend he doesn't know, a son who pretends he's dead, and an unsettling new job chasing a trail of paper scraps for a shadowy intelligence agency. Whether that trail will lead Remy to an elusive terror cell—or send him circling back to himself—is only one of the questions posed by this provocative yet deeply human novel. Performed by Christopher Graybill"

Jess Walter (Author), Christopher Graybill (Narrator)

Audiobook