Audiobooks by Nina Siegal

The Diary Keepers: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times – World War II in the Netherlands, as Writte

Based on select writings from an exceptional Amsterdam archive containing more than two thousand Dutch diaries from World War II, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before. This audiobook is read by Nina Siegal, Maggi-Meg Reed, Nan McNamara, Catherine Taber, Jenna Lamia, Rob Shapiro, Mike Ortego, Robert Petkoff, Steven Jay Cohen and Jim Meskimen Nina Siegal, an accomplished journalist and novelist, weaves together excerpts from the daily journals of collaborators, resistors, and the persecuted—a Dutch Nazi police detective, a Jewish journalist imprisoned at Westerbork transit camp, a grocery store owner who saved dozens of lives—into a braided nonfictional narrative of the Nazi occupation and the Dutch Holocaust, as individuals experienced it day by day. Siegal provides the context, both historical and personal, while she tries to make sense of her own relationship to this past. As a “second-generation survivor” born and raised in New York, she attempts to understand what it meant for her mother and maternal grandparents to live through the war in Europe in those times. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did 75 percent of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower? How did this square with the narratives of Dutch resistance she had heard so much about, and in what way did it relate to the famed Dutch tolerance? Searching and singular, The Diary Keepers takes us into the lives of seven diary writers and follows their pasts into the present, through interviews with those who preserved and inherited these diaries. Along the way, Siegal investigates the nature of memory and how the traumatic past is rewritten again and again.

Nina Siegal (Author), Catherine Taber, Jenna Lamia, Jim Meskimen, Maggie-Meg Reed, Mike Ortego, Nan Mcnamara, Rob Shapiro, Robert Petkoff, Steven Jay (Narrator)

Audiobook

You'll Thank Me for This: A Novel

This pulse-pounding psychological thriller takes roots from the Dutch tradition of blindfolding and dropping your adolescent child in the middle of the wilderness-and shows what happens when it goes horribly wrong. Twelve-year old Karin is blindfolded and dropped into the Hoge Veluwe National Forest with three other children. With nothing but a few basic supplies and emergency food, the children are tasked with working together to navigate one of the Netherlands' most beautiful and wild locations and return home to where their families are anxiously waiting. The youngest of the group and distracted by her own thoughts, Karin lags behind, suddenly looking up to see that the other children have vanished. As Karin struggles against the elements to find her way back, she soon realizes that something far more sinister lurks in the woods. Meanwhile, the parents are reeling from the knowledge that none of the children have returned. The authorities are alerted, and the news media descends, turning the disappearances into a public frenzy. Amidst the chaos and hysteria, Karin's mother, Grace, is facing threats of her own, making her doubt who she can trust. Will she be able to untangle this web of false leads and fake news to find her daughter-before it's too late?

Nina Siegal (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Anatomy Lesson: A Novel

Set in the Dutch Golden Age, an engrossing historical novel that brilliantly imagines the complex story behind one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings Commissioned by the Amsterdam Surgeons’ Guild, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp was the first major Rembrandt work to catapult the young painter to international fame. Taking this painting as its inspiration, Nina Siegal’s novel The Anatomy Lesson opens on the morning of the medical dissection and follows several characters as they prepare for the evening’s big event: we meet Aris the Kid, a one-handed coat thief who is awaiting his turn at the gallows; Flora, the woman who is pregnant with his child and who hopes to save him from the executioner; Jan Fetchet, a curio collector who also moonlights as an acquirer of medical cadavers; René Descartes, who will attend the dissection in the course of his quest to understand where the human soul resides; and the twenty-six-year-old Dutch master himself, who feels a shade uneasy about this assignment. And in the twenty-first century, there is Pia, a contemporary art historian who is examining the painting. As the story builds to its dramatic and inevitable conclusion, the events that transpire throughout the day sway Rembrandt to make fundamental changes to his initial composition. Bringing to life the vivid world of Amsterdam in 1632, The Anatomy Lesson offers a rich slice of history and a textured story by a young master.

Nina Siegal (Author), , Nina Siegal, Various Readers (Narrator)

Audiobook