Literary Audiobooks | Biography & Memoir

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Brought to you by Penguin. From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring - and surviving - an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art - and finding the strength to stand up again. ©2024 Salman Rushdie (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Salman Rushdie (Author), Salman Rushdie, TBD (Narrator)

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Life as We Know It Can Be: My Search for a World Worth Passing Down

Award-winning journalist and CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir takes readers through time and around our changing world to confront the biggest threats to life as we know it and search for proven ways to build happier, healthier, and more resilient communities, come what may. While reporting from every state and continent, and filming his acclaimed CNN Original Series, The Wonder List, Bill Weir has spent decades telling the stories of unique people, places, cultures, and creatures on the brink of change. And as the first Chief Climate Correspondent in network news, he is immersed in the latest scientific warnings and breakthroughs while often on the frontlines of disasters, natural and manmade. After the birth of his son in April 2020, Bill began distilling these experiences into a series of Earth Day letters for his boy to read in 2050, weaving the worry and wonder into a reminder to other anxious parents that they are not alone and a better future can still be written. This dialog with a boy born into “The Age of Unreason” inspired Life As We Know It (Can Be). With a storyteller’s flair, Bill digs into fascinating corners of history, psychology, technology, and his own biographyto connect the lessons he’s collected from the happiest, healthiest, and most resilient societies. Bill’s stories take readers on journeys from the Greek Island where people live to 100 at an astonishing rate to the one community in Florida that took on a hurricane and never lost power, from the Antarctic Peninsula where one species of penguin is showing us the key to survival to the nuclear fusion labs where scientists are trying to build a star in box. In these pages, we join a search for ancient wisdom and new ideas. Life As We Know It (Can Be) is a celebration of the wonders of our planet, a meditation on the human wants and needs that drive it out of balance, and an inspiration for communities to galvanize around nature and each other as the very best way to brace for what’s next.

Bill Weir (Author), Bill Weir, TBD (Narrator)

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Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann

Brought to you by Penguin. 1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it. We encounter them at quiet moments – pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold. Invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making homes, they emerge from long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment; they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living. In the country, each woman finds her path: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing. Graceful, fluid, and enriched by previously untouched archival material, Rural Hours is both a paean to the bravery and vision of three pioneering writers, and a passionate invitation to us all: to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day. ©2024 Harriet Baker (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Harriet Baker (Author), Harriet Baker, TBD (Narrator)

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Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family

A frank and entertaining memoir, from the daughter of Edward Said, about growing up second-generation Arab American and struggling with that identity. The daughter of a prominent Palestinian father and a sophisticated Lebanese mother, Najla Said grew up in New York City, confused and conflicted about her cultural background and identity. Said knew that her parents identified deeply with their homelands, but growing up in a Manhattan world that was defined largely by class and conformity, she felt unsure about who she was supposed to be, and was often in denial of the differences she sensed between her family and those around her. The fact that her father was the famous intellectual and outspoken Palestinian advocate Edward Said only made things more complicated. She may have been born a Palestinian Lebanese American, but in Said’s mind she grew up first as a WASP, having been baptized Episcopalian in Boston and attending the wealthy Upper East Side girls’ school Chapin, then as a teenage Jew, essentially denying her true roots, even to herself—until, ultimately, the psychological toll of all this self-hatred began to threaten her health. As she grew older, making increased visits to Palestine and Beirut, Said’s worldview shifted. The attacks on the World Trade Center, and some of the ways in which Americans responded, finally made it impossible for Said to continue to pick and choose her identity, forcing her to see herself and her passions more clearly. Today, she has become an important voice for second-generation Arab Americans nationwide.

Najla Said (Author), Najla Said (Narrator)

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Learning to Think.: A broken system kept her trapped, education helped her break free

Brought to you by Penguin. When you have nothing, you cling to whatever gives you hope. Put yourself in Tracy King's shoes. Growing up in an ordinary council estate outside Birmingham; a house filled with creativity, curiosity and love, but marked by her father's alcoholism and her mother's agoraphobia. By the time she turns twelve her father has been killed, her sister taken into care and her mother ensnared by the promises of born-again Christianity. This isn't the stuff of cult documentaries; this is the story of an ordinary family trapped in a broken system. It's a story that could happen to anyone without the tools to transform their circumstances. And it's the story of how Tracy found her way out. A shocking, inspiring and ultimately hopeful memoir that holds up a mirror to the everyday realities of living in poverty, it is also a testament to the power of books and to learning to question our world. 'Tracy King's memoir is heartbreaking and hopeful...An incredible true story of survival and forgiveness.' TIM MINCHIN 'Raw and unflinching.' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ 'A brilliant writer.' ADAM KAY 'What would you do if you began to suspect the events of your childhood didn't happen as you remembered them? In this evocative memoir, Tracy King confronts the stories we all tell ourselves in order to live.' HELEN LEWIS ©2024 Tracy King (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Tracy King (Author), TBD, Tracy King (Narrator)

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Combat Love: A Story of Leaving, Longing, and Searching for Home

CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota's memoir Combat Love is her story of growing up longing for stability and attachment as the foundation of her family crumbled. Set on the Jersey Shore in the free-range 1980s, Camerota finds the belonging she craves courtesy of a local punk rock band named Shrapnel and their diehard fans. Combat Love chronicles her near-misses and misadventures at clubs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City, coupled with the sex, drugs, and punk rock of 1980s New Jersey. By the time she leaves home at sixteen, it feels like home had left her long ago. Combat Love is also the story of two women, mother and daughter, trying to forge their own paths and independence, and find their own happiness, success, and wholeness. Camerota's story searches for the line between shelter and risk, nurture and neglect, parenting and personal freedom. What are we willing to sacrifice for self-actualization and happiness? What if the answer is your mother, or your daughter? The two-time Emmy-award-winning Camerota retraces her steps down an often gritty path toward her dream of becoming a journalist. At times heartbreaking and pulse-pounding, Combat Love is an inspiration for anyone who's ever searched for that elusive place called home.

Alisyn Camerota (Author), Alisyn Camerota (Narrator)

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Intermezzo

For all its brevity, Intermezzo is a beautiful and deeply profound piece, rightfully considered Kotsubinsky's best work. It speaks of an artist's ongoing struggle to create in the midst of life and all its good, bad, and ugly aspects. It also acknowledges the need to escape and reset - but emphasizes this as a temporary measure only.

Mihailo Kotskubinsky (Author), Michael L. Brusasco (Narrator)

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Mostly What God Does: Reflections on Seeking and Finding His Love Everywhere

In her first trade book, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award recipient, Savannah Guthrie, co-anchor of the TODAY show, shares reflections on faith and life and offers inspiration for all of us to do what God does-love. Today's society is filled with headlines that inspire fear and anxiousness, but the power of faith and belief in God can help us make sense of this world. Mostly What God Does is centered on the essentials of God's love, a love that is needed now more than ever. Savannah Guthrie turns her journalistic eye toward the power of faith in everyday life. Using personal stories of motherhood, love, her career, being a daughter, grief, and even the mundane moments that have shaped her faith, she illustrates the profound role that belief in God has in helping us find real hope in this life. As a fellow traveler with you, Savannah opens up about her own beliefs and questions to illuminate the moments where she has experienced God's love. Journey with her through the six essentials of faith: love, presence, praise, grace, hope, and purpose, to rediscover your spiritual connection with your creator. Savannah penned these reflections to help you engage in the real and practical ways that God loves you. With true stories that bring both tears and laughter, you will discover a path of faith that is both authentic and heartening. Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. - Ephesians 5:2 MSG

Savannah Guthrie (Author), Savannah Guthrie, TBD (Narrator)

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Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald published America's favorite novel, The Great Gatsby, at the young age of twenty-eight. Taking Things Hard reveals the story behind the now-iconic Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald's struggle to write anything that matched its brilliance. Robert R. Garnett's new biographical study of Fitzgerald's life and work begins by constructing a portrait of the young man who would wholly and uniquely pour himself into writing Gatsby. In the years following its publication, Fitzgerald continued penning stories, some of them among his finest, yet it took him nine years to complete another novel. The downward trajectory of his career had interweaving causes, among them arrogance, irresponsibility, his troubled marriage to Zelda Sayre, financial improvidence, and a destructive alcoholism. At the root of it all, though, lingered the simple fact that Fitzgerald's most intense and profound experiences had come early, during his truncated undergraduate years at Princeton and the months following his February 1919 discharge from the army. Taking Things Hard provides a fresh look at the imaginative sources of Fitzgerald's fiction and considers the elements, drawn from the keen impressions and salient emotions of its author's youth, that make Gatsby a book that still speaks powerfully to readers.

Robert Garnett (Author), Keith Sellon-Wright (Narrator)

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Horace: A Very Short Introduction

Horace was one of the greatest poets during the reign of Augustus and is seen as mark of cultural sophistication since this time. This Very Short Introduction examines how Horace's poetry has exerted enormous influence but argues that it is best understood within the traditions of ancient literature. Llewellyn Morgan guides the listener through the dizzying vagaries of Horace's biography, which reflects the political and social instability of the period. His poetry, and the life he artfully constructs and presents to us in it, engages both with the greatest crisis that Rome had ever faced, and its resolution by the first Emperor. Horace is Rome's laureate, and through him we experience the anxieties and triumphs of his age. For posterity, Horace has served for a model of the good life, a promoter of enlightened retirement, but has also exemplified poetic artistry, and is the most creative manipulator of the Latin language, even among his remarkable contemporaries.

Llewelyn Morgan (Author), Michael Langan (Narrator)

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The Long and Winding Road

Brought to you by Penguin. Lesley Pearse didn't publish her first novel until she was 48. Now she has sold over ten million books around the world and is a constant presence on the bestseller chart. A writer of heart-stopping stories, Lesley's books are filled with heroines struggling to make it in a difficult world. Yet this description could apply to Lesley herself. In this, her first ever autobiography, she tells of growing up in an orphanage after her mother's death, her racy twenties in London during the swinging sixties and working as a bunny girl and dressmaker. Packed full of Lesley's signature warmth, wit and poignancy, this is the story of a woman and a writer fighting against the odds to achieve her dreams. ©2024 Lesley Pearse (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Lesley Pearse (Author), Rebecca Lacey, TBD (Narrator)

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Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses

'He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all' Thomas Hardy is one of the most beloved and most-read British authors. His influence on literature and the minds of his readers is singular. But how is it that the novelist who created some of the most memorable and modern female characters in literature had such troubled relationships with real women? In this highly innovative book, acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne re-examines Hardy’s life through the eyes of the women who made him – mother, sisters, girlfriends, wives, muses. The story veers from shocking scenes such as his obsession with the sight of a woman hanged, to poignant vignettes of unfulfilled passion, to fascinating details of working women’s lives in the nineteenth century. Hardy Women is the story of how the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination. It is only through understanding and witnessing these hardy women that we can truly enter the heart of this great novelist and poet.

Paula Byrne (Author), Dawn Murphy (Narrator)

Audiobook

Literary Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir