Biography & Memoir Audiobooks

Seven Signs of Life: Stories from an Intensive Care Doctor

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Seven Signs of Life by Aoife Abbey, read by Caroline Lennon. Grief. Anger. Joy. Fear. Distraction. Disgust. Hope. All emotions we expect to encounter over our lifetime. But what if this was every day? And what if your ability to manage them was the difference between life and death? For a doctor in Intensive Care this is part of the job. Fear in the eyes of a terminally ill patient who pleads with you to not let them die. Grief when you make a potentially fatal mistake. Disgust at caring for a convicted rapist. But there are also moments of joy, like the rare bright spots of lucidity for a dementia patient, or when the ward unexpectedly breaks into song. Dr Aoife Abbey shows us what a doctor sees of humanity as it comes through the revolving door of the hospital and takes us beyond a purely medical perspective. Told through seven emotions, Seven Signs of Life is about what it means to be alive and how it feels to care for a living.

Aoife Abbey (Author), Caroline Lennon (Narrator)

Audiobook

Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia

In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she became an acclaimed musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living. Returning more than three decades later to Brookmans Park, scene of her childhood, Thorn takes us beyond the bus shelters and pub car parks, the utopian cul-de-sacs, the train to Potters Bar and the weekly discos, to the parents who wanted so much for their children, the children who wanted none of it. With endearing wit and great insight, Thorn reconsiders the Green Belt post-war dream so many artists have mocked, and yet so many artists have come from.

Tracey Thorn (Author), Tracey Thorn (Narrator)

Audiobook

Skeletons in My Closet: Life Lessons from a Homicide Detective

Sometimes tragedy is our teacher. Skeletons in My Closet is an unorthodox police memoir taking listeners on a ride-along like no other, revealing poignant truths about life and death, and how we can all work and live together. Danger and grit pair with humor and compassion in this gripping, fresh audiobook. Dave Sweet, a conservative, veteran homicide detective has teamed up with Sarah Graham, a liberal, optimistic author to write this unconventional, universal life-lessons book.

Dave Sweet (Author), Jonathan Ostrander (Narrator)

Audiobook

Time to go

Some things in life are too serious to joke about. Assisted dying is not one of them In 2017 Susie Kennaway asked her son Guy to kill her. 88 years old, with an older and infirm husband, Susie wanted to avoid sliding into infantilized catatonia. Her son immediately started taking notes and Time to Go is the result. In turns a manual for those considering the benefits of assisted dying, a portrait of a mother-son relationship, and a sympathetic description of old age, this book is a route map through the moral, legal, emotional, intellectual and practical maze that is the biggest issue facing the senior generations today: leaving life on their own terms. During their conversations about when and how to make Susie's final exit, some of the difficulties of their fractious relationship mellowed and others even melted, as the reality of what they were planning brought them together. Many elderly people, like Susie, have clearly stated that they wish to die in a manner and time of their choosing. But the Church, the law, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry stand in the way, wagging their fingers. A change is coming for the rights of the elderly, the way it has come for the rights of women and gay people. Time to Go is a rallying call in this fight. Life is too precious not to be lived properly. As with a job, a relationship or a party, you have to know when it's time to go.

Guy Kennaway (Author), Alex Jennings, Patience Tomlinson (Narrator)

Audiobook

'Kill The Black One First': The most moving story you'll read this year

A story about race, identity, belonging and displacement, Kill the Black One First is the memoir from Michael Fuller - Britain's first ever black Chief Constable, whose life and career is not only a stark representation of race relations in the UK, but also a unique morality tale of how humanity deals with life's injustices. Michael Fuller was born to Windrush-generation Jamaican immigrants in 1959, and experienced a meteoric career in policing, from the beat to the Brixton inferno, through cutting edge detective work to the frontline of drug-related crime and violence on London's most volatile estates. He took a pivotal role in the formation of Operation Trident, which tackled gun crime and gang warfare in the London community, and was later appointed as chief constable of Kent. Kill the Black One First is a raw and unflinching account of a life in policing during a tumultuous period of race relations throughout the UK. Includes an exclusive interview with the author.

Michael Fuller (Author), Michael Fuller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Solitude & Company

An oral history biography of the legendary Latin American writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez, brimming with atmosphere and insight Irreverent and hopeful, Solitude & Company recounts the life of a boy from the provinces who decided to become a writer. This is the story of how he did it, how little Gabito became Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and of how Gabriel Garcia Márquez survived his own self-creation. The book is divided into two parts. In the first, BC, before Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), we hear from his siblings and those who were friends before Garcia Márquez became the universally loved Latin American icon. The second part, AC, describes the man behind the legend that Garcia Márquez became. From Aracataca, to Baranquila, to Bogota, to Paris, to Mexico City, the solitude that Garcia Márquez needed to produce his masterpiece turns out to have been something of a raucous party whenever he wasn't actually writing. Here are the writers Tomás Eloy Martinez, Edmundo Paz Soldán, and William and Rose Styron; legendary Spanish agent Carmen Balcells; the translator of A Hundred Years of Solitude, Gregory Rabassa; Gabo's brothers Luis Enrique, Jaime, Eligio, and Gustavo, and his sisters Aida and Margot; Maria Luisa Elio, to whom A Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated; and many others.

Silvana Paternostro (Author), Robert Fass (Narrator)

Audiobook

Traveling with Dogs: From the USA to the UK

Traveling With Dogs: From the USA to the UK is the first in a series by Elizabeth Acker about her journeys with her beloved dogs. In this book, her canine companion is Cody, who enters Acker's life in a most unusual manner. Feeling like a failure after a divorce and a business foreclosure, Acker soon sets off with dogged determination to make a new life for herself and Cody. This is a warm-hearted tale that tackles topics such as hardship and work, friendship and unromantic love, as well as the challenges and joy of starting over.

Elizabeth Acker (Author), Elizabeth Acker (Narrator)

Audiobook

Boys, Bumps and Blood

For Clarence, a two-year-old Minnesota boy, the terrible twos were terrible. His mother was killed in an auto accident, boiling water scalded his arm, and a rooster nearly pecked out one of his eyes. Things weren't much better at six. Tumbling into a stream, a broken bottle pierced his elbow and doctors contemplated amputating the arm. At eight, his luck changed. During a summer at an Ojibwe Indian camp, he took on a new identity as White Eagle, found friends, developed skills, and gained wisdom from a 103 year-old Indian lady named Grandma Baker-experiences that forged a self-reliant character which allowed him to adapt to being shuffled off to live in an orphanage and with a series of relatives. The book chronicles the childhood of Paul C. Slayback, a young boy who grew up in northeastern Minnesota in the 1940s. Slayback tells entertaining stories of growth and learning, triumph and tragedy, victory and defeat. His earthy and vulnerable voice elicits empathy and laughter, and rekindles memories of a simpler time. Losing a mother, living with relatives, gaining a friend, swimming down the Mississippi, diving off high cliffs, ski-jumping off a mountain, squaring off with a bully, working on a farm, falling in love before he even imagined love, a dance with religion, discovering the soothing comfort of nature, fishing, and hunting with a dog. Slayback's stories are timeless tales of boyhood from another era.

Paul C. Slayback (Author), E-Audioproductions.Com (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Unwinding of the Miracle: A memoir of life, death and everything that comes after

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams, read by Emily Woo Zeller. 'A searing memoir ... I didn't know Julie, but in these pages I grew to love her.' Lucy Kalanithi Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia at the hands of her grandmother, only to have to flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, a life. Then, at the age of thirty-seven, with two little girls still at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. Growing out of a blog Julie kept for the last four years of her life, The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life told through the prism of imminent death, of a life lived vividly and cut too short. With glorious humour, bracing honesty and the cleansing power of well-deployed anger, her story is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. More than just a tale about cancer, it's about truth and honesty, fear and pain, our dreams, our jealousies. And it's about how to say goodbye to your children and a life you love. Starting as a need to understand the disease, it has evolved into a powerful story about living - even as Julie put her affairs in order and prepared to die.

Julie Yip-Williams (Author), Emily Woo Zeller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Policing Saigon

Policing Saigon isn't Platoon or Apocalypse Now, but the story of Loren W. Christensen's experience as a military policeman (MP) in a city of millions at a time when chaos and fear reigned. As a twenty-three-year-old from a small town in Washington State, the author was plunged into a chaotic city of brawling servicemen, prostitutes, racial violence, enemy rockets, riots, and death. It was a place that would give him a unique opportunity to see up close a different side of the Vietnam War and its effect on the human condition. Nearly eighty stories collectively convey the author's experiences, and his arc-from naive to jaded, angry, confused, anxious, and bone-weary exhausted-is representative of so many GIs who served in the Vietnam War as well as those veterans of today's conflicts around the globe.

Loren W. Christensen (Author), Peter Berkrot (Narrator)

Audiobook

Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

A mayor's inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal. Once described by the Washington Post as "the most interesting mayor you've never heard of," Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation's most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a "dying city," because the industrial Midwest beckoned as a challenge to the McKinsey-trained Harvard graduate. Whether meeting with city residents on middle-school basketball courts, reclaiming abandoned houses, confronting gun violence, or attracting high-tech industry, Buttigieg has transformed South Bend into a shining model of urban reinvention. While Washington reels with scandal, Shortest Way Home interweaves two once-unthinkable success stories: that of an Afghanistan veteran who came out and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and that of a Rust Belt city so thoroughly transformed that it shatters the way we view America's so-called flyover country.

Pete Buttigieg (Author), Pete Buttigieg (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bottled: A Mom's Guide to Early Recovery

An unflinching and hilarious memoir about recovery as a mother of young kids, Bottled explains the perils moms face with drinking and chronicles the author's path to recovery, from hitting bottom to the months of early sobriety-a blur of pain and chaos-to her now (in)frequent moments of peace. Punctuated by potent, laugh-out-loud sarcasm, Bottled offers practical suggestions on how to be a sober, present-in-the-moment mom, one day at a time, and provides much needed levity on an issue too often treated with deadly seriousness.

Dana Bowman (Author), Rachel Dulude (Narrator)

Audiobook