Audiobook roundup: Literary fiction

Death Valley

by Melissa Broder

From the publisher: "A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow—for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path discovered on a nearby hike. Out along the sun-scorched trail, the narrator encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious, and poignant.

Absolution

by Alice McDermott

From the publisher: "American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be 'helpmeets' to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to 'do good' for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene's altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands' convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America's tragic interference in Southeast Asia."

The Fox Wife

by Yangsze Choo

From the publisher: "Manchuria, 1908. In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach—until, perhaps, now. Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them—their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change—or does it? Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur."

Metropolitan Stories

From the publisher: "Hidden behind the Picassos and Vermeers, the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing, exists another world: the hallways and offices, conservation studios, storerooms, and cafeteria that are home to the museum's devoted and peculiar staff of 2,200 people—along with a few ghosts. A surreal love letter to this private side of the Met, Metropolitan Stories unfolds in a series of amusing and poignant vignettes in which we discover larger-than-life characters, the downside of survival, and the powerful voices of the art itself. The result is a novel bursting with magic, humor, and energetic detail, but also a beautiful book about introspection, an ode to lives lived for art, ultimately building a powerful collage of human experience and the world of the imagination."

The Nix

by Nathan Hill

I finally read Hill's debut after reading and enjoying his sophomore novel Wellness. The Nix is similarly long (at 640 pages) and sweeping in scope, spanning decades and unfurling the life stories of several generations of one midwest family. The story begins in 2011, when Samuel Andresen-Anderson suddenly finds himself embroiled in professional scandal, and almost simultaneously discovers his long-absent mother, who left the family when he was a child, is headline news for throwing rocks at a presidential candidate. We go on to examine the long road that led to her decision to leave the family, her childhood, even the family's roots back in Norway, where the myth of the Nix—a spirit that follows you for life—originated. I'm glad I finally read this but this blend of family saga and satire didn't work as well for me here as it did in Wellness. Heads up for multiple content warnings that are not evident from the publisher's description.

Trust

by Hernan Diaz

Literary historical fiction that is a book within a book within a book, weaving a tangled web of power, wealth, and deceit. While many Americans struggled after the Wall Street crash of 1929, Benjamin and Helen Rask flourished. The popular novel Bonds, published in 1937, details their privileged upbringing, excessive lifestyle, and the cost of acquiring their fortune. But Bonds might not be the whole story or the right one. Fans of epistolary literature will appreciate the four-part structure of a novel, autobiography draft, memoir by the biographer, and diary excerpts. Every time you think you know the story, it transforms into something else.

The Light Pirate

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

This adroit sophomore novel from Good Morning, Midnight author Brooks-Dalton is a notable addition to the growing canon of dystopian climate change fiction. Wanda takes her name from the powerful hurricane that swept across southeastern Florida on the day she was born: to Floridians, her name has always been synonymous with death and destruction, and it's true that the storm visited both upon her family. As Wanda grows, Florida's landscape grows ever more precarious, and Wanda learns what it means to survive as one epoch of human history comes to an end and another begins, always with the help of her older survivalist neighbor Phyllis. I found myself rooting for Wanda as she sought love and safety, found improbable ways forward, and struggled to come to terms with her world as it is now. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Rosemary Benson.

Olga Dies Dreaming

by Xochitl Gonzalez

This January 2022 release features Olga, a Puerto Rican Brooklynite who works as a wedding planner to the ultra-rich—those who might think nothing of spending seven figures on a wedding. The juicy wedding details made for fascinating reading (and are rooted in Gonzales's real-life experience), but the emotional heart of this story lies with Olga's family of origin: their revolutionary father was a heroin addict who died years ago of complications from AIDS; their mother abandoned the pair when they were young so she could fight for Puerto Rican independence. Now 40, Olga finds herself restless with the life she's leading, her brother feels trapped for his own reasons, and the two find themselves torn between the success they've found and the ideals with which they were raised. This is a story about finding love and healing, breaking free from past hurts, and also very much about the past and present of Puerto Rico. I loved this, and found the ending particularly satisfying.

The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

Debut novelist Peters draws on her father's childhood memories of berry picking to weave this heartbreaking yet ultimately hopeful tale. The story begins in 1960s Maine, where an indigenous family has come from Nova Scotia to pick berries as they do every summer. But their lives are irrevocably changed when 4-year-old Ruthie disappears from the edge of the berry field; her 6-year-old brother Joe was the last one to see her, and he will carry guilt over his disappearance for the rest of his life. The story is narrated in turn by an adult Joe and a New England woman named Norma, whose childhood was marked by a chilly household atmosphere, strange recurring dreams, and a persistent sense of unbelonging. The reader will put together the pieces long before Norma does: it's impossible not to root for Norma and Joe as they strive to first understand, and then accept and find forgiveness for the devastations they endured in their youth. This novel is hard in many ways (take note of the obvious content warnings and others that are less obvious but real), and yet it's also a moving and gentle exploration of family, identity, grief, and healing.

We All Want Impossible Things: A Novel

by Catherine Newman

Edi and Ashley have been best friends their entire lives—more than four decades—and now, three years after her ovarian cancer diagnosis, Edi is ceasing treatments and entering hospice care. It's gutting: Edi's dying too young, in pain, and making impossible decisions like how to say goodbye to her 7-year-old son. Ash is desperately trying to hide her grief from her friend, but it's making itself felt in big and small ways. It's all so hard to read. But this novel is also filled with so much life and humor, on practically every page. For while Edi's suburban hospice may be filled with the dying, it is also still filled with life, and with forty years of memories from an exceptional, joy-filled, through-thick-and-thin friendship. I noticed the German translation bears a different title, which gets more directly at the coexistence of joy and pain in this novel: Und wir tanzen, und wir fallen: "And We Dance, and We Fall." The audio version, narrated by Jane Oppenheimer, was an excellent choice for this first person story.

Audiobook roundup: Literary fiction

Death Valley

Absolution

The Fox Wife

Metropolitan Stories

The Nix

Trust

The Light Pirate

Olga Dies Dreaming

The Berry Pickers

We All Want Impossible Things: A Novel

Find your next read with:

100 Book recommendations
for every mood

Audiobook roundup: Literary fiction

Find your next read with:

100 Book recommendations for every mood

100 Book recommendations
for every mood