Everyone has a roster of favorite, dependable authors they can turn to when looking for the next book to read. But sometimes it’s refreshing to hear a new voice.
Here are ten debut-author audiobooks you’ll want to cozy up to this winter:
In the hours after a bridge collapse rocks their city, a group of Boston teenagers meet in the waiting room of Massachusetts General Hospital. Vanity Fair film critic Richard Lawson makes your heart stop and time stand still in his extraordinary, life-affirming novel.
Listen to an excerpt All We Can Do Is Wait
Stuck with her mother after receiving a rejection letter from NYU, seventeen-year-old Luljeta wonders if the key to her future is to unlock the secrets of the past. She decides to find out what exactly her mother has been hiding about the father Luljeta has never known. As she soon discovers, the truth is closer than she ever imagined.
Listen to an excerpt Brass
In 1992, David Greenfeld is one of the few white kids at his middle school in Boston. After David is teased, Marlon Wellings, a loner from the public housing project in David’s gentrifying neighborhood, surprises David by sticking up for him, and they become friends. This coming-of-age story about race and privilege in America is written by a former Obama campaign staffer.
Listen to an excerpt Green
With film rights already sold, this fast-paced thriller is not to be missed. In pursuit of a Russian sleeper cell on American soil, CIA analyst Vivian Miller uncovers a dangerous secret that will threaten her job, her family, and her life.
Listen to an excerpt Need to Know
First-grader Zach Taylor has survived a school shooting that takes nineteen lives. While his mother pursues justice against the shooter’s parents, Zach sets out on a captivating journey of healing, determined to help the adults in his life rediscover love and compassion.
Listen to an excerpt Only Child
Kay Donovan is a star soccer player effortlessly popular at her private school. However, when a girl’s body is found with a memento—a computer-coded scavenger hunt—Kay finds herself caught in the crosshairs of a murder investigation that proves no one is quite what he seems.
Listen to an excerpt People Like Us
Zadie and Emma are surgeons, happily married wives, mothers, and best friends since med school. When Dr. X—the man they both fell in love with as students, who was at the center of two tragedies that almost derailed their careers—moves to town, the women’s friendship is tested once more.
Listen to an excerpt The Queen of Hearts
In Empire Island, a dystopian metropolis plagued by dragons, three young people are forced to flee everything they’ve ever known. As they journey to the heart of the city, they face conspiracy, mayhem, and the monsters lurking inside themselves.
Listen to an excerpt The Sky Is Yours
Inspired by trailblazing Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad’s verse, letters, films, and interviews—and including original translations of her poems—this haunting novel uses the lens of fiction to capture the tenacity, spirit, and conflicting desires of a brave woman who represents the birth of feminism in Iran.
Listen to an excerpt Song of a Captive Bird
In 1943, Hana lives under Japanese occupation in Korea. One day she saves her younger sister, Emi, from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and forced to become a “comfort woman” in a Japanese military brothel. In 2011, Emi has spent sixty years trying to forget her sister’s sacrifice, but now she must face the past in order to find peace.
Listen to an excerpt White Chrysanthemum