March’s debuts are popping up like daisies, and we couldn’t be more thrilled! You’re sure to find an audiobook to be excited about on this list—the only other thing you’ll need is a warm, sunny day to listen on.
On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there was once a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. Here begins the epic story of a small African nation, told by a mysterious chorus.This gripping, unforgettable audiobook sweeps over the years and the globe and is a testament to our yearning to both create and cross borders.
Will Daughtry is a late bloomer–at least, that’s what everyone tells him. On his sixteenth birthday, Will is just shy of five feet, and he is bitterly resigned to being tiny forever. That is, until things take an unexpected turn, and he realizes he’s really and truly on his own. That’s when he starts to grow, and grow fast. For the first time, Will’s happy with his stature, and the world’s at his feet (for a change). But the highest heights come with some low, low lows, and his most precious relationships suffer excruciating growing pains.
When Oksana’s family begins their new American life in Florida after emigrating from Ukraine, she just wants to have friends and lead a normal life. But although she constantly tries to do the right thing, she keeps getting herself in trouble. As she grows up, she continues to misbehave, from somewhat accidentally maiming the school bus bully, to stealing the much-coveted key to New York City’s Gramercy Park, to falling in love with a married man. As her grandmother moves back to Ukraine, her father gets a job at Goldman Sachs, and her mother knits endless scarves, Oksana longs for a Russia that looms large in her imagination but is a country she never really knew.
Detective P.T. Marsh was a rising star on the police force of Mason Falls, Georgia–until his wife and young son died in an accident. Since that night, he’s lost the ability to see the line between smart moves and disastrous decisions. Such as when he agrees to help out a woman by confronting her abusive boyfriend. When the next morning he gets called to the scene of his newest murder case, he is stunned to arrive at the house of the very man he beat up the night before. When the dead body of a black teenager is found in a field with a portion of a blackened rope around his neck, P.T. realizes he might have killed the number-one suspect of this horrific crime.
When the love of her life, Henry, is killed in a freak biking accident, Grace feels like she’s lost her own shadow. In his absence, she must put her world back together: she moves into the Dublin dream house they bought together, she returns to work as a chef, she watches TV with her nosy elderly neighbor. But, through it all, she’s ever aware of the growing Henry-shaped hole in her life. Until his long-lost twin brother knocks on her door.
Evie and her uncle Jim have just moved to an isolated cabin in a remote beach town–a far cry from their hometown of Melbourne. But Evie isn’t her real name. And Jim isn’t really her uncle. Jim tells Evie she did something terrible back home, that he’s hiding her to protect her. But Evie can’t remember anything about that night–for all she knows, he’s lying. As fragments of her memory return, she starts to wonder if Jim is really her savior…or her captor.
In the city of Houston the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods. Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.
In his first book, Joel Golby presents a blistering collection of new and newly expanded essays. In these pages, he travels to Saudi Arabia, where he acts as a perplexed bystander at a camel pageant; offers a survival guide for the modern dinner party, and gets pitted head-to-head, with an unpredictable, unpitying subspecies of Londoner: the landlord. Through his narration of his essays, Joel shows that no matter how cruel the misfortune, how absurd the circumstance, there’s always the soft punch of a lesson tucked within. This audiobook is for anyone who overshares, overthinks, has ever felt lost or confused–and who wants to have a good laugh about it.
From the moment a doctor in Raleigh, North Carolina, put “male” on Jacob Tobia’s birth certificate, everything went wrong. Alongside “male” came many other, far less neutral words: words that carried expectations about who Jacob was and who Jacob should be. Naturally sensitive, playful, creative, and glitter-obsessed, as a child Jacob was given the label “sissy.” In the two decades that followed, “sissy” joined forces with “gay,” “trans,” “nonbinary,” and “too-queer-to-function” to become a source of pride and, today, a rallying cry for a much-needed gender revolution. Hear who Jacob has become in their own words, and on their own terms.
The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or are overwhelmed by having recently given birth. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its depiction of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about what having a baby looks like. Witty, empathetic, and precisely observed, this audiobook offers the rare, honest portrayal of pregnancy and new motherhood in a culture obsessed with women’s most intimate choices.
In the quiet haven of Clearing, Oregon, four neighbors find their lives upended when they begin to have visions of themselves in parallel realities. At first the visions are relatively benign, but they grow increasingly disturbing—and, in some cases, frightening. When a natural disaster threatens Clearing, it becomes obvious that the visions were not what they first seemed and that the town will never be the same. Kate Hope Day’s debut audiobook is about the choices we make that shape our lives and determine our destinies—the moments that alter us so profoundly that it feels as if we’ve entered another reality.
The Whitbys: an American dynasty, once enormously wealthy real-estate magnates who were considered “the landlords of New York.” When the family patriarch, Roger, dies, he is alone. Word of his death travels from the longtime family lawyer to his clan of children and the news isn’t good. Roger has left everything to his twenty-one-year-old son Nick, a Whitby only in name, including the houses currently occupied by Shelley and Brooke—two of Roger’s daughters from different marriages. And Nick is nowhere to be found. Weaving together multiple narrations to create a portrait of an American family, and an American dream gone awry, Baby of the Family is an audiobook about family secrets—how they define us, bind us together, and threaten to blow us apart.
Arthur Alter is in trouble. A middling professor at a Midwestern college, he can’t afford his mortgage, he’s exasperated his much-younger girlfriend, and his kids won’t speak to him. And then there’s the money–the small fortune his late wife, Francine, kept secret, which she bequeathed directly to his children. Spanning New York, Paris, Boston, St. Louis, and a small desert outpost in Zimbabwe, The Altruists is a darkly funny family saga that confronts the divide between baby boomers and their millennial offspring.
When Andrew Rannells left Nebraska for New York City in 1997, he, like many young hopefuls, saw the city as a chance to break free. To start over and transform the fiercely ambitious but sexually confused teenager he saw in the mirror into the Broadway leading man of his dreams. In his own words, Rannells takes us on the journey of a twentysomething hungry to experience everything New York has to offer: new friends, wild nights, great art, standing ovations. At the heart of his hunger lies a powerful drive to reconcile the boy he was when he left Omaha with the man he desperately wants to be.
In Metropolis, the gleaming city of tomorrow, the dream of the great American city has been achieved. But all that is about to change, unless a neurotic, rule-following bureaucrat named Henry Thompson and an irreverent, freewheeling artificial intelligence, OWEN, can save the city from a mysterious terrorist plot that threatens its very existence. Soon after what was supposed to be a routine check-in, Henry and OWEN are fighting to save not only their own lives and those of the city’s millions of inhabitants, but also the soul of Metropolis. The Municipalists audiobook is a tour-de-force of imagination that explores our relationships to the cities around us and the technologies guiding us into the future.