Penguin Random House Audio

“Jackson proceeds deliberately, his narration measured and nuanced, avoiding over-performing through even the most graphic, disturbing passages. His control enhances Whitehead’s relatively spare not-quite-seven-hour story of two boys whose lives intersect at the Nickel Academy, a reform school that proves to be an institution of abuse, torture, and even death.”—Booklist, starred audio review

Read our Q&A with JD Jackson, Narrator of The Nickel Boys.

Richard Holbrooke was brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites. In Our Man, drawn from Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, listeners are given a nonfiction narrative that is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited.

“Narrator Joe Barrett’s voice is learned, rugged, and dry—the perfect fit for Packer’s political biography, which spans decades as it follows career diplomat Richard Holbrooke from the Vietnam War to the war in Afghanistan.”—AudioFile, Earphones Award Winner

National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.

“Gripping…In Parisian Lives, which reads much like a ‘making of’ documentary, Bair gives us her off-camera take on her first two biographies. And, to our delight, we become voyeurs.”—The New York Times Book Review