Audiobooks: Fiction, Poetry, & Drama
I am a believer in the beauty and utility of audiobooks. (It helps that I drive about an hour a day.) Humans spoke and told stories before they wrote. Homer sang or chanted. Your experience of a story may be enhanced or transformed by listening to a skilled artist bring to life. I cannot imagine reading Alexander McCall Smith's wonderful No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, because the amazing Lisette Lecat, a South African actress, has given them life inside my head with her singular readings. If you love the experience of being read to, here are some of our carefully chosen titles. If you want books to be delivered in an old and an always new way, try an audiobook soon. (Success and technological parameters have driven me to divide our audiobooks into two pages. Be sure to browse our audiobook-nonfiction as well.)
Go Set a Watchman
Go Set a Watchman
Read by Reese Witherspoon.
7 hours, 6 cds, unabridged.
From Harper Lee comes a landmark new novel set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch—"Scout"—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters fromTo Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can only be guided by one's own conscience.
Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic.