BookPage December 2016

Page 24

GIVE the GIFT of GREAT LISTENING!

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AUDIO BY SUKEY HOWARD

Exemplary audio gifts

MY OWN WORDS by Ruth Bader Ginsburg Read by Linda Lavin with a preface and archival original recordings read by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

TALES FROM THE SHADOWHUNTER ACADEMY by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, and Robin Wasserman

UAB CD: 9781508226284 / $39.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508226307 / $79.99

UAB CD: 9781442384613 / $39.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781442384637 / $79.99

THE GIRL WITH THE LOWER BACK TATTOO

THE UNDOING PROJECT

UAB CD: 9781508222002 / $29.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508222026 / $59.99

UAB CD 9781508229117 / $39.99 EAUDIO LIBRARY 9781508229131 / $79.99

by Amy Schumer • Read by the author

THE GIRL FROM VENICE

by Martin Cruz Smith Read by the Zach Appelman

ORDER TO KILL

by Vince Flynn and Kyle Mills Read by George Guidall

UAB CD: 9781508219514 / $39.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508220930 / $79.99

THE MISTLETOE SECRET

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

UAB CD: 9781508221890 / $29.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508221913 / $79.99

/SimonandSchusterAudio

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by Michael Lewis

UAB CD: 9781508221869 / $29.99 UAB EAUDIO LIBRARY: 9781508221883 / $59.99

by Richard Paul Evans • Read by the author

Yes, Commonwealth (HarperAudio, 10 hours), Ann Patchett’s brilliant new novel, narrated by Hope Davis, is autobiographical. But it’s her fabulous, fluent storytelling, her understanding of family in all its cumbersome complexity and delicately nuanced affections and animosities that makes this group portrait so appealing. It all begins with a ginsoaked kiss at a christening party in 1960s Los Angeles that leads to

by Charles Dickens Performed by Patrick Stewart AB CD: 9780743563796 $14.95

@SimonAudio

divorce, a cross-country move and a blended but never homogenized family forced into intimacies that shift over the decades. With clarity, smooth prose and a new cache of documents, Jeffrey Toobin tells the still-tantalizing tale that mesmerized a nation in the 1970s in American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Random House Audio, 18 hours). It’s all here, set in context: how a captive became a bank-robbing comrade, how the jailed Patty became a Hearst again. All read with perfect pacing by Paul Michael. On June 22, 1922, Count Alexander Rostov appeared before a Bolshevik Tribunal, accused of succumbing “to the corruption of his class.” Only his high-ranking friends kept him from being summarily shot. Instead, the handsome, gracious young count became a “Former Person,” sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Moscow’s famed Hotel Metropole. It’s the next 40 years of that life that Amor Towles so skill-

fully evokes in his quintessentially charming second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (Penguin Audio, 18 hours), read with impeccable Rostov grace by Nicholas Guy Smith. Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (Hachette Audio, 6 hours) is an irresistibly moving, revelatory account of the hottest, most heralded Broadway show in a generation. McCarter was in meetings, workshops and dressing rooms during the six years of the play’s development, and he talked with more than 40 people close to the show. He details Miranda’s constant rewriting and reshaping and shows how people from different backgrounds came together to make this stunningly audacious show work so wonderfully. Miranda reads the 300 funny footnotes he added to the libretto (on an accompanying PDF, which includes fabulous photos).

TOP PICK IN AUDIO With mastery worthy of Rembrandt, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Macmillan Audio, 10 hours), Dominic Smith’s fourth novel, moves back and forth in time and place from 1631 Amsterdam when Sara de Vos painted her hauntingly beautiful “At the Edge of the Wood,” to 1957 New York when it was stolen from Marty de Groot’s Fifth Avenue penthouse and replaced by a flawless forgery. In 2000, the forger, Ellie Shipley, is in Sydney, Australia. She’s now a renowned expert on women painters of the Dutch Golden Age, awaiting the authentic de Vos painting and the forgery she made decades ago to arrive for an exhibition. Engrossing audio, elegantly wrought, elegantly read by Edoardo Ballerini.


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