Every month we are eagerly anticipating the release of certain audiobook titles.. below you will find ten of the most intriguing audiobooks that will be released in September. Please let us know what audiobooks you are looking forward to in the comments.
1. What It Is Like To Go To War
Author: Karl Marlantes
Narrator: Bronson Pinchot
Length: 8 hrs 47 min
Release Date: September 1, 2011
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)
Publisher’s Summary: From the author of the bestselling and award-winning Matterhorn comes a brilliant nonfiction book about war and the psychological and spiritual toll it takes on those who fight.
“I wrote this book primarily to come to terms with my own experience of combat. So far—reading, writing, thinking—that has taken over thirty years.”
In 1969, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty marines who would live or die by his decisions. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his war experience. In his first work of nonfiction, Marlantes takes a deeply personal and candid look at what it is like to experience the ordeal of combat, critically examining how we might better prepare our soldiers for war.
Just as Matterhorn is already acclaimed a classic of war literature, What It Is Like to Go to War is set to become required reading for anyone—soldier or civilian—interested in this visceral and all too essential part of the human experience.
Purchasing Options: Direct from Blackstone Audio | Via Audible.com
2. Sanctus
Author: Simon Toyne
Narrator: Simon Vance
Length: 11 hrs 57 min
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Publisher: Harper Audio
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Publisher’s Summary: One man’s sacrifice shocks the world….
One woman’s courage threatens a conspiracy as old as humankind.
And some will do anything—anything—to keep their secrets in the dark.
A man climbs a cliff face in the oldest inhabited place on earth, a mountain known as the Citadel, a Vatican-like city-state that towers above the city of Ruin in modern-day Turkey. But this is no ordinary ascent. It is a dangerous, symbolic act. And thanks to the media, it is an event witnessed by the entire world.
Few people understand its consequence. But for foundation worker Kathryn Mann and a handful of others, it’s evidence that a revolution is at hand. For the Sancti, the cowled and secretive monks who live inside the Citadel, it could mean the end of everything they have built. They will stop at nothing to keep what is theirs, and they will break every law in every country and even kill to hold it fast. For American reporter Liv Adamsen, it spurs the memory of the beloved brother she lost years before, setting her on a journey across the world and into the heart of her own identity.
There, she will make a discovery so shocking that it will change everything.
©2011 Simon Toyne (P)2011 HarperCollinsPublishers
Purchasing Options: Via Audible.com
3. Vacation
Author: Matthew Costello
Narrator: Peter Macon
Length: 6 hrs 50 min
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Release Date: September 27, 2011
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Publisher’s Summary: Jack Murphy and his family need a vacation. This one might just kill them.
After a global crisis causes crops to fail and species to disappear, something even more deadly happens. Masses around the world suddenly became predators, feeding off their own kind. These “Can Heads” grow to such a threat that fences, gated compounds, and SWAT-style police protection become absolutely necessary to live.
After one attack leaves NYPD cop Jack Murphy wounded and his partner dead, Jack takes his wife and kids on a vacation far up north, to the Paterville Family Camp, a fortress-like compound in the mountains where families can still swim and take boats out on a lake.
At first, it’s idyllic. There’s plenty of food, fun stuff for their children, and another nice young couple with kids of their own. And when the camp suffers a Can Head attack, Jack even helps defend it. He’s immediately offered a job in security. His family wants to stay.
But Jack slowly comes to realize that there’s something else going on at Paterville Family Camp, and when he makes a gruesome discovery, he will be forced to get his family out, no matter who—or what—stands in his way.
Purchasing Options: Direct from Blackstone Audio
4. A Crack In Everything – The Susan Callisto Mysteries, Book 1
Author: Angela Gerst
Narrator: Xe Sands
(follow Xe Sands on twitter! She is super nice!)
Length: 8 hrs
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Release Date: September 6, 2011
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Publisher’s Summary: Susan Callisto is pushing thirty and taking stock. The man in her life, Massachusetts Police Lieutenant Michael Benedict, has unaccountably left her without a word of goodbye. Wounded but full of pride, Susan at first wonders why and then shrugs and decides to forget about him. Who needs a moody piece of work like Michael, anyway? Certainly not Susan who, transitioning from lawyer to political consultant, is far too busy to think about love—except on lonely summer nights.
Her consulting firm caters to entry-level candidates, and late in the season, political novice Charles Renfrow begs Susan to help him run for mayor of Telford. But Renfrow is a scientist, not a politician, and his pockets are far too deep. Susan is tempted—Renfrow knows how to seduce—but her suspicions, if not her libido, are aroused. When a friend insists that Renfrow’s biotech company is dumping deadly toxic waste, Susan decides to find out the truth before committing herself.
Instead of the truth, she finds a corpse, Renfrow’s gorgeous assistant, Torie Moran. The murder weapon is a microtome blade, razor sharp and accessible to anyone at Renfrow’s lab. After Torie’s murder, violence shadows Susan and people close to her. She is attacked in her driveway. An elderly client is beaten and left for dead. The young daughter of a client is abducted on her way to camp. All are the sticky strands of a web with her name on it, Susan fears. Then Renfrow himself turns up dead. Could he have been the master of all of this?
The murders bring Michael Benedict back into Susan’s life, and when another of her clients is charged, she elbows her way into Michael’s investigation. Working on parallel tracks, Michael explores mountains while Susan unearths a truth about little Delia Baird. In the nick of time, Susan rescues Delia from the person she now reckons has killed Renfrow and his assistant. But she’s only half right. Susan must confront the real killer—and try to escape with her life.
5. Lethal
Author: Sandra Brown
Narrator: Victor Slezak
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Release Date: September 27, 2011
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Publisher’s Summary: When her four year old daughter informs her a sick man is in their yard, Honor Gillette rushes out to help him. But that “sick” man turns out to be Lee Coburn, the man accused of murdering seven people the night before. Dangerous, desperate, and armed, he promises Honor that she and her daughter won’t be hurt as long as she does everything he asks. She has no choice but to accept him at his word.
But Honor soon discovers that even those close to her can’t be trusted. Coburn claims that her beloved late husband possessed something extremely valuable that places Honor and her daughter in grave danger. Coburn is there to retrieve it — at any cost. From FBI offices in Washington, D.C., to a rundown shrimp boat in coastal Louisiana, Coburn and Honor run for their lives from the very people sworn to protect them, and unravel a web of corruption and depravity that threatens not only them, but the fabric of our society
6. Those Across The River
Author: Christopher Buehlman
Narrator: Mark Bramhall
Length: 9 hrs and 5 min
Publisher: Penguin Audio
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Release Date: September 27, 2011
Publisher’s Summary: Failed academic Frank Nichols and his “wife,” Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family’s old estate, the Savoyard Plantation, and the horrors that occurred there. An aunt Frank never knew bequeathed him a modest homestead, so he and Eudora take the opportunity to break ties with the past. But in a letter delivered after her death, his aunt warned Frank not to live in the house—a warning Frank ignores.
At first the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.
It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard still stand, where a longstanding debt of blood has never been forgotten—a debt that has been waiting patiently for Frank Nichols’ homecoming.
As tensions mount, listeners will find themselves on the edge of their seats anticipating the spine-tingling conclusion to this stunning novel.
Buehlman is the most original voice in horror since Stephen King.
7. Reamde
Author: Neal Stephenson
Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner
Length: 43 hrs
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
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Release Date: September 20, 2011
Publisher’s Summary: In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world. But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe — and Richard is at ground zero.
Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story — an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.
8. The Wounded Heart – The Amish Quilt Trilogy, Book 1
Author: Adina Senft
Narrator: Marguerite Gavin
Length: 8 hrs
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Release Date: September 27, 2011
(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)
Publisher’s Summary: When a business offer turns into something more personal, Amelia is torn between what logic tells her is right and the desire of her heart.
A widow with two small children, Amelia Beiler is struggling to make ends meet. She is running her late husband’s business, but it’s not what she was raised to do, which is run a home. When she gets an offer for the business from Eli Fischer, she’s only too relieved to consider it—especially when it looks like Eli’s interest might include more than just the shop. But when she begins to experience strange physical symptoms and is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, it’s difficult not to question God’s will. If she pursues the treatment she believes in, she risks going under the bann. But how can she allow Eli to court her when she can’t promise him a future?
Includes instructions to make the quilt block featured in the novel
9. Adventures of the Karaoke King
Author: Harold Taw
Narrator: James Chen
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
(See More New Releases from Brilliance Audio)
Release Date: September 12, 2011
Publisher’s Summary: What happens when a thirty-something, newly divorced man discovers courage and adventure, thanks to a karaoke contest? In Adventures of the Karaoke King, Harold Taw introduces us to Guy Watanabe, a man marginally aware of his Asian background and decidedly unaware of how poorly he has planned for his future. In this riotous, often thoughtful, and always entertaining novel, readers are taken on a memorable journey that crosses America, Asia, and back, with the last leg spent in a shipping container.
As we follow Guy on his odyssey, we meet a former Thai prostitute and her fiancé, who orchestrates a beating to the overly attentive Watanabe and steals his cherished karaoke medal. We get to know a closeted gay man, a heavily-armed dwarf, and a Chinese businessman so determined to become the king of a worldwide karaoke empire that nothing — and no one — will block his path. Provocative, taunting, and dependably wayward, Watanabe has lessons to learn about understanding who he is, and readers may learn a few along the way.
10. We The Animals
Author: Justin Torres
Narrator: Frankie J. Alvarez
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Length: 3 hrs 5 min
Release Date: September 1, 2011
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Publisher’s Summary: An exquisite, blistering debut novel
Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.
Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.
Purchasing Options: Direct from Blackstone Audio | Via Audible.com
