Contemporary Literature Audio Books

This brilliant fabulist novel combines the delight of Kipling's "Just So Stories" with the metaphysical adventure of "Jonah and the Whale, " as Pi, the son of a zookeeper, is marooned aboard a lifeboat with a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger.

An adventure tale in its purest form. A thrilling and elegantly told account of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time....

The world will end on Saturday. Next Saturday. Just before dinner, according to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655.

First published in 1970, this is the first novel by Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families--one English, one Bengali--as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways.

Prospectors from Earth travel to a world that seems to know of their hearts' desires, and makes their every wish come true. But a member of the crew has darker desires, and pays the ultimate price....

It's just a small story really, about, among other things, a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery....

McMurphy is a life-loving fighter who rallies the other mental patients around him to challenge the dictatorship of Big Nurse in what becomes a struggle for the minds and hearts of men. Includes a bonus author interview from "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross.