Audiobooks by Alexandra Fuller

Brought to you by Penguin. From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career-defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep. No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, a home country – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers – in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it. 'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk ©2024 Alexandra Fuller (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Alexandra Fuller, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Travel Light, Move Fast

From bestselling author Alexandra Fuller, the utterly original story of her father, Tim Fuller, and a deeply felt tribute to a life well lived Six months before he died in Budapest, Tim Fuller turned to his daughter: 'Let me tell you the secret to life right now, in case I suddenly give up the ghost. You wouldn't want me taking all this wisdom with me to the grave.' Then he lit his pipe, and stroked his dog's, Harry's, head. Harry put his paw on his lap and they sat there the two of them, one man and his dog, keepers to the secret of life. 'Well?' she asked. 'Nothing comes to mind quite honestly, Bobo,' he said, with some surprise. 'Now that I think about it, maybe there isn't a secret to life. What do you think Harry?' Harry gave Dad a look of utter agreement. He was a very superior dog. 'Well, there you have it,' Dad said. After her father's sudden death, Alexandra Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather his loss, she will need to become the parts of him she misses most. So begins TRAVEL LIGHT, MOVE FAST, the unforgettable story of Tim Fuller, a self-exiled black sheep who moved to Africa to fight in the Rhodesian War before settling as a banana farmer in Zambia. A man who preferred chaos to predictability, to revel in promise rather than wallow in regret, and was more afraid of becoming bored than of getting lost, he taught his daughters to live as if everything needed to happen altogether, all at once - or not at all. Now in the wake of his death, Fuller internalizes his lessons with clear eyes, and celebrates a man who swallowed life whole. A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death as she and her mother return to his farm with his ashes and contend with his overwhelming absence, and her childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. Writing with reverent irreverence of the rollicking grand misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, Fuller takes their insatiable appetite for life to heart. Here, in Fuller's Africa, is a story of joy, resilience, and vitality, from one of our finest writers.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Alexandra Fuller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Quiet Until the Thaw

The debut novel from the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Leaving Before the Rains Come. Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota. Two Native American cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, though bound by blood and by land, find themselves at odds as they grapple with the implications of their shared heritage. When escalating anger toward the injustices, historical and current, inflicted upon the Lakota people by the federal government leads to tribal divisions and infighting, the cousins go in separate directions: Rick chooses the path of peace; You Choose, violence. Years pass, and as You Choose serves time in prison, Rick finds himself raising twin baby boys orphaned at birth in his meadow. As the twins mature from infants to young men, Rick immerses the boys in their ancestry, telling wonderful and terrible tales of how the whole world came to be and affirming their place in the universe as the result of all who have come before and will come behind. But when You Choose returns to the reservation after three decades behind bars, his anger manifests, forever disrupting the lives of Rick and the boys. A complex tale that spans generations and geography, Quiet Until the Thaw conjures the implications of an oppressed history, how we are bound not just to immediate family but to all who have come before and will come after us, and, most of all, to the notion that everything was always, and is always, connected.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Alma Cuervo (Narrator)

Audiobook

Leaving Before the Rains Come

As her marriage collapses, the author of the international bestseller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight relearns the fearless ways of her father to find her own true north. Standing in the wreckage of her marriage, in her adopted country America, Alexandra Fuller revisits the continent she loves and finds in her father’s harsh, simple and uncompromising ways the key to her salvation. Casting a fresh eye on her parent’s boisterous strengths and debilitating weaknesses, painting a vivid picture of America at the end of decades of false certainty and security, and revealing her Africa, vital and resilient, Leave Before the Rains Come is an astonishment – a memoir of such grace and intelligence, wit and courage that only Alexandra Fuller could have written it.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Alexandra Fuller (Narrator)

Audiobook

Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Alexandra Fuller won worldwide attention, popular acclaim, and critical accolades for her memoir of her childhood in Africa, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. This engaging follow-up explores Fuller's parents' childhoods and charts the trajectories of their lives through all the British couple's experiences in war-torn Africa. With the same sharply etched narrative that has earned the author such immense praise, Fuller expands on and offers new insights into her family's remarkable trials and successes.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Bianca Amato (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

The best-selling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller presents this heart-rending story of a simple man whose life is cut short. Colton H. Bryant loves Wyoming and loves life. Mind over matter, he always says-"If you don't mind, it don't matter." And so, like his father and his father's father before him, he gets a dangerous job on the oil rig when he's old enough. He always said he'd die young, anyway.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Ed Sala (Narrator)

Audiobook

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger." Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K. K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians-and K, like all the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands. Driven by K's memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the most literal way-by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past, one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed, mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of life in Africa, a land that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more vulnerable than elsewhere.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Lisette Lecat (Narrator)

Audiobook

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.

Alexandra Fuller (Author), Lisette Lecat (Narrator)

Audiobook