Audiobooks by Kate Walbert

His Favorites

From the highly acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women, a searing and timely novel about a teenaged girl, a charismatic teacher, and a dark, open secret. They were on a lark, three teenage girls speeding across the greens at night on a "borrowed" golf cart, drunk. The cart crashes and one of the girls lands violently in the rough, killed instantly. The driver, Jo, flees the hometown that has turned against her and enrolls at a prestigious boarding school. Her past weighs on her. She is responsible for the death of her best friend. She has tipped her parents' rocky marriage into demise. She is ready to begin again, far away from the accident. Taut, propulsive, and devastating, His Favorites reveals the interior life of a young woman determined to navigate the treachery in a new world. Told from her perspective many years later, the story cooly describes a series of shattering events and the system that failed to protect her. Walbert, who brilliantly explored a century of women's struggles for rights and recognition in her award-winning A Short History of Women, limns the all-too-common violations of vulnerability and aspiration in the lives of young women in this suspenseful short novel. From the publisher of the classic A Separate Peace, His Favorites is an urgent book by a "wickedly smart writer" (The New York Times Book Review) whose work is "fascinating, moving and significant" (The Washington Post).

Kate Walbert (Author), Gabra Zackman (Narrator)

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The Sunken Cathedral: A Novel

From the National Book Award nominee and author of the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling A Short History of Women, a deeply moving, "lyrical, ominous, and unexpectedly funny" (Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers) novel that follows a cast of characters as they negotiate one of Manhattan's swiftly changing neighborhoods, extreme weather, and the unease of twenty-first-century life.Marie and Simone, friends for decades, were once immigrants to the city, survivors of World War II in Europe. Now widows living alone in Chelsea, they remain robust, engaged, and adventurous, even as the vistas from their past interrupt their present. Helen is an art historian who takes a painting class with Marie and Simone. Sid Morris, their instructor, presides over a dusty studio in a tenement slated for condo conversion; he awakes the interest of both Simone and Marie. Elizabeth is Marie's upstairs tenant, a woman convinced that others have a secret way of being, a confidence and certainty she lacks. She is increasingly unmoored-baffled by her teenage son, her husband, and the roles she is meant to play. In a chorus of voices, Kate Walbert, a "wickedly smart, gorgeous writer" (The New York Times Book Review), explores the growing disconnect between the world of action her characters inhabit and the longings, desires, and doubts they experience. Interweaving long narrative footnotes, Walbert paints portraits of marriage, of friendship, and of love in its many facets, always limning the inner life, the place of deepest yearning and anxiety. The Sunken Cathedral is a stunningly beautiful, profoundly wise novel about the way we live now.

Kate Walbert (Author), Kate Walbert (Narrator)

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A Short History of Women

The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries, and her granddaughter Dorothy Townsend Barrett, who focuses her grief over the loss of her son by repeatedly defying the ban on photographing the bodies of dead soldiers returned to Dover Air Force base from Iraq. The contemporary chapters chronicle Dorothy Barrett's girls, both young professionals embarrassed by their mother's activism and baffled when she leaves their father after fifty years of marriage. Walbert deftly explores the ways in which successive generations of women have attempted to articulate what the nineteenth century called "the woman question." Her novel is a moving reflection on the tides of history, and how the lives of our great-grandmothers resonate in our own.

Kate Walbert (Author), Eliza Foss, Kathleen McInerney, Nicola Barber, Paula Parker, Ruth Moore (Narrator)

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