Audiobooks narrated by Sharon Freedman

Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict

An award-winning journalist presents an even-handed, thoroughly researched examination of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and illustrates how a shocking yet little-known massacre one century ago in what was then Palestine became ground zero of a war that continues to devastate. "[A] compelling story. . . . If you are going to read one book to help you understand the current Middle East tragedy, this is it." —Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow, Shalom Hartman Institute, and author of the New York Times bestseller Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor In 1929, in the sacred city of Hebron—then governed by the British Mandate of Palestine—there was no occupation, state of Israel, or settlers. Jews and Muslims lived peacefully near the burial place of Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish and Arab nations, until one Saturday morning when nearly 70 Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered by their Arab neighbors. The Hebron massacre was a seminal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict, key to understanding its complexities. The echoes of 1929 in Hamas’s massacre of October 7, 2023, illustrate how little has changed—and how much of our perspective must change if peace is ever to come to this tortured land and its people, who are destined to share it. Noted journalist Yardena Schwartz draws on her extensive research and wide-ranging interviews with both sides to tell a timely, eye-opening story. She expertly weaves the war between Israel and Hamas into a historical framework, demonstrating how the conflict today cannot be understood without the context of ground zero of this century-old war, which began long before the occupation, the settlements, or the state of Israel ever existed. This meticulously researched and balanced examination of the Arab-Israeli conflict's origins interweaves historical analysis with contemporary insights, providing crucial context for understanding today's Middle East tensions. Perfect for anyone who has read Ilan Pappe, Noa Tishby, or Rashid Khalidi, Schwartz's work is a riveting exploration of the complex background of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the ongoing struggle for peace in the region.

Yardena Schwartz (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed. Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim's quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim's world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare's heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

Michelle Ephraim (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that growing affluence and suburbanization threatened the future of Jewish life. Many communal educators and rabbis contended that without educational interventions, Judaism as they understood it would disappear altogether. They pinned their hopes on residential summer camps for Jewish youth: institutions that sprang up across the United States in the postwar decades as places for children and teenagers to socialize, recreate, and experience Jewish culture. Adults' fears, hopes, and dreams about the Jewish future inflected every element of camp life, from the languages they taught to what was encouraged romantically and permitted sexually. But adult plans did not constitute everything that occurred at camp: children and teenagers also shaped these sleepaway camps to mirror their own desires and interests and decided whether to accept or resist the ideas and ideologies their camp leaders promoted. Focusing on the lived experience of campers and camp counselors, The Jews of Summer demonstrates how a cultural crisis birthed a rite of passage that remains a significant influence in American Jewish life.

Sandra Fox (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Your Eyes Will Be My Window: Essays

Your Eyes Will Be My Window reclaims the two erasures of Esta Plat. Murdered in Ukraine by Nazi troops in 1942, evidence of the life of Esta Plat was preserved in a bundle of her letters until the letters were tossed into a dumpster and destroyed. Haunted by the inheritance of survivor's guilt and shame in a family that kept no Old World keepsakes except her grandmother's one-sentence memory of Esta Plat, Jodi Varonis compelled to sift through records of Europe's genocidal past. Pitting grandiose Holocaust memorials against the act of bearing witness, Varon confronts the limitations of history, folklore, archival data, and survivor testimonies. Seeking solace in ritual, she challenges her upbringing as an outlier Jew in the Rocky Mountain West to provide a window to the meaning of cultural displacement in immigrant communities. When an ethnic German woman's corpse was discarded across from Varon's rented flat in Baden-Württemberg, the homemade memorial for Nadine E. prompts a meditation on violence against women and girls as a weapon of suppression and war. The record of unfiltered emotions among Kindertransport survivors in Europe, journalists in Ludwigsburg, and archivists and guides in Jerusalem, Your Eyes Will Be My Window is a defiant exercise in honoring the lost.

Jodi Varon (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bitter Bones

The finale is here . . . The Beast is bringing the battle to the mortal realm, and Prue's finally ready to face him. Or is she? Maybe. Life is complicated, but that's what makes it beautiful. The war is brewing, the rogues are desperate, and a human enemy lurks in the darkness, threatening to derail Prue's hero era before it even begins. And Isobel . . . Well. Sometimes being a hero is a thankless job. There's no need to be bitter about it.

Lauretta Hignett (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Burned Bones

I've been burned. One of my secrets is out in the open, and it couldn't have happened at a worse time. The people of the city need a hero right now, and it can't be me. It's too risky. I could lose everything. While everything falls to chaos, I've got some hard decisions to make. There's a fine line between hero and tyrant. I need to figure out how to dance down that line so I can be the leader they need, without turning into the monster they fear.

Lauretta Hignett (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Blood & Bones

My whole world has just exploded. I'm doing a jaunty quick-step on the edge of total insanity, battling shock, exhaustion, crisis fatigue, and some sort of festering dark power that threatens to erupt out of me every time I get a little stressed. At least now I know where this genocidal rage comes from. Turns out, it's hereditary. To make things worse, as Enforcer of the city, I now have to organize a Conclave of the Treaty, a sort of formal summit for the supernatural creatures of the world. We've got some serious problems to sort out, and gathering together the Shifter Kings and Queens, the High Priestesses, and the Vampire Monarchy all in one place is bound to give anyone a headache. What are the chances I can get them all to agree on a course of action when they're only worried about their own kind?

Lauretta Hignett (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bare Bones

A powerful supernatural mob boss is terrorizing my neighborhood, demanding protection money from store owners and breaking legs when it's not paid. His little gang member minions are all humans, and one of them just showed up at my new business insisting I pay him my monthly 'insurance premium', or face the boss himself. Funnily enough, this arrogant little underling has no idea what his employer is. Neither do I. He's a complete mystery, and he's been operating right under our noses for years. Every supe store owner has been paying up and, bizarrely enough, keeping quiet about it, which makes me very, very nervous. As Enforcer, it's my job to find out who this mob boss is, what he is, and take him down. But to do that, first I have to face the man who completely destroyed my reputation and ripped my little teenage heart to shreds. As if the mysterious supernatural mob boss wasn't scary enough, nooo, I've got to face the reason why I'm so goddamn angry all the time.

Lauretta Hignett (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Broke Bones

The Beast has awakened. Word has reached the mortal realm, sending shock waves through the supernatural community. The Beast is stirring, and gathering his dark troops towards himself with a single-minded purpose: destroy all the magical creatures on Earth. He's awake, and promising bloody, furious vengeance. Prue's mom was the witch who sent the Beast to sleep in the first place, and she's in a coma. Somehow Prue needs to decipher her riddle-filled diary to figure out how to put the Beast back to sleep again before he rampages through the realms committing genocide. As if Prue didn't have enough on her plate. Her evil sister is threatening legal action for the most mundane of reasons, and a mysterious figure from Max's past shows up with a kid in tow. Oh, and there's an ifrit on the loose, torching whole city blocks. That one just might be Prue's fault. Finally, the mighty Prince Salozar Winterborne, Fae Diplomat of DC, seems to have developed an insane schoolboy crush on her. Things are getting awkward.

Lauretta Hignett (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bad Bones

Okay, I might be seriously under-qualified for the job of Enforcer, I'll admit. The Enforcer is supposed to be a human, for starters. It's usually an ex-special forces guy with big muscles and even bigger balls, and a knack for sorting out petty squabbles between the witches and vampires and shifters in the city. And I'm just a technically-dead nail tech-an animated skeleton with a talent for illusion magic and gold gel manicures. But I've recently discovered that I can manifest some pretty big muscles of my own. I've already got the big balls, so I'm halfway there. It's the 'sorting out petty squabbles' part that I might have trouble with. I'm usually the one to start the fights, not finish them. But a girl has got to grow up sometime. My first job is finding a missing person-a half-pixie girl vanished from her home a week ago, and if she doesn't surface soon, the local Fae diplomat is going to raise Hell. Her father is blaming vampires, her boyfriend is pointing the finger at the local werewolves. The clock is ticking. I'm determined to find her alive, and prove to the supes of DC that I've got what it takes to keep this town on the straight-and-narrow.

Lauretta Hignett (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Armies of Daylight

The bestselling author's epic fantasy trilogy comes to a dramatic end. The 'cold, tense, creeping dread lasts right up until the final confrontation' (Tor.com). Since the Dark Ones returned, the world has been laid to waste. The wizards have been slaughtered, cities destroyed, and people have scattered in terror. Few have witnessed more of the destruction than Rudy and Gil-two ordinary Californians who found their way across the Void, and took up arms in defense of a strange and magical world. She learned the ways of war, while he found within himself the powers of a great wizard. Both of them will need all their strength to survive this final challenge. Ingold, the master wizard, has devised a spell to hide the user from the deathly stare of the Dark, and he intends to use it to strike at their very heart. Finally, Rudy, Gil, and the rest of mankind's survivors will take the offensive, bringing an end to this terrible war, for better or for worse.

Barbara Hambly (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Time of the Dark

A whirlwind fantasy classic set in the richest world imaginable, with unforgettable characters and the highest stakes-The Time of the Dark is the first book in Barbara Hambly's epic Darwath Trilogy. Gil Patterson is a woman familiar with dark stories. As a student of medieval history, she knows the Crusades, the Black Death, and the horrors of life in the Middle Ages. But it is another kind of darkness has begun to stalk her dreams: when she falls asleep she sees forces of evil assaulting a beleaguered kingdom, whose kind people are on the brink of annihilation, and awakes each morning in a cold sweat. Gil dismisses the dreams until a wizard appears in her apartment. He has crossed into her dimension, passing through the fraying fabric of the universe, to ask her help. For mankind to survive he must protect an infant prince, whom he plans to hide in Gil's world. The student of history is about to get much closer to evil than she ever imagined.

Barbara Hambly (Author), Sharon Freedman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Sharon Freedman