Audiobooks narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Rethinking Possible: A Memoir of Resilience

Becky Galli was born into a family that valued the power of having a plan. With a pastor father and a stay-at-home mother, her 1960s southern upbringing was bucolic—even enviable. But when her brother, only seventeen, died in a waterskiing accident, the slow unraveling of her perfect family began. Though grief overwhelmed the family, twenty-year-old Galli forged onward with her life plans—marriage, career, and raising a family of her own—one she hoped would be as idyllic as the family she once knew. But life had less than ideal plans in store. There was her son's degenerative, undiagnosed disease and subsequent death; followed by her daughter's autism diagnosis; her separation; and then, nine days after the divorce was final, the onset of the transverse myelitis that would leave Galli paralyzed from the waist down. Despite such unspeakable tragedy, Galli maintained her belief in family, in faith, in loving unconditionally, and in learning to not only accept, but also embrace a life that had veered down a path far different from the one she had envisioned. At once heartbreaking and inspiring, Rethinking Possible is a story about the power of love over loss and the choices we all make that shape our lives—especially when forced to confront the unimaginable.

Rebecca Faye Smith Galli (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire

A sweeping biography of one of the most influential and successful business-women in American history, BECOMING ELIZABETH ARDEN opens the Red Door to a world of wealth, glamor, and the profitable business of beauty Elizabeth Arden was a household name on six continents and a millionaire several times over before her death in 1966. Arden counted British royalty and social elites from the overlapping worlds of New York, Hollywood, London, and Paris among her clients. She revolutionized skin care and cosmetics, making it acceptable for all women to embrace glamour and wear makeup-not just actresses and prostitutes. She created a successful international business empire before women gained the vote and at a time when virtually no woman owned or ran a national company. She developed the first luxury spa and insisted on a holistic understanding of health and beauty. Unconventional and driven, Arden fervently believed that every woman could be beautiful. Acclaimed biographer Stacy Cordery does full justice to one of America's greatest entrepreneurs. Canadian-born Florence Nightingale Graham turned herself into Elizabeth Arden, using her uncanny sense of the possible to take full advantage of everything New York City offered, building her company and becoming one with her brand. In an astounding rags-to-riches tale, Elizabeth Arden came to personify sophistication and refinement. Her hard work and innovation made makeup, fitness, and style not only acceptable but de rigueur. Arden prospered throughout the Depression, reimagined women's needs during two World Wars, and by pioneering new approaches to marketing and advertising, ushered beauty into the modern era. Cordery delivers a compelling picture of a modern CEO whose career provides a model for aspiring businesses to this day.

Stacy A. Cordery (Author), TBD, Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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The Real Education of TJ Crowley

It’s 1968, during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and TJ Crowley, a young white teenager, faces a critical choice when a Black family, the Washingtons, crosses the city’s racial redline and moves next door. As racial tensions surge, TJ questions his prejudices and forms secret friendships with his Black peers and the doctor next door, who becomes his mentor and sports coach. The story unfolds in the wake of the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., passage of the Fair Housing Act and school integration. Inspired by the author’s own story and historical events, including the characters of Dr. Val Brown, Josephine Brown and Sheila Brown Kinnard. The story plays out against the background of a nation divided over civil rights and the Vietnam War. As an immersive experience, The Real Education of TJ Crowley offers an authentic and relatable exploration of racial awakening and the ongoing fight for justice and equality. In so doing, it challenges us to confront our own biases and consider the choices we make in times of social change.

Grant Overstake, May Wuthrich (Author), A Full Cast, Ari Fliakos, Brittany Pressley, Dani Martineck, Dion Graham, Graham Halstead, John Wright, Johnny Heller, Kevin R. Free, Kirby Heyborne, Michael Crouch, Peter Berkrot, Shayna Small, Sheila Brown Kinnard, Tavia Gilbert, Thérèse Plummer, a full cast (Narrator)

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His Risk: The Amish of Hart County

New York Times bestselling author Shelley Shepard Gray brings us another compelling suspense in her Amish of Hart County series, this time featuring an undercover English DEA agent who will do anything to protect the Amish girl he loves. Calvin Fisher left the Amish community at fourteen and never looked back. Only his brother’s illness can bring him back to Hart County. Now, as Calvin works to make amends, he meets Alice, a local nursery school teacher, and falls hard for her. But he has a secret that could threaten the happiness he’s finally found. Alice shouldn’t like—or want—Calvin. He’s English, has a questionable past, and an even more questionable job. Still, she can’t help being intrigued. Though Calvin assures Alice that he’s worthy of her, she’s torn between surrendering to her growing feelings and steering clear of him. When a sudden surge of criminal activity alarms the community and even targets Alice, Calvin fears that his double life has put everyone he loves at risk. As for Alice, she can’t help but wonder if the brave and honorable man she’s lost her heart to is far more dangerous than she could ever imagine.

Shelley Shepard Gray (Author), Reader Tbd 1, Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

An urgent examination of the great wave of change breaking over today’s world – from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and New York Times bestselling author of The Death of Truth ‘A profoundly inspiring and prophetic perspective on the contemporary world’ Ai Weiwei In the twenty-first century, a wave of political, cultural and technological change has capsized our old certainties and assumptions, creating both opportunity and danger. As people lose their faith in old institutions and elites, radical voices at the margins and the grassroots are disrupting the status quo. This is the time of the outsider – the protester, the populist, the hacker. Some of these outsiders have sown chaos, like Donald Trump, and others have provided inspirational leadership, like Volodymyr Zelensky. But all have grasped this precarious moment to make something new. Writing with a critic’s incisive understanding of cultural trends, Michiko Kakutani outlines the consequences of these new asymmetries of power, and looks back to similar hinge moments in history, from the waning of the Middle Ages to the aftermath of the Second World War, to find a way forward. For there is, Kakutani argues, always the promise of transformation in times of turmoil. We can surrender to the waters, give in to the gathering chaos, or we can use the wave’s momentum to propel us into a more stable and sustainable future.

Michiko Kakutani (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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Inseparable: The Hess Twins' Holocaust Journey through Bergen-Belsen to America

Stefan and Marion Hess's happy childhood was shattered in 1944. Torn from their home in Amsterdam, the six-year-old twins and their parents were deported to a place their mother called "a dying hell"-the infamous concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Inseparable is the vivid account of one family's struggle to survive the Holocaust. When caught in childish mischief, Stefan and Marion ran from SS soldiers, making a game of seeing who could get closest to the guard towers before being warned he would be shot. They witnessed their father beaten beyond recognition, dodged strafing warplanes, and somehow survived in a place where "the children looked for bread between the corpses." Above all, this is the unforgettable story of a young mother and father who were willing to sacrifice everything for their children. From the Hesses' prosperous pre-war life in Germany to their desperate ride in a bullet-strafed boxcar through the rubble of the collapsing Third Reich, Faris Cassell weaves Stefan and Marion's personal memories and historical details into a gripping narration of this heroic family's ordeal.

Faris Cassell (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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The Young Man

This is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some thirty years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and, at the same time, leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time—together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing.

Annie Ernaux (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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Look at the Lights, My Love

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux “A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.”—Kirkus Reviews For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as “a great human meeting place, a spectacle”—a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

Annie Ernaux (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You, and Other Stories

Bestselling author Julianna Baggott delivers her mind-bending debut short-story collection, featuring an array of genres populated by deeply human characters, and with film rights to the stories already having been sold to Netflix, Paramount, Amblin, Lionsgate, and others! In the title story, set five minutes in the future where you not only have a credit score but also a dating score, a woman who’s been banished from all dating apps attends a weekly help group with others who have been “banned for life,” and finds herself falling in love. In “Backwards,” a twist on Benjamin Button, a woman reconnects with her estranged father as he de-ages ten years each day they spend together. In “Welcome to Oxhead,” all the parents in a gated community “shut off” when the power goes out. In “Portals,” a small town deals with hope and loss when dozens of portals suddenly open. In “How They Got In,” a grieving family starts to see a murdered girl in all of their old home videos. This fantastical collection from a unique voice contains a myriad of stories of the weird and wonderful. Julianna Baggott is a talented and clever guide, and I’d Really Prefer Not to Be Here with You will take the reader on a journey unlike anything they’ve experienced.

Julianna Baggott (Author), Andi Arndt, Cassandra Campbell, Em Grosland, Emily Lawrence, Emily Woo Zeller, Erin Bennett, January Lavoy, Kelli Tager, Kimberly M. Wetherell, Lisa Flanagan, Natasha Soudek, Rachel Jacobs, Sarah Beth Pfeifer, Tavia Gilbert, Xe Sands (Narrator)

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Getting Lost

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries, it is 1989, and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris, and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there, and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write; she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world; she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any she has written, a haunting, desperate view of a strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

Annie Ernaux (Author), Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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Well Behaved Wives: A Novel

Perfect wives, imperfect lives, and upending the rules of behavior in 1960s America. Law school graduate and newlywed Ruth Appelbaum is acclimating to life and marriage in a posh Philadelphia neighborhood. She’ll do almost anything to endear herself to her mother-in-law, who’s already signed up Ruth for etiquette lessons conducted by the impeccably accessorized tutor Lillian Diamond. But Ruth brings something fresh to the small circle of housewives—sharp wit, honesty, and an independent streak that won’t be compromised. Right away Ruth develops a friendship with the shy Carrie Blum. When Carrie divulges a dark and disturbing secret lurking beneath her seemingly perfect life, Ruth invites Lillian and the Diamond Girls of the etiquette school to finally question the status quo. Together they form an unbreakable bond and stretch well beyond their comfort zones. For once, they’ll challenge what others expect from them, discover what they expect from themselves, and do whatever it takes to protect one of their own—fine manners be damned.

Amy Sue Nathan (Author), Gail Shalan, Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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And There We Were and Here We Are: A Novel

“I wasn’t even going to tell this story, but Violet had to go and write a whole book about all of us before getting herself killed.” Ten years ago, Jerry came to New York City to break into show business. Today, his career is stalled, his ex-fiancé is a TV star, and he survives by bartending in Manhattan’s high-end cocktail lounges. Stunned by loss and regret, he is sleepwalking through a hung-over life when he discovers Violet’s book about when they were young, hopeful servers at a Times Square restaurant. Mustering the courage to open it, he relives the days of call-backs and late nights, angry chefs and crazy customers. As he searches the words of his self-destructive soul-mate, can he reconcile his past and find the hope he lost along the way? With unflinching honesty, this book lays bare the reality of breaking into show business, while living paycheck to paycheck in the most expensive city in America. If you’ve ever wondered what happens to people who go to NYC to make it in show business and don’t, you will love this entertaining story of redemption.

Scott Brooks (Author), Michael David Axtell, Tavia Gilbert (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Tavia Gilbert