Patricia Buolamwini

Audicted hosts Kat Johnson and Katie O’Connor kick off a new season of Audicted with some of the buzziest debuts of 2022.

Pallavi is an aspiring writer living in California. Her mother, Usha, is thousands of miles away in Delhi - and obsessed with finding her daughter a husband. In Madhuri Shekar’s ingenious Evil Eye, hilarious back-and-forth via phone and social media takes a shocking, supernatural twist when Pallavi meets the perfect man - leading to a climactic showdown that will leave listeners on the edges of their seats.

Who am I? Who were these people who made me who I am? And, what was this place? Was it ever what I thought it was? For celebrated journalist and author Julie Salamon, these recently became central questions. Salamon spent the first 18 years of her life Seaman, Ohio, a town that is part of the American heartland, a repository of mythology and misunderstanding.

In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.