World Fiction

Did you know that most of our dinosaur fossils were discovered because two grown men absolutely hated each other? It’s true! Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World is a riotous audio exclusive, like if Monty Python taught your history class. Each volume of four 30-minute histories will dig into the petty name-calling and grumbling grudges that led to many of the world’s greatest advancements, all delivered with a cheeky sense of humor. Choose sides: Cope or Marsh, the jerks who discovered so many dinosaurs; Hamilton or Burr, whose rivalry fueled American politics; and many more....

Brzeziny, Poland, 1939. Zofia's comfortable lifestyle overturns when her husband, Jabez, who monitors Nazi activity, has gone missing. Rather than fleeing the country with her young son, as she had promised Jabez who is fearing retaliation, she decides to stay. She cannot possibly leave her friend, Aanya. Since their childhood they have amazed fellow Brzeziners that it does not matter that Aanya is Jewish and deaf, and that Zofia is Catholic and hearing. Now, more than ever with war looming, Zofia will do whatever is necessary to protect her family and Aanya.

Zachary Quinto - best known for his role as the Nimoy-approved Spock in the recent Star Trek reboot and the menacing, power-stealing serial killer, Sylar, in Heroes - brings his well-earned sci-fi credentials and simmering intensity to this audio-exclusive novella from master storyteller John Scalzi. One day, not long from now, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone - 999 times out of a thousand, anyone who is intentionally killed comes back. How? We don't know.

After the death of her mother, Rebecca is sorting through her empty flat. Starting with the letters piling up on the doormat, she finds an envelope postmarked from Cornwall. In it is a letter that will change her life forever. A desperate plea from her mother’s elderly cousin, Olivia, to help save her beloved home. Rebecca arrives at Chynalls to find the house crumbling into the ground and Olivia stuck in hospital with no hope of being discharged until her home is made habitable.

Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now 15 and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, believing her neighbors that they pose no real threat, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate. Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears.

Life has never been easy for Kailani. With her mother caught up in the fast lane—dancing at the club and hooked on pills—Kailani was forced to step up and become the mother figure to her younger siblings, Misha and Brooke. Working long hours at a 24-hour diner, Kailani barely makes ends meet. But there’s one thing keeping her going—her passion for baking. She sells cakes and cookies to customers on the side, earning a reputation for her mouth-watering treats. Her cakes are so good that it’s what draws Giant, a local hustler with a millionaire empire, into her life when he stops by...

It's not just a thousand miles that separates Hanna Majewski from her younger sister, Stefa. There is another gulf—between the traditional Jewish ways that Hanna chose to leave behind in Warsaw, and her new, independent life in London. But as autumn of 1940 draws near, Germany begins a savage aerial bombing campaign in England, killing and displacing tens of thousands. Hanna, who narrowly escapes death, is recruited as a spy in an undercover operation that sends her back to her war-torn homeland.

Deep in the tobacco land of North Carolina, nothing's been the same since the boys shipped off to war and worry took their place. Thirteen-year-old Lucy Brown is precocious and itching for adventure. Then Allie Bert Tucker wanders into town, an outcast with a puzzling past, and Lucy figures the two of them can solve any curious crime they find - just like her hero, Nancy Drew. Their chance comes when a man goes missing, a woman stops speaking, and an eccentric gives the girls a mystery to solve that takes them beyond the ordinary.

When an eccentric Englishman named Phileas Fogg makes a daring wager that he can circle the globe in just eighty days, it’s the beginning of a breathlessly-paced world tour. With his devoted servant Passepartout at his side, Fogg sets off on an adventurous journey filled with amazing encounters and wild mishaps. Pursued all the way by the bumbling Detective Fix, who believes the two travelers are bank robbers on the run, Fogg and Passepartout must use every means of transportation known to 19th-century man - including a hot-air balloon, a locomotive, and an elephant - to win the bet.

In his final novel - which he considered his most important - Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and - to his amazement - give him hope.

The year 1941: Andrew Troost, heir to generations of naval tradition, has just been made admiral, when reports fly in of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Troost's son, Warren, has followed in his footsteps and is one of the men fighting for his country on a PT boat in the Pacific. In New York City, Tony Trapasso hears the call to action and gets ready to join the naval action. With him is Jacob Miller, a young man choosing to become a naval pilot instead of following the rabbinical calling of his Jewish forebears.

Rosalie Iron Wing has grown up in the woods with her father, Ray, a former science teacher who tells her stories of plants, of the stars, of the origins of the Dakhota people. Until, one morning, Ray doesn't return from checking his traps. Told she has no family, Rosalie is sent to live with a foster family in nearby Mankato - where the reserved, bookish teenager meets rebellious Gaby Makespeace, in a friendship that transcends the damaged legacies they've inherited.

In 1940, Germany seizes control of Guernsey without a fight—but not without resistance. Innocent young teacher Catherine is forced to house a German officer. Shrewd waitress Betty seeks to elude the persistent Nazi determined to conquer her. And courageous nurse Helen cares for her patients—both British and German—while hiding a British spy in her seaside cottage. Their fight against the injustices being enacted on their island home brings the women, the spy, and their enemies together in one night that will change all of their lives forever.

When Drizzt Do’Urden first entered Icewind Dale in 1347, he found a place quite unlike anywhere he had ever known, a land of freezing winds and ferocious monsters, of dramatic vistas and unrelenting challenges. Most of all, though, he found a land populated by folk who knew all too well the price of a misstep, whether walking into a yeti den or trusting a stranger. Making his way in those early days was no easy task, but Drizzt would find focus and joy in watching the antics of a girl and a bunch of dwarfs trying to keep her from getting herself killed.

The South Seas are a paradise for battle-weary Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. But their peace is disturbed when Stephen's fancy for a peculiar marine organism lands him overboard. Acting in his usual headstrong fashion, Jack dives into the rescue, unfortunately failing to plan what will happen once they are both in the water watching the sails of the Surprise disappear in the mist.

The women of Mulberry Lane anxiously wait for news. Peggy doesn’t know if she’ll ever again see Able, the American father of her twins, while a very odd letter from estranged husband, Laurie, threatens to set the cat among the pigeons. Rose can’t stop loving Jimmy, while Tom can’t stop loving her. Will Gordon ever again be the man he once was? Can he be a proper husband to Maureen, and if he can’t, what will become of their marriage?

In 1944, blonde and blue-eyed Jewess Hadassah Benjamin feels abandoned by God when she is saved from a firing squad only to be handed over to a new enemy. Pressed into service by SS Kommandant Colonel Aric von Schmidt at the transit camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, she is able to hide behind the false identity of Stella Muller. However, in order to survive and maintain her cover as Aric's secretary, she is forced to stand by as her own people are sent to Auschwitz.

Cassie Forrest isn't surprised to learn that the day she’s decided to get her life together is also the day the world ends. After all, she’s been on a self-imposed losing streak since her survivalist parents died: she’s stopped painting, broken off her engagement to Adrian and dated a real jerk. Rectifying her mistakes has to wait, however, because Cassie and her friends have just enough time to escape Brooklyn for her parents’ cabin before Bornavirus LX turns them into zombies, too.

From playwright, author and Oscar-nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg, When You Finish Saving the World tells the moving and evocative story of three individuals working to understand each other and themselves: Nathan, a father learning to connect with his newborn son; Rachel, a young college student seeking to find her place in a relationship and in life, before marriage to Nathan; and Ziggy, their son, a teenager hoping to figure out where he came from, and where he’s headed.

Spearpoint, the last human city, is an atmosphere-piercing spire of vast size. Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different---and rigidly enforced---level of technology. Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue.