Audiobook Narrator Spotlight: Robin Miles

Actor, audiobook director and performer Robin Miles has narrated hundreds of audiobooks. Miles has the ability to convincingly recreate a huge range of speech patterns and accents, conveying more about a character than comes across through their words alone. After an experience narrating the horror book The Good House by Tananarive Due, she realized she could leverage this ability to take on more audiobook work in the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy genres, whose stories typically require more range to portray a large diversity of character-types and voices. Robin Miles is now an industry legend, and a recent inductee of the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. Here are a few titles read by Miles in the collection:

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

In 1927 and 1931, author Zora Neale Hurston met and interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last person alive who had been enslaved and transported from Africa as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A Peak Pick!

New Fiction Roundup – October 2018

10/2: Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III – An ex-con living a solitary life in seaside New England travels to a quaint Florida town in search of his estranged daughter.

New Voices in Young Adult Literature

It’s always exciting to discover new books and authors and, as usual, some of the freshest voices can be found in young adult publishing.   Here are three debut titles that have quickly become librarian favorites around here.

Melissa Albert writes with an authority that belies her status as a first-time author in the deliciously creepy The Hazel Wood.  Bad luck has followed Alice every one of her 17 years and no matter how many times she and her mother, Ella, move to a new town, disaster always catches up.  When Alice’s grandmother, the reclusive author of the cult fairy-tale classic Tales of the Hinterland, dies it seems their luck has finally turned.  But bad things continue to lurk around the edges of their lives and it isn’t long before Ella goes missing.  All signs of the abduction point to the The Hazel Wood, her grandmother’s rundown impenetrable estate.  Dark, eerie, and deeply atmospheric, author Melissa Albert mines the darker side of fairy tales in this unsettling

New Fiction Roundup – September 2018

9/4: The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory – When her boyfriend surprises her with a Jumbotron proposal at a baseball game, Nik says no, and is saved when a stranger steps in to whisk her away. That stranger is Carlos, and could there be a spark between the two?

9/4: The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker – Set in the midst of literature’s most famous war, Barker imagines the events of The Iliad as experienced by the captured women living in a Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War.

9/11: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore – In a novel shot through with magical realism, Moore reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three characters who share an uncommon bond. A Peak Pick!

9/18: 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle – Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day in this literary puzzle. Evelyn Hardcastle dies at a party Aiden Bishop is attending. Waking up the next morning, Aiden finds it is once again the morning of the party, only he is in the body of a different guest. He’ll inhabit 8 people on that day, until he can solve the crime.

September Literary Holidays

September means school’s starting. What better way to get warmed up for school than with a few literary holidays?

National Read a Book Day has been celebrated on September 6th since the early 2000s. To celebrate, I’d like to give you this word: tsundoku. This is a Japanese word for collecting reading material but not reading it. So this is the perfect excuse to grab one of those books you’ve been meaning to read. If that doesn’t strike your interest try one of the following books and feel free to let people know what you are reading by using #ReadABookDay on social media.

An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine follows the story of a woman in Beirut who surrounds herself with books and is gossiped about for being godless, childless, and divorced.