Watch movies on OverDrive

OverDrive offers more than just books! you can also stream videos. OverDrive has hundreds of movies, audio books and popular books to keep you entertained over the holiday break. Kick back with a hot cup of coca and take a well deserved break. 

Here's how to access the videos (note: you must be a Tarleton student or a staff or faculty member to use Overdrive. If you are not a student, you may have access through your local library).

Note: the screenshots below were taken from a desktop computer.

HOW TO ACCESS STREAMING VIDEOS ON OVERDRIVE

1.  Go to the library's home page at www.tarleton.edu/library.

2.  Click on Databases A-Z.

      

3.  Under N-O, click on Overdrive.

4.  You will be asked to sign in  with your NTNET credentials.
You will then be taken to Overdrive's home page.

5. If you are on a desktop or laptop computer, click Collections on the top left of the screen and go to Videos.
                                           

If you are on a smartphone, click the three horizontal lines on the top right of the screen.  They will open a drop-down menu. Scroll down the menu section until you reach Videos.

6.  Under Videos, you can click on Available Now, New Video Additions, Most Popular or See All.

7.  Click on a video title to get information.

 

8.  You can click Borrow on an individual title.  A pop up window will confirm that you are borrowing the movie.  You then have 3 days to view it on your browser (laptop or desktop computer) or on your mobile device.  You can also click Sample to view a movie trailer.

Summer Reading Recommendations - Three from Kim Gragg

A couple months ago, the Library posted a video on our YouTube Channel with staff recommendations for summer reading.  Here's the "why?" behind some of those recommendations, as well as other books that did not make it into the video.  All are available as e-books in our OverDrive collection.

Kimberly Gragg, our Circulation and Interlibrary Loan Manager, had three suggestions.

Kim said, "I really enjoyed The Alice Network. It’s historical fiction and based on a network of spies that utilize women to get knowledge on the enemy in World War I." This fascinating story is based on the real-life "Alice Network" of mostly-female spies centered in Lille, France, on the border with Belgium.  This book has two story lines, one set during World War I and the other in 1947.  Eve Gardiner is the character that ties them together.

The tale goes back and forth in time and between narrators.  The other narrator is Charlotte "Charlie" St. Clair, who enlists Eve's help in 1947 to find her French cousin Rose, who disappeared in World War II.  Author Kate Quinn does a masterful job weaving them and other characters (some real-life), places, and incidents into the story.

Lois Lowry's The Giver is a popular fantasy.  This 1994 Newbery Medalist has become a classic, and one that is frequently challenged in schools and libraries, for reasons ranging from “contains graphic themes,” and  “contains blasphemous ideas and content,” to “depicts ideas and actions that are inappropriate for young readers,” and “inappropriate for [elementary] grade level.”

The plot in a nutshell:  Jonas, the main character, learns his utopian world is really dystopian.

Same Kind of Different as Me is the true story of a wealthy white man, Ron Hall, and a homeless black man, Denver Moore, brought together by the white man’s wife, Deborah, who dies from colon and liver cancer. The book is short chapters alternately narrated by Ron and Denver.

The Giver is also available in both print and audiobook format, both on the lower level of the Dick Smith Library.  Same Kind of Different as Me can also be found in print in the General Stacks on the upper level of the library.

Summer Reading Recommendations - Two Audiobooks from Amanda Pape

A couple months ago, the Library posted a video on our YouTube Channel with staff recommendations for summer reading.  Here's the "why?" behind some of those recommendations, as well as other books that did not make it into the video.

Amanda Pape, Coordinator for Archives and Special Services, has a 45-minute one-way commute to the Stephenville campus, so she is a big advocate of audiobooks.  These suggestions are available as e-audiobooks in our OverDrive collection.


"'The Nightingale' is the code name for a member of the French Resistance during World War II, and it's also the last name (in English) for three characters in the book, Vienne Rossignol Mauriac, her younger, single sister Isabelle Rossignol, and their father Julien Rossignol.  They are each part of the resistance, in different ways.  Vienne's story in some ways is the most compelling, for she has to pretend to be 'normal' both for the sake of her children and because of the German officers billeting in her home.

Kristin Hannah states in her author's note and a conversation in the reading group guide that she based Isabelle on a 'young Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh, who had created an escape route for downed airmen out of Nazi-occupied France.'

Polly Stone was an excellent reader - she has lived in France, and it shows in this audiobook, which won the 2016 Audie Award for Fiction and was a finalist for best female narrator and Audiobook of the Year."  The Nightingale is also available as an e-book in OverDrive.

"Barkskins is an epic (713 pages in print) novel tracing two families involved in different ways in the timber industry in North America (primarily - also a bit in New Zealand as well).  It starts in 1763 with two French immigrants to Canada, René Sel and Charles Duquet.  Both are indentured servants, but Duquet runs away and becomes a successful fur trader - and eventually a timber baron, changing his surname to Duke.  Sel marries a Native American woman, and their descendants work in the forest, but rarely own much.

The book then follows down each line about six generations, to 2013.  Along the way, the two families intersect.  Some characters are more memorable than others.  In particular, I liked René's great-great grandson Jinot Sel and his (mis-)adventures in New Zealand, as well as Lavinia Duke Breitsprecher, who is about as ruthless in business as her great-great-grandfather Charles.

The stories move all over the world too, from Nova Scotia and Maine to France, London, Amsterdam, New Zealand, China, and the Amazon, as well as to various American cities (Boston, Detroit, Chicago) as the Duke company enterprises move westward.  Lots of period details make the settings come alive.  It's obvious author Annie Proulx has done her research.

Actor Robert Petkoff is an outstanding reader on the audiobook, creating appropriate accents and voices for each character that help to distinguish them."

More Historical Fiction with Female Characters by Female Authors

In honor of Women's History Month, here are more historical fiction books in the library's collection that feature female characters or subjects, and are written by female authors:

The Dressmaker's War begins in 1939, and is about a talented English would-be modiste named Ada who makes some bad choices and is trapped by the Nazis into making dresses for German women at Dachau.  Unfortunately, Ada continues to make some bad choices after the war ends and she returns home, but they are complicated by postwar conditions in England (that were particularly unfriendly to working-class women, as was the judicial system) and her not-supportive family.  Mary Chamberlain's novel is compelling, and there is a historical note and acknowledgements at the end.  This title is available as an e-book in our OverDrive collection.


Salt to the Sea is historical fiction based on some little-known real-life events and places - Operation Hannibal, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, and the fate of the original Amber Room.  The story takes place in January 1945, near the end of World War II, when the German navy launched Operation Hannibal to evacuate citizens and military wounded across the Baltic Sea ahead of the approaching Russian army.  The Wilhelm Gustloff was a former cruise ship used in this evacuation.  The Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, was looted by the Nazis, hidden, and never found again (it was later reconstructed in the palace).  All play a part in the narrative.

The story is told by four first-person narrators:
- Joana, a Lithuanian woman around age 21 who has medical training,
- Emilia, a Polish 15-year-old,
- Florian, a 19-20-year-old Prussian trained in art restoration, and
- Alfred, a young German sailor.

Joana is traveling with a group of refugees that include a blind girl, a shoemaker, and a little orphan boy.  Emilia is originally traveling alone, but is saved from an attack by a Russian soldier by Florian.  The two of them meet up with Joana's group and eventually wind up in the port city of Gotenhafen (now known as Gdynia), where Alfred is helping to prepare the Gustloff for the evacuees.

Part of the intrigue of the book is that few people know about Operation Hannibal or the Gustloff, despite the immense disaster.  The Amber Room is somewhat peripheral to the story - it provides the motivation for Florian's actions - but it is especially interesting given that amber is the national gem of Lithuania, where author Ruta Sepetys' father is from. This e-book is also available in our OverDrive collection.


The Translation of Love, by debut author Lynne Kutsukake, explores a little-used setting for historical fiction:  post-World War II Japan, during its occupation by the United States.  The story is told through five voices:  twelve-year-old girls Fumi and Aya, their male teacher Kondo, Fumi's older sister Sumiko, and Cpl. ­Yoshitaka (Matt) Matsumoto.  Aya is a Japanese-Canadian "repatriated" with her native Japanese father to his homeland after the war.  Sumiko works as a bar girl, entertaining American occupation troops, to buy food and medicine for her family after her father's bookstore is bombed out.  Kondo moonlights translating and writing letters in English, mostly for bar girls whose American boyfriends have gone home.  And Matt, a Japanese-American whose family was interred in the war (despite his older brother earning a Purple Heart when killed in action in Europe), works for General Douglas MacArthur's office as a translator.

Sumiko goes missing and Fumi gets the English-speaking Aya to write a letter for her to MacArthur asking for his help finding her.  The girls end up giving the letter to Matt, and he and an office typist, Nancy (another Japanese-American, but one still trapped in Japan since Pearl Harbor) decide to help the girls find Sumiko.  Kondo gets pulled into their story as well.

In an article, the Japanese-Canadian Kutsukake said,

The idea came from a book called Dear General MacArthur, written by Japanese historian Rinjirō Sodei. The book is a study of the letters written to General MacArthur during the occupation period...So I began thinking about what kind of person would write a letter to General MacArthur.... I wanted the person to be a 12-year-old because General MacArthur quite famously called Japan "a nation of 12-year-olds."

Nancy Wu is an appropriate narrator for the e-audiobook (available in our OverDrive collection), and makes the 12-year-olds sound just their ages.  This was a great debut novel about a time-and-place setting few know much about.

Historical Fiction by Female Authors with Female Characters

In honor of Women's History Month, here are some historical fiction books in the library's collection that feature female characters or subjects, and are written by female authors:

Helen Simonson's The Summer Before the War starts in the summer of 1914, when 23-year-old, orphaned Beatrice Nash is hired by the school board of the small town of Rye in England to be the Latin teacher.  In the first part of the book, the reader gets to know the independent Beatrice and her champions, Agatha Kent, her London government employee husband John, and their nephews, medical student Hugh Grange and poet Daniel Bookham.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, as World War I starts about 23% into the book.  The first impact on the town of Rye is the arrival of a number of Belgian refugees - Beatrice takes a beautiful young girl named Celeste into her small apartment, so she can be near her widowed father, taken in by an American writer living across the street.

Later, though, British soldiers are drawn into the war, and both Hugh and Daniel enlist (Hugh as a surgeon) - along with Beatrice's promising Romani (Gypsy) Latin student nicknamed Snout.  Simonson does an outstanding job showing the impact of the war on these participants as well as their friends and loved ones back home in Rye.  She also subtly takes on issues such as women's roles and rights in that era, as well as class distinctions and prejudices.  Simonson lists numerous research sources in her acknowledgements at the end of the book.  This title is available as an e-book in our OverDrive collection.

Based on the real-life "Alice Network" of mostly-female spies centered in Lille, France, on the border with Belgium, during World War I, this book has two story lines, one set during World War I and the other in 1947.  Eve Gardiner is the character that ties them together.  She begins 1915 as a 22-year-old file clerk in England, recruited to spy in France during the war because she can also speak French and German - with a stammer in all languages that makes people overlook her and assume she is stupid.

The 1947 Eve is a broken woman with gnarled hands, contacted by 19-year-old American Charlotte "Charlie" St. Clair, who is trying to find her French cousin Rose, last seen working in 1943 in a restaurant in Limoges, France, called Le Lethe, owned by a Monsieur Rene.

That hits close to home for Eve - whose cover while working as a spy involved working in a restaurant in Lille, also called Le Lethe, and also owned by a Monsieur Rene - the evil Rene Bordelon, a Frenchman collaborating with the Germans.

The tale goes back and forth in time and between narrators.  Along the way, the reader meets the real-life head of the Alice Network, Louise de Bettignies, aka Alice Dubois, aka "Lili" (among many code names) in this book.  Author Kate Quinn does a masterful job weaving this (and other) real-life character(s), places, and incidents into the story, which is available as an e-book on OverDrive.

"The Nightingale" is the code name for a member of the French Resistance during World War II, and it's also the last name (in English) for three characters in the book, Vienne Rossignol Mauriac, her younger, single sister Isabelle Rossignol, and their father Julien Rossignol.  They are each part of the resistance, in different ways.  Vienne's story in some ways is the most compelling, for she has to pretend to be "normal" both for the sake of her children and because of the German officers billeting in her home.

Kristin Hannah states in her author's note and a conversation in the reading group guide that she based Isabelle on a "young Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh, who had created an escape route for downed airmen out of Nazi-occupied France," while researching the Siege of Leningrad (also in World War II) for another novel.

This book is available in our OverDrive collection as both an e-book and an e-audiobook.  Polly Stone was an excellent reader - she has lived in France, and it shows in the audio version, which won the 2016 Audie Award for Fiction and was a finalist for best female narrator and Audiobook of the Year.

Fiction and Popular Nonfiction by Black Authors

If you'd like to read fiction or popular nonfiction by Black authors, the library has some good options to choose from. Below are just a few of them.

Fiction:

 

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (format: paper) – In this Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction novella, Binti, the first of the Himba people to ever go off to space and attend the prestigious Oomza University, encounters angry and deadly aliens called Meduse. The Dick Smith Library also owns a copy of Okorafor’s Lagoon, a “first contact” sci-fi novel set in Lagos, Nigeria.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl (format: paper) – An alternate history steampunk novel set in the Belgian Congo.

The Brightest Day: A Juneteenth Historical Romance Anthology (format: paper) – This collection includes Lena Hart’s “Amazing Grace,” Kianna Alexander’s “Drifting to You,” Piper Huguley’s “A Sweet Way to Freedom,” and Alyssa Cole’s “Let It Shine.”

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley (format: paper) – Walter Mosley’s first published book, a hardboiled mystery starring Easy Rawlins, a recently unemployed black war veteran who’s hired to find a young white woman.

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (format: paper) – In this time travel novel, Dana, a modern black woman, finds herself traveling back and forth between her home in the present (1976) and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation.

Beloved by Toni Morrison (format: paper | audiobook | e-book) – This Pulitzer Prize winning novel was inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (format: e-book) – In this contemporary YA novel, Starr Carter witnesses a police officer kill her unarmed best friend.

Nonfiction:

Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina by Michaela DePrince with Elaine DePrince (format: e-book) – The memoir of Michaela DePrince, a Sierra Leonean-American ballet dancer who currently dances as a soloist for the Dutch National Ballet.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (format: e-book) – This book, recently made into a movie, tells the story of the African American women mathematicians working at NASA, starting with World War II and continuing on through the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race.

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae (format: audiobook) – A collection of humorous essays, read by the author herself.

Travel through Time and Place with Overdrive Audiobooks

Planning any travel this summer?  Going somewhere that involves a long drive or ride?  Try an e-audiobook!  Even if you're planning a stay-cation, you can travel to other times and places through historical fiction e-audiobooks.  Here are just some of the titles available as e-audiobooks in our Overdrive collection:

Curses and Smoke by Vicky Alvear Shecter, read by Marisol Ramirez and Zach Villa - Subtitled "A Novel of Pompeii," this novel is set in A.D. 79, the year the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, read by Zach Appelman - This book won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.  The lives of a 12-year-old blind French girl living in Paris when the German occupation of World War II begins in 1940, and a 14-year-old German boy living in an orphanage in the coal-mining town of Zollverein, intersect in four years later, in August 1944, during the Allied bombing of the walled city of Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast.

The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman; read by Gloria Reuben, Tina Benko, and Santino Fontana - This is a fictionalized account of the life of the mother of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, set on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and in Paris in the early and mid-1800s.  It's a little bit of a fictionalized biography of the early life of the artist as well.

Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise by Oscar Hijuelos, read by James Langton, Polly Lee, Henry Leyva, and Robert Petkoff - The real, nearly-lifelong friendship between American author Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and British explorer Henry Morton Stanley is the basis for this historical fiction novel, set in the period between 1860 and 1910 along the Mississippi River, in Cuba, and in England.
The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati, read by Cassandra Campbell - Set in 1883 in New York City, this book focuses on two female doctors, cousins Anna and Sophie Savard, and the challenges they face practicing medicine in that place and time.  A murder and a police investigation also play into the story.


The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende, read by Joanna Gleason - Jewish refugee Alma Mendel Belasco and Japanese gardener's son Ichimei "Ichi" Fukuda are the main characters in this story set in San Francisco covering the years 1939 to 2013, which touches on topics like racial prejudice, aging issues, and death with dignity.

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant, read by Linda Lavin -  Born in 1900 in the United States to Jewish immigrant parents, Addie Baum tells her life story to her granddaughter in 1985, concentrating on the years 1915 to 1931 in and around Boston.  Life in the immigrant tenements, the effects of World War I, and the changes it brought about in the 1920s, especially for women, are all part of the tale.

Sashenka by Simon Montefiore, read by Anne Flosnik - Set in three time periods in twentieth century Russia - 1916, 1939, and 1994 - the title character becomes a Bolshevik and later part of the Communist elite.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, read by David Pittu - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014 and two 2014 Audie Awards, this book is actually set in more modern times, but moves between Amsterdam, New York City, and Las Vegas, and involves the fictional theft of a real painting called "The Goldfinch" from 1654 by Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), a Dutch artist.

*****

Listening to e-audiobooks is easy!  The OverDrive app lets you download and listen to the MP3 format of the audiobook.  It is available for iOS, Android, Chromebook, Windows 8 & 10, and Kindle Fire HD.  I have one of the latter, and I download the books, hook up an aux cable from the Kindle to my car, and listen to audiobooks on my car's speakers while I commute.  OverDrive Listen is a streaming audiobook player that works on computers, tablets, and mobile devices with compatible web browsers.  You'll need an active Internet connection to use it.

OverDrive eBooks!

Tarleton State University Libraries has a new feature:  OverDrive eBooks (and digital audiobooks)!

From the library's home page (www.tarleton.edu/library), choose Databases, and then OverDrive.  Depending on your browser settings and whether or not you are already logged into NTNET, you may (or may not) get the authentication screen, which looks like this:

Enter your NTNET ID and password, and click Login.  You'll then get a screen like this:

Scroll down the page, because there are a number of different groupings of the eBooks, or use the menu at the top.  There's also a search box in the upper right corner, if you are looking for a specific title or author.

If you are familiar with OverDrive from using it at other libraries, the interface is the same here.  Tarleton has partnered with other libraries in the Texas A&M System to purchase eBooks and digital audiobooks for this shared resource.  Keep checking as more titles are being added!

If the book shape (or headphones, for an audiobook) in the upper right corner for a title is dark, it is available for checkout.  If it is grayed out, you can place a hold on the item and be notified when it becomes available (and have it automatically checked out to you .  The eBooks can be downloaded in Kindle or EPUB format, or read in your browser.  Items can be borrowed for 14 days, and you can have up to 10 items checked out and 10 items on hold at any one time.

Free public domain books

If you can't find a public domain book in the library or would just prefer something downloadable, there are lots of good sites out there. A couple I like are Project Gutenberg and LibriVox.

Project Gutenberg has over 49,000 free e-books - you can download them as Kindle e-books, EPUB files, or read them online in your browser. If you don't have a particular book or author in mind, it can be fun to browse the categories and subcategories on their Bookshelf page.

LibriVox is great if you prefer audiobooks. Everything on the site is read by volunteers, so the performance quality varies, but some works have multiple versions available, so you can choose which readers you prefer. You can download a whole book as a zip file, stream individual tracks, or subscribe in iTunes.

Some of my favorites from these sites include Jill the Reckless by P.G. Wodehouse (LibriVox) and The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar by Maurice Leblanc (Project Gutenberg). Feel free to recommend your favorites in the comments!

Summer Reading Video

Looking for something fun to read this summer? Need a good audio book for your next road trip? The library has you covered! Check out our newest video for staff suggested books and audio books for summer reading.

Fun for the summer!

If you're ready to sit back and relax, you can find something for just about everyone at the library - we have books, graphic novels, DVDs, and more. The above picture shows just a few of the things in our collection. From left to right:

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel - A steampunk YA novel.

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett, performed by Stephen Briggs - A fantasy audiobook featuring magically intelligent rats and a cat, set in the Discworld.

Angel by Erica Sakurazawa - A standalone Japanese manga.

Cadfael: The Complete Collection - A historical mystery series on DVD.

Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn - A historical mystery novel.

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling - J.K. Rowling's first novel written for adults.

Cowboy Bebop - A Japanese anime TV series. It's a space western centered on a bunch of bounty hunters.

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy - A humorous Middle Grade fantasy starring a bunch of princes from various fairy tales.

Takedown Twenty by Janet Evanovich - Another installment in Evanovich's popular Stephanie Plum series.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - A popular thriller.

Avengers Forever - One of several Marvel graphic novels in the library's collection.

Spirited Away - An anime movie both kids and adults can enjoy. A girl works at a bathhouse for spirits in order to rescue her parents, who've been turned into pigs.

New Audiobooks!

A number of new audiobooks have recently been added to the library's collections.  We have a number of mysteries and thrillers by such authors as James Lee Burke, Carol Higgins Clark, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Tony Hillerman, Stephen King, Phillip Margolin, Michael Palmer, Ridley Pearson, and John Sandford.  There are also quite a few audiobooks by the late Terry Pratchett, narrated by Stephen Briggs.  Here are a few other new additions:

Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan, call number AV-Audio PS3608 .O725 U53 2013, is about Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny Van De Grift Osbourne.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, call number AV-Audio PS3573 .A4722834 B43 2012, is an intricate story that  moves between 1962, in a tiny coastal village in the Cinque Terre area of the Italian Riviera, and 2012 in Hollywood.  The narrator of this audiobook, actor Edoardo Ballerini, won a well-deserved 2013 Audie Award for Solo Narration - Male; and the audiobook was also a nominee for the award for Fiction and for Audiobook of the Year.

The Bees by Laline Paull, call number AV-Audio PR6116 .A87 B44 2014, is an incredible book that anthropomorphizes bees (and other insects) and their lives in the hive.  Debut novelist Paull got the idea for the book when she learned about the unusual laying worker bee, which is the main "character," Flora 717.  Actress Orlagh Cassidy is an outstanding narrator who truly "performs" this book.

China Dolls by Lisa See, call number AV-Audio PS3569 .E3334 C47 2014, is historical fiction set in 1938 in San Francisco's Chinatown. Three Asian-American women bind - more from necessity than friendship - in a novel that spans the next ten years, with an epilogue 40 years later.  As is usual with Lisa See's novels, this one is rich from research, and incorporates some real people into the story.

The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd, call number AV-AudioPS3611 .I44 I58 2014, is set in the early 1800s.  This historical fiction novel has two alternating first-person narrators - the real Sarah Grimké, and a fictional family slave, Hetty "Handful" Grimké.  Sarah was, in her time, a famous - and infamous - abolitionist and early feminist, along with her younger sister Angelina.  The audiobook has two narrators:   Jenna Lamia is perfect as Southern-bred Sarah, while Nigerian-American actress Adepero Oduye voiced Handful.

You can find these, and all our audiobooks, on the lower level of the Dick Smith Library in the Audiovisual Collection. 

New Audiobooks

Here, in no particular order, are some new audiobooks recently acquired by the Dick Smith Library. Many of these won Audies or other prestigious awards. You can find them on the lower level of the Dick Smith Library in the Audiovisual Collection.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, call number AV-Audio PR6063 .A438 W65 2009, was the 2009 winner of the Man Booker Prize for "the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland." It also won the 2010 Audie Award for Literary Fiction. It's a novelization of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540.


Wolf Hall is first in a trilogy and was followed by Bring Up The Bodies, call number AV-Audio PR6063 .A438 B75 2012. Mantel tells the well-known story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn from Cromwell's viewpoint. This book also won the Man Booker Prize, in 2012.  The third book in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is expected to be published in 2015.


Cleopatra's Moon by Vicky Alvear Shecter, call number AV-Audio PZ7 .S53822 CLE 2011, is a well-written young adult novel (that will also appeal to adults who like historical fiction) about the only daughter of the famous queen Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius, Cleopatra Selene II.


The Round House, call number AV-Audio PS3555 .R42 R68 2012, won the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction. It highlights a major issue in Native American tribal law - the "difficulty of prosecuting crimes of sexual violence on reservations," according to author Louise Erdrich, who is Native American herself.


A Good American, call number AV-Audio PR6107 .E53 G66 2012, is historical fiction written in memoir style. The fictional memoir is by James Meisenheimer, and he's telling his family's story. His grandparents, Frederick and Jette, immigrated from Hanover, Germany, in 1904, and due to a series of mishaps, wound up in (fictional) Beatrice, Missouri, on the Missouri River. They settle down there, have a family, run a bar. But life - and historical events - intervene.  This debut novel is by Alex George, himself an immigrant from England.


Set in Texas in late 1899, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, call number AV-Audio PZ7 .K296184 EVO 2009B, was a Newbery (for the "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children") Honor Book in 2010. This historical fiction about a young girl interested in science was written by another debut author, Jacqueline Kelly.  The audiobook was also a 2011 finalist for the Children Ages 8-12 Audie.


The One and Only Ivan, call number AV-Audio PZ7 .A6483 ON 2013, is based on a real animal - the infamous "Ivan the Shopping Mall Gorilla," who spent 27 years alone in a small cage in a shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington. This fantasy won the 2013 Newbery Medal and was written by Katherine Applegate.


Another fantasy, The Graveyard Book, written and read by Neil Gaiman, call number AV-Audio PZ7 .G1273 GR 2008B, was the Newbery Medalist in 2009. That year it also won the Audie Award for Children Ages 8-12 and was named the Audiobook of the Year.


Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, call number AV-Audio D805 .J3 Z364 2010B, is the inspiring true story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic athlete and World War II hero, who spent 47 days on a raft in the Pacific and over two years in a Japanese prison after his plane crashed.

Check out our Pinterest board on audiobooks for more ideas!