New Audiobook Excerpts (6/13/22)

Hello audiobook listeners! Check out some of the exciting audio excerpts from some of our June titles for your listening pleasure, and make sure to follow Macmillan Audio on SoundCloud to stay up to date with all the latest audio excerpts.

THIS VICIOUS GRACE by Emily Thiede | 9781250855978 | 6/28/22

SERPENT & DOVE meets THE BODYGUARD in this romantic, thrilling debut fantasy where one girl’s magic can save – or it can kill.
Three weddings. Three funerals. Alessa’s gift from the gods is supposed to magnify a partner’s magic, not kill every suitor she touches.

Now, with only weeks left until a hungry swarm of demons devours everything on her island home, Alessa is running out of time to find a partner and stop the invasion. When a powerful priest convinces the faithful that killing Alessa is the island’s only hope, her own soldiers try to assassinate her.

Desperate to survive, Alessa hires Dante, a cynical outcast marked as a killer, to become her personal bodyguard. But as rebellion explodes outside the gates, Dante’s dark secrets may be the biggest betrayal. He holds the key to her survival and her heart, but is he the one person who can help her master her gift or destroy her once and for all?

Emily Thiede’s exciting fantasy debut, THIS VICIOUS GRACE, will keep readers turning the pages until the devastating conclusion and leave them primed for more!

ELSEWHERE by Alexis Schaitkin | 9781250852786 | 6/28/22

Richly emotive and darkly captivating, with elements of Shirley Jackson’s THE LOTTERY, and the imaginative depth of Margaret Atwood, Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin conjures a community in which girls become wives, wives become mothers and some of them, quite simply, disappear.
Vera grows up in a small town, removed and isolated, pressed up against the mountains, cloud-covered and damp year-round. This town, fiercely protective, brutal and unforgiving in its adherence to tradition, faces a singular affliction: some mothers vanish from their families. It is the exquisite pain and intrinsic beauty of their lives; it sets them apart from people elsewhere and gives them meaning.

Vera, a young girl when her own mother went, is on the cusp of adulthood herself. As her peers begin to marry and become mothers, they speculate about who might be the first to go, each wondering about her own fate. Reveling in their gossip, they witness each other in motherhood, waiting for signs: this one devotes herself to her child too much, this one not enough—that must surely draw the affliction’s gaze. When motherhood comes for Vera, she is faced with the question: will she be able to stay and mother her beloved child, or will she go?

Provocative and hypnotic, Alexis Schaitkin’s ELSEWHERE is at once a spellbinding revelation and a rumination on the mysterious task of motherhood and all the ways in which a woman can lose herself to it; the self-monitoring and judgment, the doubts and unknowns, and the legacy she leaves behind.