The AudioBookaneers

A well-timed Amazon.com gift card burning a hole in your digital pocket? Looking for some year-end reading and listening? I’ve got you covered with another monthly #WhispersyncDeal roundup, with great current year titles from Patrick deWitt, Marko Kloos, Chuck Wendig, and more, and classic sf from Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut. Here we go, with my usual picks from the monthly $3.99 or less listings. 358 are Whispersync-for-voice enabled, of which my very top picks are:

Undermajordomo Minor: A Novel by Patrick deWitt, performed by Simon Prebble for $1.99+$5.99 — “A love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners, Undermajordomo Minor is Patrick deWitt’s long-awaited follow-up to the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Sisters Brothers. Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, Lucy is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for producing brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the Majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as Undermajordomo, Lucy soon discovers the place harbors many dark secrets, not least of which being the whereabouts of the castle’s master, Baron Von Aux. He also encounters the colorful people of the local village—thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and Klara, a delicate beauty for whose love he must compete with the exceptionally handsome soldier Adolphus. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder in which every aspect of humanity is laid bare for our hero to observe.”

Invasive: A Novel by Chuck Wendig, read by Xe Sands for $2.99+$6.99 — “Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI – a futurist who helps the agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It’s her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland. Hannah is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to see her family, when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. “I’ve got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies,” he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn’t say. What Hannah finds is a horrifying murder that points to the impossible – someone weaponizing the natural world in a most unnatural way. Discovering who – and why – will take her on a terrifying chase from the Arizona deserts to the secret island laboratory of a billionaire inventor/philanthropist. Hannah knows there are a million ways the world can end, but she just might be facing one she could never have predicted – a new threat both ancient and cutting-edge that could wipe humanity off the earth.”

Bird Box: A Novel by Josh Malerman, read by Cassandra Campbell for HarperAudio for $1.99+$3.99 — “Something is out there…. Something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from. Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remain, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, Malorie has long dreamed of fleeing to a place where her family might be safe. But the journey ahead will be terrifying: 20 miles downriver in a rowboat blindfolded with nothing to rely on but Malorie’s wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. And something is following them. But is it man, animal, or monster?”

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It’s a pretty lean month for the #WhispersyncDeal monthly roundup, making yet another “almost too late to be useful” post pretty ridiculous. When I finally started looking at the deals in the monthly $3.99 or Less and 50 Kindle Books for $2 Each listings between innings of the Cubs World Series games (yes I just typed that!) I almost decided to just go ahead and skip the month. While great, we’ve seen Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Slaughter-House Five and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend before quite a few times. But! The few gems I found made it worth getting this quick little mini-roundup out there, because the few that there are, are really, really good. And! I already had the text bit of my picks from the Downpour.com $3.95 Horror Sale, also expiring on October 31, which I’ve added to the end of the post. Enjoy!

Emperor of the Eight Islands: Book 1 in The Tale of Shikanoko by Lian Hearn, read by Neil Shah for $2.99+$3.99 — Hearn is the author of Across the Nightingale Floor, and Shah is brilliant in her new series: “In the opening pages of the action-packed Book One of Lian Hearn’s epic Tale of Shikanoko series–all of which will be published in 2016–a future lord is dispossessed of his birthright by a scheming uncle, a mountain sorcerer imbues a mask with the spirit of a great stag for a lost young man, a stubborn father forces his son to give up his wife to his older brother, and a powerful priest meddles in the succession to the Lotus Throne, the child who is the rightful heir to the emperor barely escaping the capital in the arms of his sister. And that is just the beginning.”

Blindnes by Jose Saramago, read by the fantastic Jonathan Davis for $2.99+$3.99 — “A city is hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and raping women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers-among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears-through the barren streets, and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses-and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit. The stunningly powerful novel of man’s will to survive against all odds, by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.”

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In the latest crop of the monthly 3.99 or less Kindle titles, there’s 174 Whispersync-enabled deals to check out, with no shortage of fantastic books and audiobooks from classic and current sf to epic fantasy to thrillers and more. When you add the monthly $2 or less listings with its own 52 Whispersync deals, there’s certainly a lot to tempt you as September comes to a close. And! While you’re at it, don’t forget that Audible’s $4.95 members-only “Win-Win” sale was extended through the end of the month as well, and my picks from that crop include The Hobbit and Ray Bradbury. OK, enough preamble, on to the best of this month’s Whispersync deals! (And yes, this is coming out on the last day of the month, again, sorry about that, but do get your shopping done before midnight!)

Bloodchild: And Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler, read by Janina Edwards for $1.99+$3.49 — This book, people. It’s full of amazing science fiction, from the titular “Bloodchild” on and on, with some great author’s notes and a brilliant essay to close. Edwards is a wonderful narrator for Butler’s work here, and this really is one of the 100%, guaranteed, can’t-miss audiobooks I can highly recommend.

Outriders by Jay Posey, read by James Lindgren for $2.99+$3.49 — Out not even 5 months ago, this is a fantastic start to a new series of space science fiction from Posey, the author of the post-apocalyptic Legend of the Duskwalker series. Here it’s a military sf series, with a focus on the “Outriders” a special forces group full of squad roles and tactics, read by new-to-me narrator Lindgren whose narration on this one reminded me quite a bit, in a very good way, of some of Tom Cruise’s science fictional and thriller turns on the big screen. Jack Reacher in space? With clones? “Captain Lincoln Suh died on a Wednesday. And things only got harder from there.”

More adult science fiction and fantasy titles I consider most worth checking out:

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