Week 10’s pair of eAudiobooks feature cities in the aftermath of devastation—and how picking up and starting over can be achieved even when the present seems to be a nightmare.
Symphony for the City of the Dead by M.T. Anderson
In September of 1941, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history—two and a half years of bombardment and starvation. More than a million citizens perished. Survivors recall corpses littering the frozen streets, the relatives of the dead having neither the means nor the strength to bury them. Desperate citizens burned books, furniture, and floorboards to keep warm; they ate family pets and—eventually—even one another to stay alive.
Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens—the Leningrad Symphony. This testament of courage was copied onto microfilm, driven across the Middle East, and flown over the deserts of North Africa to be performed in the United States—where it played a surprising role in strengthening the Grand Alliance against the Axis powers.
A true story.
The Young World by Chris Weitz
Welcome to New York, a city ruled by teens.
After a mysterious Sickness wipes out the rest of the population, the young survivors assemble into tightly run tribes. Jefferson, the reluctant leader of the Washington Square tribe, and Donna, the girl he’s secretly in love with, have carved out a precarious existence among the chaos.
But when a fellow tribe member discovers a clue that may hold the cure for the Sickness, five teens set out on a life-altering road trip, exchanging gunfire with enemy gangs, escaping cults and militias, braving the wilds of the subway—all in order to save humankind.
The first in a trilogy. The final novel, The Revival, is due out July 2016!
Available for a Limited Time
Remember — grab these titles before they are replaced by a new pairing on 7/14/2016! While the title availability is time-limited, your listening time is not. Once you have downloaded the MP3 files, the audiobook is yours to listen to at your leisure.
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Thank you to Brilliance Audio and Hachette Audio for providing this week’s titles.