JUNE 25-JULY 1, 2014: A fantastic crop of audiobooks this week, with picks from “nerd fiction” to Mulholland-published speculative thrillers, collections, and Clive Barker’s 1987 novel Weaveworld. More great titles in the “also out this week” listings, including the latest in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files, Peter David’s vampiric retelling of Oliver Twist, and enough high-end epic fantasy to keep you busy for a hundred hours: Anthony Ryan’s Tower Lord, Django Wexler’s The Shadow Throne, Mark Smylie’s The Barrow, and Jeff Salyards’ Veil of the Deserters. It’s also a week to welcome Kickstarter-funded and Janis Ian-narrated Catherine M. Wilson’s The Warrior’s Path to more general availability. Unfortunately one of my most-anticipated titles this week shows up in the SEEN BUT NOT HEARD listings: Tobias S. Buckell’s Hurricane Fever. But in a week with the pleasant surprise (to me at least) of collections from Link and Rambo, I suppose some things have to be forgiven. In other book news this week, the Locus Award winners were announced, and for audiobook lovers there’s something pretty cool afoot for John Scalzi’s forthcoming Lock In. Not only will there be two complete audio editions under different narrators (Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson), if you pre-order one edition you’ll get the other edition for free. Pretty neat, eh?

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky by Lydia Netzer, read by Joshilynn Jackson (St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan Audio, July 1) is Netzer’s follow-on to her brilliant 2012 novel Shine Shine Shine, reunited with the same long-time-friend narrator who so perfectly captured Netzer’s voice in the first book, for another curiously fascinating book with unique, memorable characters, and! science. “Beyond the skyline of Toledo stands the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, the nation’s premier center of astronomical discovery and a beacon of scientific learning for astronomers far and wide. One of these is George Dermont, a dreamer and a man of deep faith, who’s trying to prove the scientific existence of a Gateway to God, and speaks to ancient gods and believes they speak back. Its newest star is Irene Sparks, a pragmatist and mathematician invited to lead the Institute’s work on a massive superconductor being constructed below Toledo.” Previously, George and Irene’s best-friend and astrology-partner mothers had concocted a plan to mold their children into the perfect soulmates for each other, and this is not nearly the weirdest part of the book. A pair of even more “unique” side characters, who go by Belion and SilverGirl in an online RPG, may take the cake on that one, though there are so few, if any, “normal” characters in the book that one may be forgiven to wonder first if Netzer doesn’t find “normal” people interesting enough to write about and/or if indeed perhaps there aren’t really any “normal” people out there, actually. There’s lucid dreaming, there are miniature black holes, there is a massive supercollider-in-construction, there’s… well, at least one reveal is so bizarre that as much as I’d like to include it, I’d rather let listeners discover it — and the rest of the novel — themselves. I didn’t enjoy How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky quite as much as I did Shine Shine Shine — but please don’t take that as a hard knock. Shine Shine Shine really was that good, and Toledo other than a bit of over-repetition — there’s only so many ways to say “love”, “real”, “fate”, and “truth” and we got them all a couple of times — and a few plot “huhs” that didn’t click on the level of Shine Shine Shine it’s a worthy sophomore novel, one that makes me even more eagerly await Netzer’s next.

The String Diaries by Stephen Lloyd Jones, read by Gemma Whelan (Mulholland Books and Hachette Audio, July 1) “opens with Hannah frantically driving through the night — her daughter asleep in the back, her husband bleeding out in the seat beside her. In the trunk of the car rests a cache of diaries dating back 200 years, tied and retied with strings through generations. The diaries carry the rules for survival that have been handed down from mother to daughter since the 19th century. But how can Hannah escape an enemy with the ability to look and sound like the people she loves?” A debut novel combining thriller pacing with supernatural historical fiction, from one of the best publishing imprints going — Mulholland also published Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, Warren Ellis Gun Machine, Austin Grossman’s You, and Joe Lansdale’s The Thicket — and that was just last year alone. Whelan’s narration is beautiful, a perfect harsh caress of Welsh and tension. While the audiobook is not showing “in stock” anywhere yet, and isn’t (yet?) available at Downpour or Audible or Overdrive, it’s both available and you can hear a sample at both AudiobooksNow and Audiobooks.com.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK:

SEEN BUT NOT HEARD:

COMING SOON:

AUGUST 2014:

SEPTEMBER 2014:

OCTOBER 2014:

NOVEMBER and DECEMBER 2014:

UNDATED or 2015: