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Vast Fiction

Novels as audiobooks: literary and historical fiction, mysteries and thrillers set around the world.

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A WOMAN'S ESTATECalcutta, 1884. Chandranath Guha manages a family endowment he does not own, lives in a house that belongs to a god, and has five unmarried daughters and no son. His second daughter Kiran has the fastest tongue in the lane and a two-year record of reading people correctly. At a musical evening a Brahmin barrister with a lakh a year says one sentence too loudly, and she converts the insult to wit and dines on it for four months. Two years later she has been wrong about two men in opposite directions, her youngest sister has signed a public declaration that she is not a Hindu, and the deed of 1782 is still in its tin box, naming the cousin who will take everything.
EL AMPARO5 booksPatagonia, November 2025. The Sarralde family has run sheep on a hundred and forty-two thousand hectares of the Chubut cordillera since a colonel was paid the land for clearing it, and a mining company has just been granted exploration rights over the ground underneath. Aureliano Sarralde is seventy-four and wants to hand the valley to his children whole, which the law forbids. When his eldest son is shot at the eastern boundary in the dark, the police name the Mapuche-Tehuelche community on the western shoulder before a single shell casing has been counted. Nobody looks at the truck, or the buyers, or the man who was dismissed at the gate three weeks earlier.
FIVE AMPERESBeirut, six years after the port explosion. Yara Semaan is twenty-four and back at her university to finish the master's the collapse took off her. At the September reception, in front of three hundred people, her body announces her as a Lubb — the rarest designation in a register her family was struck out of eighty-three years ago and never told about. The register wants her back and gives her until the end of the academic year to bind or lose the scholarship that pays her fees. The one man who can get her into the archive that might free her is the resident who signed the letter. She has never asked anybody for anything in her life.
FREE ENERGY12 booksParis, in the first week of the fashion season. Sol Brandt has modeled for ten years, has saved two hundred and eleven thousand dollars, and has worked out what it would take to stop. A lingerie house offers her more than that in one contract, on a single condition: a full body scan and a permanent license to her own face. Between castings she is two years into a distance neuroscience degree nobody at the parties knows about, and the coursework keeps explaining the parties. Emeric Ronay, who stages the evenings everyone wants to be at, wants her in business with him. He is right about the mechanism, and she cannot say what is wrong with the conclusion.
GILGAMESH: THE WALL OF URUK4 booksUruk, in the seventh year of Gilgamesh's reign. The king has called a fourth levy in a year when two is customary, brick season has taken every household's men to the wall, and eleven of them do not come out of the clay-pit. The complaint of the potters' lane goes up to the gods, who answer it in a way nobody there would recognize: on the steppe west of the city a man is made out of a handful of clay, the king's exact match, who has been told nothing at all and drinks at the waterhole with the gazelles. A woman of the temple is sent to bring him in. What she begins there cannot be called back, and Uruk is going to have two of them.
JARDINS4 booksSão Paulo, 2025. Marina Bulhões Arantes sits on the board of the school that expelled her at seventeen, runs a community garden in the far east zone that three hundred children use every week, and has spent fourteen years building a woman nobody in the Jardins can place. The man she killed in 2011 is under the garden. In February a man who drove the car that night recognizes her at a school fair, asks for two hundred thousand reais, and then asks for something she cannot pay. She has a gala on Saturday, two children, a husband who decided nine years ago not to look, and a police officer from her own part of the city who wants to know what time she usually comes to the garden.
KUMACHMoscow, 1916. Agrafena Kumacheva is seventeen, the daughter of a cotton fortune built out of serfdom, and she has never once looked at where the money came from. Two revolutions, a civil war and a famine take the mill, the house, the estate and most of the people she loves. On her knees in frozen ground in January 1920 she swears that she will never be hungry again and that she does not care who pays for it. By 1924 she is leasing her family's mill back from the state, on the recommendation of Marfa Khudyakova, who went into it at eleven and whose claim on the ground is older. What that lease costs, and who is billed for it, is the whole of the account.
LA VERTIENTE4 booksThe Atacama, 2025. The Larrechea family has held a valley in the high desert since the nitrate collapse and runs a copper mine and a lithium joint venture from a tower in Santiago, and the water all of it depends on belongs personally to one woman. Beatriz Larrechea is seventy-one, holds the vote over shares she does not own, and has never once raised the price. Her eldest son wants to sell the company before a state lease expires. In January the spring falls below the canal intake for the first time in the record, and the question stops being what the family is worth and becomes who has been telling the valley the truth.
MAN-PRICE6 booksIceland, 997. Six years ago the dead won an argument about jurisdiction, and a draugr may now hold land, bring suits, and be owed compensation like anybody else. When Steinunn of Kaldakvísl is found in the lava with her head wrong, the district has its answer inside an hour: the dead man whose howe stands on her ground. The only person who knows better is a freedwoman who pours ale at a trading post, whose oath at law is worth half a free man's, and who has never been able to stand inside the Althing because several thousand people in one field is a wall of noise. She cannot bring the case. So she assembles it, and hands it to the one party in Iceland who cannot be bought, frightened, outwaited or killed.
MARKED TO MARKETHong Kong, over one year. Clementine Siu is twenty-four and sits on the invitation committee of a charity ball whose seating chart is the city's social order in a spreadsheet, and she means to be its chair. An anonymous account called FACE VALUE, which publishes a ranking four times a year, begins printing small true damaging facts about her brother, and each one is accurate, and together they build a narrative. She sets out to find who is feeding it. What she does not know is that the feeder is inside her family and the man carrying the paper is the one she is in love with. The question is what a reputation is worth, and who is holding it when the price moves.
NOTHING HERE IS WET YET3 booksMiami, February 2026. Adrian Vance dies of a heart attack on the flybridge of a yacht at the boat show, in front of a hundred and ten people, with a cardiologist eleven feet away and four cameras running, and the death is ruled natural inside forty-eight hours. His widow, Mercedes Arriaga, decides what is serious in this city, and she has spent thirty years deciding it about sixty-one paintings by one dead Cuban artist that now stand behind six hundred and forty million dollars of appraised value. Nothing in the collection is stolen and nothing is forged. The papers are immaculate. What Mercedes has never said out loud is that she has known since 2016 which eleven pictures are wrong.
RETENTIONTel Aviv, this year. Noa Amzaleg is twenty-six, broke and unqualified, with a perfect ear for what a stranger needs to hear. A friend puts her name forward and a man on the nineteenth floor of a tower in Ramat Gan talks to her for eleven minutes and offers her a job. Upstairs it is a start-up with plants and a gong; downstairs it is a room with no windows that takes the savings of retired people in five languages. She is very good at it. Her father is a district court judge who has never taken anything from anyone, and the only question the book asks is what her warmth was hired for.
THE ASSAYShanghai, 1919. Xu Jinhai is twenty-four, made comprador of a Bund trading house that morning, and arrested at his own betrothal supper on eight lines a colleague wrote as a joke and left on the table. The office that issued the warrant is dissolved twice and scattered once, and no successor will read a file he cannot open. Thirteen years later a man comes out of a river fort in a dead man's mat, and in the autumn of 1936 a Straits Chinese financier nobody can place takes rooms on the Bund and begins to collect. Each of the four men who buried him is offered one genuine chance before it closes. What the ledger cannot settle is whether a debt collected this exactly is justice.
THE ATALANTA PAPERS12 booksKenya, 1959. A club opens on the equator eleven miles from the mountain, and in its first season three men of consequence each sign one thing they cannot afterward explain. Aurelia Fanshawe is thirty-one, a Second Secretary (Commercial) whose commercial work is nothing of the kind, and her trade is the oldest and least respectable there is: she makes men feel interesting and then bills them for it. Now somebody has worked out how to do that to a whole table at once, in advance, for a fee, and the Office wants a name. What Fanshawe cannot decide, once she has met him, is what separates his profession from her own.
THE CONTINUING YESAccra, this year. Akosua Darko is thirty-one and runs a payroll company that pays three hundred and forty thousand people on the twenty-eighth of every month. In September a payments billionaire offers to buy it, and what he wants is not her software but the moment the money lands. Over six months the acquisition proceeds through lawyers who speak because the principals no longer can, and a second negotiation opens beside it in the same grammar, conducted by her family and his. Neither document is executed. She has nine people who depend on her and one answer nobody can draft for her.
THE CROWN PILLARJohannesburg. Nhlanhla Mthiyane runs a listed mining house he built out of paper and timing, and forty-one thousand poor households hold a quarter of it — an arrangement the state has certified nine times and now wants to call a fraud. He intends to keep it. Advocate Thembekile Matiwane runs a corruption directorate with four people and no money, and he wants that quarter frozen. What follows takes four years. A shaft burns, a union splits, a psychologist surrenders her registration, a clerk of twenty-four loses his articles, and a company that employed thirty-one thousand people is taken apart in public, lawfully, by people who are each of them right. The question is who should own the ground. Nobody asks who is still working on it.
THE FLORENTINEFlorence, 1498. Days after the Republic hangs and burns a friar in the Piazza della Signoria, it hands its Second Chancery to a man of twenty-nine with no fortune, no patron and no record of office, whose only demonstrated asset is that he can write. For fourteen years Niccolò Machiavelli runs the correspondence of a state with no army, no money and no friends, and builds a citizen militia out of plowmen because he cannot afford mercenaries. The boy who can read his handwriting is seventeen, has no name in the leather bags from which Florence draws its government, and keeps the copies. He is still keeping them sixty years later, and this is his account.
THE NAME THAT REMAINS4 booksThebes, in the fourth year of the reign. Yami is twenty, a merchant's daughter from a burned Levantine port, entered in a ledger column beside cedar, copper and cattle and walked into the royal household with three hundred and ten others. She is renamed on the spot. She can also read the language the kings of the world write to one another, which is a thing nine people in Egypt can do. Hornakht has been addressed as a god since he was fourteen and has not heard his own name spoken since his coronation. She says it. Over the year that follows she climbs an institution that counts everything, and every rung she takes is taken from a woman standing on it.
THE NINE POSES3 booksVienna, 1899. Maximilian von Attems paints the second rank of Viennese society superbly and kills for the Emperor out of an office hidden in the regulations for court mourning. Three men are dead in improbable rooms with no marks on them, and all three attended the same private demonstration in the Josefstadt within a fortnight of dying. Dr. Konrad Nachtigall is a physician of impeccable family who has discovered that what a mesmerist does to one subject can be done to a hall, and who believes that finding out how a thing works entitles a man to use it. Attems is given the case, an assistant of twenty-four he did not ask for, and one season to be right in.
THE NOT-GOOD MAN8 booksChang'an, 752. Chang Nine is a licensed thief-catcher — a not-good man, which is the actual job title — living six flights above the West Market's drum in a room he pays for in unpaid nights. A woman comes out of the canal and the county wants her signed off as a drowning before the closing gong. She is the market's licensed cloth-measurer, she went into the water already dead, and her official rule is missing. The next morning a silk factor climbs six flights to hire him to find forty bales of cloth he calls nobody's. The trail runs through a warehouse, a monastery's weaving shed and a clerk's nephew, to a gate in the other county where his license is waste paper.
THE ORIGIN OF RIGHTJakarta, September 1985. A body comes up at a floodgate with no wound on it, and Captain Sudibyo opens a homicide file because nobody else will. In the dead man's shirt pocket is a photocopy of a village land deed executed by thumbprint in December 1965. The city is repainting itself for a state visit in ten days, the file is taken off him by a polite memorandum, and he continues under an inquiry into the disposal of an unclaimed motorcycle. What he assembles is a register, a manifest, a tax counterfoil and a page of purple roneo, and the question the novel puts is whether a man can go on being a good policeman once he understands what the paperwork is a record of.
THE QUIET PART12 booksSavannah, this year. Nate Cobb is a psychotherapist who is not yet licensed in Georgia, which means that for six weeks he can consult for anybody except a patient. A family that owns a cold-storage terminal wants him to prove their father is not himself: at seventy-nine he has rewritten his will, given away fourteen million dollars, stopped speaking to two of his three children, and become happier than anyone has ever seen him. Nobody has coerced him. For fourteen months he has been talking six hours a day to something that agrees with him. Cobb's wife takes up a chair at a law school, and his mother calls on Sundays.
THE SCHEDULERotterdam, now. Ruben Boldewijn is forty-one, a partner at a commercial firm, and one of the best commodities lawyers in the Netherlands, and his family left Paramaribo in 1982 because his father declined to sign something. He wants to be the most respectable man in every room he enters. A client he acquires by winning a customs forfeiture wants him a little further in each year, one scope-of-work at a time, and every step is defended by a professional rule that is real and good. Underneath it, discussed at lunch in the register of freight rates, is a market in knowing which containers will be opened, and its price rises every time enforcement improves.
THE SIDE THAT FACES THE WALL1 bookZamalek, Cairo, a Thursday in October. A young man with a cut above his eye comes up in the lift of a fourth-floor flat, says he is a friend of the son of the house and the child of a screen legend nobody has photographed since 1985, and by midnight he has cooked dinner, closed a sale nobody could close, and been put to bed in the son's room. Nothing is stolen. Nayera Doss told the story at a dozen dinner parties that autumn, and twenty months later she is telling it again, to you, and it is very funny until the bill for that evening arrives four hundred kilometers south, on somebody who was never in the room.
THE WASTAGEVienna, August 1859. The Empire is nine days from a treaty signing and an inspector of the Third Division catches a drowning nobody wants: an old man in the Winter Harbor basin, his pockets emptied and refilled, his flat sealed two hours before the body was found. Nate Mahr is a careful policeman with a stolen key-ring for a warrant and eleven days to work in. Clémence Rutledge is a New York stringer who has heard this rumor before and filed it as an old man's story. What Mahr finds has no name in any code he owns, and the question is not whether he can prove it but what a man does with a thing the law has no word for.
THE ZOHDIS OF CAIRO6 booksCairo, 1923. Nevine Mahran is twenty-four, publishes under her own name, and cannot find a newspaper in the city that will print her. Sherif Zohdi owns one, needs the revenue, and has a society column he cannot kill because it pays the wages of the political pages he believes in. She buys a full page every Wednesday; he charges her half rate and will not say why. What neither of them says is worth more: a paragraph he was paid to print in September, and a school in Bulaq that has been funded for two years by a man nobody has named. Cairo assembles the rest out of chauffeurs, maids and hostesses with grudges.
TODAY FOR YOUOaxaca, 2026. Mara Hale is forty-four, has a bestselling book about grief, three thousand certified practitioners at seven thousand four hundred dollars a head, and a wellness company raising money on a deck with the word OAXACA on one slide. She has not sat with an actually suffering person in three years. Her uncle dies in a pueblo in the Sierra Sur and she goes down for a deed and a signature. There is no deed and there cannot be one: the land is communal, the agave is worth a peso a kilo, and a school exercise book records forty-one inherited debts that cannot be paid in cash. The assembly that will decide her case is a room she may sit in and may not vote in.
TWO YEARS EARLYBangalore, 2004. Four people inside a three-thousand-person software services company build a product they are not permitted to own, in a clean room, against their own largest client, and it is switched off by a project plan. Over twelve years they build three more — a place to talk for people who have a phone and no computer, a way to send money to a phone number, a telephone line answered by a human being in nine languages — and every one of them is right about the country and wrong about the year. Sunita Iyer keeps the arithmetic. Nandita Borah keeps the shape. In one quarter of 2016 all of the infrastructure they were early for arrives at once, and none of them is still in the game.
YIELDChen Zhuo is thirty-four, a gray-market hardware engineer in Huaqiangbei, ninety-one thousand yuan in debt and eleven days into a bug he cannot find. An old partner who is doing conspicuously well hands him a strip of cut tape in an anti-static bag, the way you hand somebody a sample of a component, and he takes one. The market becomes legible. Within four months he has money and a name and a team and a car he did not choose. And running underneath all of it from the first week, in flat installments he explains away exactly as anyone would, is a label with a revision letter on the end of it, which any engineer alive would read as meaning there were an A, a B and a C.

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