From haunted New Jersey suburbs to melancholy Irish landscapes to the contested wilds of the American West, Alan Minskoff joins host Jo Reed to discuss three sharply different works of fiction in audio. Tom Perrotta’s Ghost Town, narrated by Robert Petkoff, blends grief, adolescence, and the supernatural through Petkoff’s nuanced character work, while Derbhle Crotty and Darragh Shannon bring quiet emotional precision to The News From Dublin, evoking the atmosphere of longing and displacement in Colm Tóibín’s story collection. The conversation closes with Taylor Brown’s Wolvers, read by Ramiz Monsef, whose vivid performance captures the tensions between ranchers, militias, environmentalists, and wolves in the modern West. These audiobooks may share little besides the genre of fiction, but each narrator creates a fully realized world listeners can step into and stay with long after the final chapter.

Audiobooks Discussed:

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta, read by Robert Petkoff (Simon & Schuster Audio)

The News From Dublin: Stories by Colm Tóibín, read by Derbhle Crotty and Darragh Shannon (Simon & Schuster Audio)

Wolvers by Taylor Brown, read by Ramiz Monsef (Recorded Books Inc.)

Support for Behind the Mic comes from HarperCollins Focus and HarperCollins Christian Publishing, publishers of some of your favorite audiobooks and authors, including Reba McEntire, Bob Goff, Savannah Guthrie, Max Lucado, Lysa TerKeurst, and many more.

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