GODS WITHOUT MEN

In a series of vignettes, a talented cast of narrators takes listeners across time and space via angels, spirit guides, UFOs, peyote, pot, crystal meth, and mercury poisoning. Each performance draws the fully realized people who live in or near the Pinnacles, a place in the desert that draws everything into itself like a cosmic black hole. Missing children, visitations from angels and aliens, surreal visions—all find their way into Hari Kunzru’s latest investigation of people’s sense of emotional deadness in a world that is broken. The audiobook doesn’t credit which narrator reads which character but provides riveting performances of them all—from an eighteenth-century friar to a 21st-century rock star and an Iraqi Goth-girl, from a modern-day Brooklyn couple to a nineteenth-century silver miner. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2012]