Staff Picks: BorrowBox 2023

We’ve drawn together a selection of audiobooks enjoyed by our colleagues in Dublin City Libraries this year. 

You can reserve items on BorrowBox here. 

If you don’t have a library card, contact your local library and they will help you to join; see here for more information on library membership. 

Or contact us at [email protected]. We’re happy to help. 

Happy Christmas and happy reading to all of you from all of us here in Dublin City Libraries.

BorrowBox

The Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell

Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world's strangest and most awe-inspiring animals, including pangolins, wombats, lemurs and seahorses. But each of these animals is endangered. And so, this most passionately persuasive and sharply funny book is also an urgent, inspiring clarion call: to treasure and act - to save nature's vanishing wonders, before it is too late. 

The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney

In the summer of 1986, two tragedies rocked Oklahoma City. Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved. Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escap and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he's willing to travel to try and get there.

Breakers by Doug Johnstone

Seventeen-year-old Tyler lives in one of Edinburgh's most deprived areas. Coerced into robbing rich people's homes by his bullying older siblings, he's also trying to care for his little sister and his drug-addict mum. On a job, his brother Barry stabs a homeowner and leaves her for dead, but that's just the beginning of their nightmare, because the woman is the wife of Edinburgh's biggest crime lord, Deke Holt. With the police and the Holts closing in, and his shattered family in devastating danger, Tyler meets posh girl Flick in another stranger's house, and he thinks she may just be his salvation unless he drags her down too.

Duffy and Son by Damien Owens

A heartwarming and hilarious novel about life, love and the weight of all we leave unsaid, Duffy and Son is a quietly moving masterpiece from one of Ireland’s most gifted comic writers. Eugene Duffy is turning 70; his son Jim is turning 40. For decades now, they’ve been running the family hardware shop and living in good-natured bachelor harmony. But time is marching on, and with thoughts of old age weighing heavily on his mind, Eugene is growing increasingly concerned about his son’s future. He resolves to help in the best way possible: by finding Jim a wife. And he’s not going to let anyone, let alone Jim himself, stand in his way.