Bottomland
About this audiobook
At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland—the anticipated second novel from Michelle Hoover—follows the Hess family in the years after World War I as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.
In the weeks after Esther and Myrle’s disappearance, their siblings desperately search for the sisters, combing the stark farmlands, their neighbors’ houses, and the unfamiliar world of far-off Chicago. Have the girls run away to another farm? Have they gone to the city to seek a new life? Or were they abducted? Ostracized, misunderstood, and increasingly isolated in their tightly knit small town in the wake of the war, the Hesses fear the worst. Told in the voices of the family patriarch and his children, this is a haunting literary mystery that spans decades before its resolution. Hoover deftly examines the intrepid ways a person can forge a life of their own despite the dangerous obstacles of prejudice and oppression.
About the author
Michelle Hoover has published fiction in Confrontation, the Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Best New American Voices, and others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the 2005 winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. She was born in Ames, Iowa, the granddaughter of four longtime farming families.
Amy Landon is a classically trained actress with numerous off-Broadway, film, and television credits. Her voice can also be heard on many television and radio commercials. She has an easy facility with dialects, which she also coaches and teaches, and she is happy to find her lifelong obsession with books is matching up with her acting and vocal work.
Robertson Dean has recorded hundreds of audiobooks in most every genre. He's been nominated for several Audie Awards, won eight Earphones Awards, and was named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of 2010. He lives in Los Angeles, where he records books and acts in film, TV, and (especially) on stage.
Tavia Gilbert, a six-time Audie Award nominee and multiple Earphones and Parents' Choice Award-winning producer, narrator, and writer, has appeared on stage and in film. Library Journal said of the highly acclaimed actress, "as close as you can get to a full cast narration with a solo voice." Tavia has narrated more than 250 multicast and single-voice audiobooks.
Emily Woo Zeller is an Earphones award-winning audiobook narrator. After beginning her voiceover career with Asian animation, she returned to the United States and began narrating a broad spectrum of audiobook genres. Her multilingual, multicultural framework brings a particularly unique, clear-eyed, and intimate perspective to the Asian American narratives she specializes in.
Richard Powers has published thirteen novels. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award. His book, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
