The Only Harmless Great Thing

Brooke Bolander

Oct 2019 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Courtney Patterson

About this audiobook

Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novelette Finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Sturgeon Awards The Only Harmless Great Thing is a heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander that imagines an intersection between the Radium Girls and noble, sentient elephants. In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey, slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island. These are the facts. Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice.

About the author

Brooke Bolander's stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon Awards, much to her unending bafflement.

Courtney Patterson is an Atlanta native who has been working as an actor on stage, screen, and behind the microphone for close to two decades. She has been narrating audiobooks since 2011 and has fallen in love with the craft of storytelling through narration.