The intimacy of a memoir can be intensified by hearing the work read by its author, and this is unquestionably the case with the debut of blogger Jeremy Atherton Lin, recently awarded the 2022 National Book Critics Circle prize for autobiography. Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (Hachette Audio, 7 hours and 52 minutes) is a hybrid of memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, moving insouciantly from in-your-face sex scenes to confident analysis of the interplay between liberation and homophobia in the gayborhoods of London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. At the heart of the book is a love story. In his early 20s, Atherton Lin met his partner, whom he calls Famous Blue Raincoat, or just Famous, at Popstarz in London, and in the decades since, bars have remained a primary location of their unfolding story. “If I earned a reputation for making trouble,”he confides, still sounding a bit like the brainy California kid he once was, “it was so that I could write about it the following morning.…Memoir is how you groom yourself. Memoir is drag.” After taking this armchair tour of their iconic and raunchy haunts, you’ll want nothing more than to meet Jeremy and Famous for a drink.

Rebecca Donner also reads the audio edition of her book All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (Hachette Audio, 13 hours and 49 minutes). This extraordinary World War II story focuses on Mildred Harnack, a little-known heroine from Milwaukee who was a key player in the resistance to Hitler for almost 10 years, ultimately beheaded by his personal order in 1943. Harnack was Donner’s great-great-aunt, and the author’s quest to re-create her inspiring and humbling story, fitting together scraps of paper and lines from other people’s memoirs, is a fascinating feat of detective work, resulting in a book that is both a political thriller and—again—a love story. You wouldn’t think there could be any new outrages left with regard to the Third Reich, but this fresh, and freshly infuriating, angle—expressively captured by Donner’s tone of voice—overcomes any fatigue listeners may feel about this harrowing subject. Winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography, Donner’s book goes straight to the heart.

Jennifer Egan’s mind-blowing masterpiece The Candy House (Simon & Schuster Audio, 11 hours and 11 minutes) hasn’t won any prizes—yet—because it’s only been out a little more than two weeks. This extraordinary novel in stories is a companion to her Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit From the Goon Squad, and outdoes its predecessor in scope and achievement. Building on the cast introduced in Goon Squad in episodes stretching from the 1960s to the 2030s, the novel revolves around an invention called Own Your Unconscious, which allows users to transfer their memories into permanent digital storage and share this information publicly. As well as exploring the effects of technology on what it means to be human, The Candy House is about love, family, ambition, fame, and fiction itself. The stories are told in a dazzling array of voices, including one chapter that is all texts and emails and another that contains field instructions for an intelligence agent delivered by a “weevil” in her brain. The successful translation of all this complexity to the audio environment is no small achievement, with 20 perfectly cast narrators, among them actor Lucy Liu, adding vibrant humanity without sacrificing comprehension.

Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and other titles.