Get two free audiobook downloads a week through August 16, 2017, through the SYNC 2017 program from AudioFile. You can download your audiobooks to the OverDrive app for free! Sign up for email or text alerts from AudioFile to learn about the weekly releases or check back on our blog for regular updates.
Here are this week’s free audiobook downloads.
More About This Week’s Giveaways
The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner & Other Stories by Terry Pratchett
Do you believe in magic? Can you imagine a war between wizards? An exciting journey in an airship or down in a submarine? Would you like to meet the fastest truncheon in the Wild West?
The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner is the second fabulously funny short-story collection from the late acclaimed storyteller Terry Pratchett. A follow-up to Dragons at Crumbling Castle, this second batch of storytelling gems features stories written when Sir Terry was just 17 years old and working as a junior reporter. In these pages, new Pratchett fans will find wonder, mayhem, sorcery and delight — and loyal readers will recognize the seeds of ideas that went on to influence his most beloved tales later in life.
As Neil Gaiman says, “a Terry Pratchett book is a small miracle” — and The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner proves to be another miracle taking its place alongside Pratchett’s astounding and cherished body of work. – Goodreads.com
Check out Douglas County Libraries materials: Book, E-Audiobook
The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff
The panic began early in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister’s niece began to writhe and roar. It spread quickly, confounding the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, husbands accused wives, parents and children accused one another. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.
Speaking loudly and emphatically, adolescent girls stood at the center of the crisis. Along with suffrage and Prohibition, the Salem witch trials represent one of the few moments when women played the central role in American history. Drawing masterfully on the archives, Stacy Schiff introduces us to the strains on a Puritan adolescent’s life and to the authorities whose delicate agendas were at risk. She illuminates the demands of a rigorous faith, the vulnerability of settlements adrift from the mother country, perched — at a politically tumultuous time — on the edge of what a visitor termed a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness.”
With devastating clarity, the textures and tensions of colonial life emerge; hidden patterns subtly, startlingly detach themselves from the darkness. Schiff brings early American anxieties to the fore to align them brilliantly with our own. In an era of religious provocations, crowdsourcing, and invisible enemies, this enthralling story makes more sense than ever.
The Witches is Schiff’s riveting account of a seminal episode, a primal American mystery unveiled — in crackling detail and lyrical prose — by one of our most acclaimed historians. – Goodreads.com
Check out Douglas County Libraries materials: Book, Audiobook, E-Book, E-Audiobook, Playaway, Large-Print Book
