Scribe: A Novel Audiobook (Free)

A haunting, evocative story about the power of storytelling

A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated hill valleys and shady hollows. The overall economy has been decreased to barter and trade.

Within this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a depressed living within the family farmstead where she grew up and where her sister met an untimely end. She enables a migrant group referred to as the about Scribe: A Novel Uninvited setup temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peacefulness with her cagey neighbours and the local enforcer. She’s learned how to make paper and ink, and she’s become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a notice from a guy with concealed motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and cause some increasingly calamitous occasions that culminate in a harrowing trip to a crossroads.

Drawing on traditional folktales and the annals and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy offers crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that details on pressing concerns of our period―migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism―and makes a engaging case for the energy of tales to both show us the world and transform it.