Get Your Free Audiobook
-
Room for a Stranger
- Narrated by: Taylor Owynns
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
Non-member price: $22.78
People who bought this also bought...
-
Honeybee
- By: Craig Silvey
- Narrated by: Harvey Zielinski
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Late in the night, 14-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.
-
-
Simply glorious
- By Jane h. on 03-10-2020
-
Exciting Times
- By: Naoise Dolan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than 'I like you a great deal'. Enter Edith, a lawyer. Refreshingly enthusiastic and unapologetically earnest, Edith takes Ava to the theatre when Julian leaves Hong Kong for work. Quickly, she becomes something Ava looks forward to. And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong....
-
The Mother Fault
- By: Kate Mildenhall
- Narrated by: Claudia Karvan
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mim’s husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him - especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them "safe". But suddenly Ben can’t be tracked. And Mim is questioned, made to surrender her passport and threatened with the unthinkable - her two children being taken into care at the notorious BestLife. Cornered, Mim risks everything to go on the run to find her husband - and a part of herself.
-
-
Like listening to a great tv series.
- By Penni on 12-12-2020
-
The Weekend
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Taylor Owynns
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the Winner of the 2016 Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things. Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie's old beach house.
-
-
A great read!
- By Lisa G on 07-11-2019
-
The Yield
- By: Tara June Winch
- Narrated by: Tony Briggs
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for 10 years when she learns of her grandfather's death.
-
-
Heartbreaking
- By Anonymous User on 21-12-2019
-
Burnt Sugar
- By: Avni Doshi
- Narrated by: Vineeta Rishi
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents) and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
-
-
Depressing, leads nowhere
- By KerryJ on 17-08-2020
-
Honeybee
- By: Craig Silvey
- Narrated by: Harvey Zielinski
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Late in the night, 14-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.
-
-
Simply glorious
- By Jane h. on 03-10-2020
-
Exciting Times
- By: Naoise Dolan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than 'I like you a great deal'. Enter Edith, a lawyer. Refreshingly enthusiastic and unapologetically earnest, Edith takes Ava to the theatre when Julian leaves Hong Kong for work. Quickly, she becomes something Ava looks forward to. And then Julian writes to tell Ava he is coming back to Hong Kong....
-
The Mother Fault
- By: Kate Mildenhall
- Narrated by: Claudia Karvan
- Length: 9 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mim’s husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him - especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them "safe". But suddenly Ben can’t be tracked. And Mim is questioned, made to surrender her passport and threatened with the unthinkable - her two children being taken into care at the notorious BestLife. Cornered, Mim risks everything to go on the run to find her husband - and a part of herself.
-
-
Like listening to a great tv series.
- By Penni on 12-12-2020
-
The Weekend
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Taylor Owynns
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the Winner of the 2016 Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things. Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie's old beach house.
-
-
A great read!
- By Lisa G on 07-11-2019
-
The Yield
- By: Tara June Winch
- Narrated by: Tony Briggs
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for 10 years when she learns of her grandfather's death.
-
-
Heartbreaking
- By Anonymous User on 21-12-2019
-
Burnt Sugar
- By: Avni Doshi
- Narrated by: Vineeta Rishi
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents) and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
-
-
Depressing, leads nowhere
- By KerryJ on 17-08-2020
-
Love and Other Thought Experiments
- By: Sophie Ward
- Narrated by: Sophie Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rachel and Eliza are hoping to have a baby. The couple spend many happy evenings together planning for the future. One night Rachel wakes up screaming and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there. She knows it sounds mad - but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza won't take Rachel's fear seriously, and they have a bitter fight. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question.
-
All Our Shimmering Skies
- By: Trent Dalton
- Narrated by: Ruby Rees
- Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, is looking to the skies and running for her life. Inside a duffel bag she carries a stone heart, alongside a map to lead her to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who she believes put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. The treasure lies before them, but close behind them trails the dark. And above them, always, are the shimmering skies.
-
-
Got to Chapter 20, Couldn’t finish
- By Anonymous User on 08-10-2020
-
Girl, Woman, Other
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the 20th century to the teens of the 21st, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of 12 characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope....
-
-
Human courage and beauty, entrancing
- By Robyn on 31-12-2019
-
The Dutch House
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Tom Hanks
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A masterpiece from the Orange Prize-winning, New York Times number one best-selling author of Commonwealth and Bel Canto: a story of love, family, sacrifice and the power of place. Lose yourself in the story of a lifetime – the unforgettable Sunday Times best seller. A story of two siblings, their childhood home and a past that they can’t let go. Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.
-
-
Great witty narration
- By christiana O on 27-09-2019
-
The Beekeeper of Aleppo
- A Moving Testament to the Human Spirit
- By: Christy Lefteri
- Narrated by: Art Malik
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nuri is a beekeeper, his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo - until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain.
-
-
A Beautiful Story
- By Jo-Anne Page on 31-07-2019
-
The Wife and the Widow
- By: Christian White
- Narrated by: Caz Prescott
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and the Widow is a mystery-thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband’s secret life; and Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside down when she’s forced to confront the evidence that her husband is a murderer. But nothing on this island is quite as it seems, and only when these women come together can they discover the whole story about the men in their lives.
-
-
WOW!
- By Tracey A Zvirblis on 01-10-2019
-
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Our brains stay active for 10 minutes after our heart stops beating. For Leila, each minute brings with it a new memory: growing up with her father and his wives in a grand old house in a quiet Turkish town; watching the women gossip and wax their legs while the men went to mosque; sneaking cigarettes and Western magazines on her way home from school; running away to Istanbul to escape an unwelcome marriage; falling in love with a student who seeks shelter from a riot in the brothel where she works.
-
-
Scintillating, Fascinating Characters
- By Kris on 12-03-2020
-
The Loudness of Unsaid Things
- By: Hilde Hinton
- Narrated by: Hilde Hinton
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Miss Kaye works at The Institute. A place for the damaged, the outliers, the not-quite rights. Everyone has different strategies to deal with the residents. Some bark orders. Some negotiate tirelessly. Miss Kaye found that simply being herself was mostly the right thing to do. Susie was seven when she realised she'd had her fill of character building. She'd lie between her Holly Hobbie sheets thinking how slowly birthdays come around, but how quickly change happened.
-
-
Bravo Hilde
- By Anonymous User on 16-06-2020
-
A Room Made of Leaves
- By: Kate Grenville
- Narrated by: Valerie Bader
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What if Elizabeth Macarthur – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney – had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented. Grenville's Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life-marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart and the search for power in a society that gave her none - with spirit, cunning and sly wit.
-
-
Not what I was expecting
- By Julie Orton on 03-08-2020
-
The Dictionary of Lost Words
- By: Pip Williams
- Narrated by: Imogen Sage
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men.
-
-
An Engrossing Story, A Thinkpiece on Words
- By KerryJ on 08-06-2020
-
Convenience Store Woman
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Meet Keiko. Keiko is 36 years old. She's never had a boyfriend, and she's been working in the same supermarket for eighteen years. Keiko's family wishes she'd get a proper job. Her friends wonder why she won't get married. But Keiko knows what makes her happy, and she's not going to let anyone come between her and her convenience store.
-
-
lovely read
- By Vanessa on 04-01-2021
-
The White Girl
- By: Tony Birch
- Narrated by: Shareena Clanton
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A searing new novel from leading Indigenous storyteller Tony Birch that explores the lengths we will go to in order to save the people we love. Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families.
-
-
Loved every minute of this book
- By Anonymous User on 20-08-2020
Publisher's Summary
By the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction.
Since her sister died, Meg has been on her own. She doesn’t mind, not really - not with Atticus, her African grey parrot, to keep her company - but after her house is broken into by a knife-wielding intruder, she decides it might be good to have some company after all.
Andy’s father has lost his job, and his parents’ savings are barely enough to cover his tuition. If he wants to graduate, he’ll have to give up his student flat and find a homeshare. Living with an elderly Australian woman is harder than he’d expected, though, and soon he’s struggling with more than his studies.
Critic Reviews
“My god, this was a joy to read. Every year there’s an Australian novel everyone endlessly passes around and recommends because they bloody love it so much, and this is going to be 2019’s. Room for a Stranger explores the high stakes of quiet moments, reveals the beauty of unlikely connections and shows how the antidote to shame is always compassion. After reading this impossible-to-put-down novel, Melanie Cheng is quickly becoming my favourite Australian writer.” (Benjamin Law)
“Melanie Cheng is an astonishingly deft and incisive writer.” (Christos Tsiolkas)
“A beautifully written novel about how the stories we tell ourselves can get us stuck and how opening our lives to others might jolt us free again. Melanie Cheng offers both razor-sharp insight into the flaws and foibles of ordinary people and a deep warmth and tenderness for them. Room for a Stranger is that rare thing: a novel which stings and soothes all at once.” (Emily Maguire)
More from the same
Author
Narrator
What listeners say about Room for a Stranger
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Spencer
- 28-02-2020
A simple story of life with feelings
A great relaxing easy read/listen with real characters, real happenings. Nice change from heavily dramatic readings, down to earth and most enjoyable!
16 Best Audiobooks by Aboriginal Authors
Across genres, there’s no shortage of brilliant titles from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers of Australia.



25 Best Celebrity Audiobooks
It’s always a pleasant surprise to pick up a familiar story and find an unexpected famous friend in the narrator’s booth.



Best Audiobooks of 2020
We've crunched the numbers, heard from our listeners and gotten expert opinions to round up the best listens of 2020.


