I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys, Read by Edoardo Ballerini

Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens.

Narrator Edoardo Ballerini masterfully conveys the unrelenting stress on 17-year-old Cristian Florescu, who lives in Bucharest, Romania, in the winter of 1989. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile’s Michele Cobb discuss Ballerini’s smooth and youthful narration that conveys all the tension of Ruta Sepetys’s story. Cristian agrees to take on an informer role in exchange for medicine to save his ailing grandfather. Instead of relief, Cristian experiences hunger, isolation, and fear, and Ballerini’s pacing enhances the suspense and twists in the first-person narration. A gripping story.

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