Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s, by John Elder Robison, read by Robison, with a foreword read by Augusten Burroughs. Abridged, 6 hours. Random House Audio, $29.95.

Robison is the older brother of Augusten Burroughs (born Christopher Robison), author of such best-selling memoirs as Dry and Running With Scissors. But he has more to offer in this serious but often-funny memoir than the parts that back up his brother’s recollection of a childhood full of odd occurrences in western Massachusetts with a mentally ill mother and the bizarre doctor who treated her.

John Elder Robison has Asperger’s Disorder, a mild form of autism that left him socially inept but with excellent ability as a tinker with cars and electrical engineer — one who designed flaming guitars for KISS and electronic games for Milton Bradley, and later started and ran a successful garage. He has to think hard about any conversation that involves small talk, he rocks and makes small motions as a form of comfort, and looking people in the eye is extremely uncomfortable for him — but he can fix broken amplifiers for rock groups, or restore an old Porsche or Rolls Royce, like nobody’s business.

As Burroughs says in his introduction, his brother is a gifted storyteller whose tales are well worth hearing. And for those whose knowledge of Asperger’s is limited to watching the character Jerry Espenson on TV’s Boston Legal, whose Asperger’s (like everything else on the show) is often played for laughs, the book will fill in a lot of gaps in an equally entertaining way.

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, read by Sebold. Unabridged, with an introduction by Sebold; 10.5 hours. Hachette Audio, $24.98.

Yes, this is the novel with which Sebold made her name in 2002. But it’s just been issued on audio, giving us a chance to revisit — or make a first visit to — this fine writer whose life was molded by an act of sexual violence.

Sebold was an 18-year-old college freshman in 1981 when she was raped and beaten on her way home to her dorm on the Syracuse University campus. Almost two decades later, she recounted that crime and its aftermath in her brutally honest memoir Lucky.

Sebold treads similar territory in equally extraordinary fashion in The Lovely Bones. Those bones are all that is left of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl raped and murdered in a Pennsylvania cornfield one fall day on her way home from middle school. The killer, an innocuous-seeming neighbor who has murdered before and will again, likes to dissolve his victims’ bodies in acid.

But the grim facts of Susie’s death are only a jumping-off point for Susie’s life after death, in a heaven of her own fashioning where she wanders a town set up just the way she wants, and can look down on the people she loved, as well as her killer. Susie’s narration of the book gives it an echo of the distant, bemused afterlife of Our Town. But where Our Town’s dead heroine Emily Webb poignantly resigns herself to drifting away from her family, Susie is far more involved with those she’s left behind. She longs for the touch of Ray Singh, the only boy who ever kissed her, and for the love of a mother who, unable to cope with Susie’s loss, tears her family apart.

Sebold reads with flat intonation that underscores both the horror and the happiness that come Susie’s way after death.

The View from Mount Joy, by Lorna Landvik, read by Robertson Dean. Abridged, 5 hours. Random House Audio, $27.95.

When high school hockey player Joe AndresonCQ moves to Minneapolis, he has trouble fitting in and finding his way, with his attention split among three girls. Sounds like a typical young-adult novel — except for the oral sex one of those girls gives him from time to time in the supply closet or a deserted classroom.

That’s when it becomes clear that this really is an adult novel, one that will follow Joe and the girl, beautiful Kristi Casey, along very different paths, him as a grocer and her, improbably enough, as a televangelist. But there’s something that keeps throwing them together even as their lives move further and further apart.

Landvik, author of novels including Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, makes Joe an appealing character and Kristi just plausible enough to keep you from bailing on the story. Dean offers a straightforward reading that doesn’t do much to differentiate among the characters but reflects Joe’s varying emotions nicely.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s South County regional editor.

arosenbe@projo.com