LISTENING IN Audiobooks Making trouble

There is trouble everywhere in three audiobooks just out by Karen Karbo, Sophie Mackintosh and Anna Burns — the kind of trouble that goes a long way toward an interesting read.

The trouble is the women themselves in Karbo’s “In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons From 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules.” Cheryl Strayed, in her foreword, tells us each chapter felt to her “like I finally had the goods on the mysterious woman who lived next door.”

Some of the usual suspects are present: Hillary, Gloria, Frida, Coco and Billie Jean, none of whom needs a surname for recognition, and J.K. and RBG, two notorious women whose initials alone do the trick. But it’s the unexpected stories that are some of the most beguiling: the actors Kay Thompson (perhaps better known as the author of “Eloise”) and Laverne Cox; the comics Amy Poehler and Margaret Cho; writers Martha Gellhorn, Vita Sackville-West and Nora Ephron.

These are messy, inspiring lives lived in public by necessity or choice. They often offer great humor too, from Amelia Earhart’s “Tell people what they want to hear, then do whatever the hell you want” to J.K. Rowling’s takedown of Twitter trolls trying to silence her outspoken politics by threatening to burn their Pottery — “Well, the fumes from the DVDs might be toxic, and I’ve still got your money, so by all means borrow my lighter.” And the wit is always wedded to accomplishment.

The jump from one story to another is occasionally a bit jarring, as when Karbo moves from “It Girl” Edie Sedgwick, a player at Andy Warhol’s New York City “Factory,” to Angela Merkel growing up in the bleak world beyond the Berlin Wall. But the collection as a whole, well read by Bernadette Dunne, becomes a call to arms of the type contemplated by the Nora Ephron quote that serves as epigraph: “I hope that you will choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there.”

The three sisters at the center of Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel, “The Water Cure,” struggle to be wellbehaved in a world that is in a good spot of trouble — or appears to be. Nothing here is quite as it seems, though. Is their island refuge from a world grown toxic with pollution really a refuge, or even an island? Is their father the spiritual leader he purports to be, or something more insidious? Are they even sisters, really?

Their idyll begins to fracture when their father disappears, soon replaced by two men and a boy who wash ashore from the forbidden sea. Soon, their mother too disappears, leaving Grace and Sky to struggle against outerworld infection transmitted by the newcomers’ touch while Lia literally embraces one of the men. “The Water Cure” turns gorgeously dark, disturbing, and provocative, then — a tale of sibling rivalry, sexual exploration and survival.

In Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning “Milkman,” the troubles are Irish, and mixed with sexual awakenings and predators — literary tropes

Milkman

Burns mixes into something unlike anything you’ve ever read.

Is this Belfast? The 1970s? It is a city somewhere in a divided Ireland: “our shops” and theirs, the right and wrong butter, “The tea of allegiance. The tea of betrayal.” A flag on a Bentley might jeopardize a life in this somewhere-world with its 10-minute area (“no dawdling” here), its routine car bombings, its park in which men linger in bushes to photograph renouncers-of- the-state. “You created a polit- ical statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to.”

Milkman’s many characters remain as unnamed as its setting. The 18-year-old narrator is middle sister or daughter or sister-in-law, except to maybe-boyfriend and to the milkman of the title, who does not deliver milk. Third brother-in-law. Wee sisters. Longest friend. Somebody McSomebody. The effect is dystopian and unmoored. This has happened. It might still be happening. It might happen again.

What happens exactly is that middle sister is doing her usual, eccentric thing — reading while walking (only 19th century novels, please) — when a powerful paramilitary leader pulls up beside her and offers her a ride. She’s a clever young woman who prefers her Ivanhoe to this “milkman,”

In Praise of Difficult Women

even if he does seem to know everything there is to know about her life. “He didn’t seem rude, so I couldn’t be rude,” she tells us of a moment thick with sexual intimidation. She declines, knowing that getting into the car will ruin her.

Yet reputation is a fragile thing. Milkman continues to stalk her, and despite her every attempt to avoid him, the gossip begins. As Burns writes in the later pages, “Even at the outer limits of absurdity and contradiction people will make up anything. Then they will believe and build on this anything.”

It’s one of many bits of wisdom — brilliantly delivered in Bríd Brennan’s expressive Irish voice — in this funny, terrifying, original and ultimately uplifting novel about so many things: physical and emotional borders; political and sexual surveillance and resistance; and, so beautifully ironic in this book without names, the redemptive power of individual identity and integrity.

Meg Waite Clayton is the author of six novels, including “Beautiful Exiles,” published in June. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com