Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Literature & Fiction

When celebrated singer Calista plunges to her death during a concert in Rio, her former girlfriend Stevie is watching, along with the rest of the world. But while millions of fans mourn, Stevie can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right. Then Calista returns—alive, a little changed, but wanting Stevie back in her life for the first time in years. At first, seeing her again feels like a miracle.

Delightfully cheeky, unquestionably charming, and sometimes maddeningly naive, cloth mage Paul Gallagher is desperately trying to make a name for himself in a reimagined postwar London. But in a world where magic is commonplace, sewing enchanted clothes is seen as little more than a frivolous distraction. Paul is hiding a secret, however: he possesses a powerful - and illegal - innate magic. Unfortunately, Paul confides in the wrong person - his latest crush, Captain Hector Hollister - and is drawn into a sinister plot that risks reigniting the machinery of war.

An encompassing, visionary, many-threaded work, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is an American novel of great scope and nearly mythological intensity. This is the third volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

Tiny McAllister never thought she’d get married. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t think girls from Connecticut married other girls. Yet here she is with Caroline, the love of her life, at their destination wedding on the Bermuda coast. In attendance - their respective families and a few choice friends. The conflict-phobic Tiny hopes for a beautiful weekend with her bride-to-be. But as the weekend unfolds, it starts to feel like there’s a skeleton in every closet of the resort.

In an astounding debut poetry collection, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Lambda Literary fellow Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa presents a relentless but refined portrait of one young woman's journey toward self-discovery. Her poems explore the eternal themes of the human condition - nature, origin, shame, identity, desire, mortality - with sensitivity and specificity. They illuminate and interrogate the ways that her characters inflict and experience pain, ultimately revealing how we must all face our shame in order to grow. No voice is blameless; no person is exempt.

This novel is indeed a morality tale about the hazards of egotistical self-indulgence. Dorian Grey's pact with evil allows his portrait to take on his many sins and degradations while his physical appearance remains youthful. Over the years as he becomes cruel and vicious, even murderous, Dorian's young and perfect body is no longer enough to salvage his deteriorating mind and morality. Will justice and good prevail?

1855, New Hampshire. Lucy Blunt is set to hang for a double murder. Murderess or victim? Only Lucy knows the truth. In the shadow of the gallows, Lucy reflects on the events that led to her bitter downfall - from the moment she arrived at the rambling Burton mansion looking for work and a better life to the grisly murders themselves.

Husbands Thomas and Matt are enjoying a second-chance marriage after coming out, leaving their wives, and finding happiness in a summer cottage on the southern coast of Maine. They’ve kept a tenuous peace with their exes. Thomas toils in the garden. There is an ease to their love. This is the way life should be. But it’s not long before their three children—each nearing adulthood and fleeing personal crises of their own—descend on their fathers’ bliss. The two-bedroom getaway has just enough space for Thomas and Matt’s future. Now they must make room for the past, and all its drama.

A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock and mourning. Ricky's sister, Alyssa, returns to confront her shattered, withdrawn mother and her guilt over the brother she left adrift. Mark McVitry, the lone survivor of the deadly outburst sparked by his own cruelty, is tormented by visions of Ricky's vengeful spirit. Ricky's surrogate older brother, Corky Meeks, grapples with doubts about the fragile boy he tried to protect but may have doomed instead.

James Patterson is a gay accountant living in Keyes, Oklahoma - deep in the Bible Belt - the religious heartland of America. He's also the first person to make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence seeking to understand our world, and that makes him the most important person on the planet.

Four high school students in present-day New Orleans are torn apart by envy, passion, and tragedy. Meredith, Brandon, Greg, and Stephen quickly discover the fragile boundaries between friendship and betrayal as they enter high school and form new alliances. Then two violent deaths disrupt the core of what they once shared.

Jane Zander has moved with her husband, Matt, back to his hometown of Atwood, Wisconsin, where he is the new headmaster of the prestigious Atwood Prep School. Jane hopes it will be a good fit for herself, her husband, and their children. Especially Charles, their six-year-old son, who aspires to be the next Julia Child, rejects the norms of boyhood, and insists he is a girl.

It’s the final years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Bríd and her sister, Ina, try to maintain a stable life in a divided country. Pushed by her mother’s fanaticism and a family tragedy, Bríd joins the IRA and makes a devastating choice. Frightened and guilt ridden, she flees, leaving behind Ireland and her family for America. Years later, her guilt and tragic history still buried, Bríd is an overprotective mother raising her sensitive daughter, Bernie, in Southern California.

For seventeen years, a serial murderer has used the Presley, Arkansas, Annual Hunt for the Golden Egg to find prey. Or at least that’s what some people believe. Others, like the town’s devoted “Eggheads,” relish the tradition and think the deaths are just unfortunate accidents. But for Nell Holcomb, the town’s annual Hunt dredges up a particularly painful memory: her brother’s death, long believed to be “the Hunter’s” first kill.

Mark Sternum, whom listeners first met in Perfect Agreement, is a veteran teacher. Twenty years older, separated for six months from his lover, and desperate to duck the overtures of double-dealing deans above him and disgruntled adjunct faculty below him, Mark has one ambition every day he is on campus - to close the classroom door and leave the world behind. His escape, however, is complicated by his contentious, complicated wrestling match of a relationship with the Professor, the tenured faculty member with whom Mark has co-taught this creative-writing workshop for ten years.

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families. Miguel Guerra, who grew up in poverty in Venezuela before his family's relocation to Chicago, could not be more different from his partner Chad Merry, a happy-go-lucky real estate mogul from Chicago's wealthy North Shore. When Chad's sister, Gretchen - struggling with the deterioration of her marriage - offers the couple her eggs, they begin scrambling for a surrogate to carry the child, finally settling on Miguel's old friend Emily, happily married to an eccentric Irish playwright.

Beautifully and hauntingly written, After Disasters is told through the eyes of four people in the wake of a life-shattering earthquake in India. An intricate story of love and loss weaves together the emotional and intimate narratives of Ted, a pharmaceutical salesman turned member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team; his colleague Piotr, who still carries with him the scars of the Bosnia conflict.

Arthur Blauefee promised to stay away from Jeremy Tyler forever. But when he learns that his troubled, heartbroken ex-lover has been seduced and swindled out of his inheritance, Arthur is off to the rescue. After rekindling their passionate affair, the starry-eyed lovers learn that Jeremy’s plight has gone from terrible to worse. Not only has Jeremy been cheated out of his fortune, he’s been framed for murder.

The high-octane drama, romance, and sexuality of New York’s gay scene snap to life in this compelling collection of five intersecting stories from the author of Gulliver Takes Manhattan. Your guides are hotheaded Brayden, spurned by his ex-boyfriend and carving a path of explosive revenge across the city; Marty, an aspiring actor whose unexpected shot at a breakthrough role could propel him straight to Broadway; go-go boy Chase, finally facing some hard truths about his life....