Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Literature & Fiction

Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at 48 years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city's incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.

Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and unable to begin writing her next book, Delphine meets L. L. is the kind of impeccable, sophisticated woman who fascinates Delphine - a woman with smooth hair and perfectly filed nails and a gift for saying the right thing. Delphine finds herself irresistibly drawn to her, their friendship growing as their meetings, notes and texts increase. But L. begins to dress like Delphine, and, in the face of Delphine's crippling inability to write, L. even offers to answer her emails, and their relationship rapidly intensifies.

An astonishing historical novel set in the shadowy, magical forests of South America, which draws on the captivating world of the international best seller The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Deep in uncharted Peru, the holy town of Bedlam stands at the edge of a forest. The shrine statues move, and anyone who crosses the border dies. But somewhere inside are cinchona trees, whose bark yields quinine: the only known treatment for malaria. On the other side of the Pacific, it is 1859, and India is ravaged by the disease.

Using Australia as a springboard, this book explores the science in folk history. It looks at ancient tales and traditions that may in all probability be rooted in scientifically verifiable fact and can be explored via geological evidence, such as the biblical flood. Nowadays the majority of our historical knowledge comes from the written word, but in The Edge of Memory, Patrick Nunn explores the largely untapped resource of the collective human memory that is held in stories. This important book explores the wider implications for our knowledge of how human society has developed through the millennia.

Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley had a huge impact on Gothic horror and science fiction genres. The name Frankenstein has become part of our everyday language, often used in derogatory terms to describe scientists who have overstepped a perceived moral line. But how did a 19-year-old woman with no formal education come up with the idea for an extraordinary novel such as Frankenstein?

In the city of Bogot, Antonio Yammara reads an article about a hippo that had escaped from a derelict zoo once owned by legendary Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The article transports Antonio back to when the war between Escobar’s Medelln cartel and government forces played out violently in Colombia’s streets and in the skies above. Back then, Antonio witnessed a friend’s murder, an event that haunts him still. As he investigates, he discovers the many ways in which his own life and his friend’s family have been shaped by his country’s recent violent past.

It is 1947, and Beit Daras, a quiet village in Palestine surrounded by olive groves, is home to the Baraka family. Eldest daughter Nazmiyeh looks after her widowed mother, prone to wandering and strange outbursts, while her brother, Mamdouh, tends to the village bees. Their younger sister, Mariam, with her striking mismatched eyes, spends her days talking to imaginary friends and writing.

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin's friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet yet published.

The Challenge of Things joins earlier collections like The Reason of Things and Thinking of Answers but this time to collect Grayling's recent writings on the world in a time of war and conflict. In describing and exposing the dark side of things, he also explores ways out of the habits and prejudices of mind that would otherwise trap us forever in the deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds.

It is the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page: The man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house at Poiana, where Safta was the privileged daughter.

Evelyn and Dorothy - the twins - are seven when the Forrests move from New York City, the hub of the world, to Westmere, New Zealand. The Forrest Trust Fund now cut out of their lives, the family live under a cloudless sky, in the dust and the heat, outdoors and running wild. Their father - who they would only call Frank - works for a cab company over the weekends but is really an actor. Michael, the eldest, has a friend called Daniel whose father lives in a half-way house. He starts to live with them, punches Dorothy to stop her crying, and becomes family.

On the day of Joseph Conrad's death, in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail - from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Those intimate recollections became Nostromo, a novel that solidified Conrad’s fame and turned Altamirano’s reality into a work of fiction. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear. Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence.

Jonathan is a private investigator in a decaying Eastern European city, consumed by his work and his failing marriage. Approached one day by an elderly couple, he is presented with a faded photograph of their daughter, missing for nearly two decades. Troubled by the image of the little girl, who was the same age when she vanished as his own daughter is now - he is compelled to find her.

The Art of the Infinite takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone for understanding mathematical thinking. Robert and Ellen Kaplan guide us through the “Republic of Numbers,” where we meet both its upstanding citizens and its more shadowy dwellers; and transport us across the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines meet.

Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration is a collection of specially commissioned essays celebrating the poet's life and work, and exploring his lasting legacy. Edited by his granddaughter, Hannah Ellis, the book is arranged thematically and includes a wealth of material: essays from noted biographers such as David Thomas and Clive Woosnam explore Thomas's lasting legacy both at home and abroad, and Welsh poet laurete Gillian Clark reflects on the impact of the seminal "play for voices", Under Milk Wood.

When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. He wants revenge but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. It marks new territory for the best-selling author of Devil in a Blue Dress and countless other books; it will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush.

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.

At the close of the Civil War, weary veteran Malcolm Hopeton returns to his home in Western New York State to find his wife and hired man missing and his farm in disrepair. A double murder ensues, the repercussions of which ripple through a community with spiritual roots in the Second Great Awakening. Hopeton has gone from the horrors of war to those far worse, and arrayed around him are a host of other people struggling to make sense of his crime.

It’s been years since Skye Elliot has seen her biological father. He left when she was 12, breaking her heart, and her life hasn’t exactly been going uphill since. A drug user and alcoholic, Skye is given a choice after a car accident: jail or rehab. It takes eight months to get clean, but the day Skye is released, she has one plan: to be a good mother to her four-year-old daughter, Gracie. But first she has to find her.When no one shows up to pick up Skye from the centre she gets a surprise visitor: her father.