Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in Genre Fiction

The Korticos are from a well-endowed pygmy tribe in West Africa; the Mandingas are descended from a tribe of tall Ghanaians. Both families have been brought to Cuba as slaves. Oscar Kortico and Jose Mandinga, inseparable friends, marry a pair of sisters, and in the tiny hamlet of Pig's Foot (Pata de Puerco), five generations of these families will live out their colorful lives through the tumultuous sweep of Cuban history.

Meet Charlie. People think he's crazy. But he's not. People think he's stupid. But he's not. People think he's innocent...He's the Gamal. Charlie has a story to tell, about his best friends Sinead and James and the bad things that happened. But he can't tell it yet, at least not 'til he's worked out where the beginning is. Is the beginning long ago when Sinead first spoke up for him after Charlie got in trouble at school for the millionth time? Or was it later, when Sinead and James followed the music and found each other?

Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. Aged 10 in 1980, he has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to him at his birth and gave him a special purpose. Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him.

A History of the Present Illness takes listeners into overlooked lives in the neighborhoods, hospitals, and nursing homes of San Francisco, offering a deeply humane and incisive portrait of health and illness in American today....In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Abraham Verghese, Aronson's writing is based on personal experience and addresses topics of current social relevance. Masterfully told, A History of the Present Illness explores the role of stories in medicine and creates a world pulsating with life, speaking truths about what makes us human.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.

For years, Elza has gotten by. A divorcee out of culinary school, she started her own little restaurant in the mid-size Hungarian city of Delibab, and she's grown a decent business, cooking quality versions of Hungarian classics and serving them with a smile. But lately her smile has gotten tired. Her loveless affair with her sous-chef has become an irritation. She's getting sick of the same old dishes and the same old customers. And in these nascent years of capitalism, it will take some competition to make her see that her restaurant, and her happiness, are worth fighting for.

On November 1, 1984, a day after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a nineteen-year-old student travels back from a class trip with his mentor and chemistry teacher, Professor Singh. As the group disembarks at Delhi station a mob surrounds the professor, throwing a tire over him, dousing him in gasoline, and setting him alight. Years later the student, Raj, is compelled to find his professor's widow, the beautiful Nelly.

Set in the working-class district of Benfica in Lisbon, The Piano Cemetery tells the story of a family, and especially of the hopes and fears of the fathers who pass the baton of the generations on to their sons. The Lazaro family are cabinet-makers who would rather be piano-makers.

A man will endlessly torture his muscles until they shriek and complain. But he will not give in. He will take a hammer to his ceiling until the neighbors begin to watch from the window and the journalists knock at the door. He will continue to train and hack away at the house until it is finished and the trapeze is in place. Although his parents thought he was nice and kindhearted and teachers saw him as a good boy, secretly he hated his drab, ordered world and longed for more.

Keith Corcoran has spent his entire life preparing to be an astronaut. At the moment of his greatness, finally aboard the International Space Station, hundreds of miles above the Earth’s swirling blue surface, he receives word that his 16-year-old daughter has died in a car accident, and that his wife has left him. Returning to Earth, and to his now empty suburban home, he is alone with the ghosts, the memories, and feelings he can barely acknowledge, let alone process.

Every day Mathilde takes the Metro, then the commuter train, to the office of a large multi-national where she works in the marketing department. Every day, the same routine, the same trains. But something happened a while ago - she dared to voice a different opinion from her moody boss, Jacques. Bit by bit she finds herself frozen out of everything, with no work to do.

It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog, is launched into space, Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber's wife, finds herself oddly obsessing about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey "Teddy" O'Neill is returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with Brylcreem in his hair and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming-of-age in Skegness, England. Father Augustus Hand is working on a bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows will put Cullymore on the map.

Glory Vigil, newly married, unexpectedly pregnant at 41, is nesting in the home she and her husband, Joseph, have just moved to in Santa Fe, a house that unbeknownst to them is rumored to have a resident ghost. Their adopted daughter, Juniper, is home from college for Thanksgiving and in love for the very first time, quickly learning how a relationship changes everything. But Juniper has a tiny arrow lodged in her heart, a leftover shard from the day eight years earlier when her sister, Casey, disappeared - in a time before she'd ever met Glory and Joseph.

It is December; Christmas is approaching and the magic of one of Europe’s most beautiful cities beckons. A father looks for himself in the past, struggling to deal with a recent divorce, his teenage son in tow. A single, selfless mother accompanies her only daughter and friends for a weekend-long bachelorette party. And a husband treats his wife to a birthday weekend away, somehow heightening her anxieties and insecurities about age, desire, and motherhood.

In the winter of 1976, Simon Cardoso is arrested by the military and is never seen again. Thirty years later, Emilia Dupuy, his wife, is stunned to find him in New Jersey. Her world, which had crumbled after losing him, is alight with life again. There is a caveat, however: for Simn Cardoso time stopped when he disappeared. Using this enigma as the foundation, Tomas Eloy Martinez' story of the anguish of a lost and recovered love is masterfully tied to the sinister sense of unreality created by a regime.

The acclaimed and endlessly entertaining novel about a Navy pilot, based on real events from the author’s life. Vinny Vesta, the hero of Mafia Summer, returns as a dashing Navy pilot in Fighter Squadron 176 in the late 1950s, living a glorious bachelor’s life. But a torrid affair with his copilot’s widow, Kat Pennington, pulls him away from his beloved all-night revels - and back into the family business. As Kat’s mafioso father tries to poison her new relationship, Vinny finds himself at the heart of a major Mafia feud.

Matt, Daniel and Paul were childhood friends. Now in their 30s, they've lost touch and have only one thing in common: their mothers. Little do they know that, having spent a cardless Mother's Day discussing how their emotionally dysfunctional offspring should be settling down, Carol, Gillian and Helen have decided to pay their wayward sons a visit. On the same day, they turn up on their sons' doorsteps, uninvited and unannounced. Their plan is to reestablish the mother-son bond by moving in for one week. Just a week. Surely that's not a lot to ask....

The seductive story of a dangerous love triangle, inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core. In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country's paranoia about Russian spies.

The building was once home to families, friends, children, couples, love, life. Now almost every flat is empty, the inhabitants forced out by developers. Only a few of the inhabitants have fought back. And they have been joined by passionate student protestor and would-be journalist Ella, who is leading a high-profile media campaign to protect those who refuse to leave. But Ella is in trouble. Because now there are more than six people in the building, but one of them is lying in a lift shaft with a broken neck....

John Lock has come to India to meet his destiny: a destiny dressed in a white karate suit and sporting an impressive moustache. He has fled the quiet desperation of his life in England: decades wasted in a meaningless job, a marriage foundering in the wake of loss, and a terrible secret he cannot bear to share with his wife. He has come to offer his help to a man who has learned to conquer pain, a world record breaker who specializes in feats of extreme endurance and ill-advised masochism.