Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Coming of Age

It doesn’t take long for ambitious freshman and aspiring engineer Jessie Ahuja to learn about two university legends. One is the haunted history of Davidson Tower, where more than fifty years ago, two ill-fated lovers disappeared in a devastating fire. The other is Ravi Kumar, a privileged billionaire nepo baby who’s aggravatingly charming and occupying more brain space than Jessie has room for. Things change when a campus prank locks them both in the old tower’s ghostly library.

It’s 1967 in the Chagos Archipelago—a group of atolls in the Indian Ocean—and life is peaceful and easy for hardworking Marie. Her fierce independence and love for her home are quickly apparent to Gabriel, the handsome and sophisticated Mauritian secretary to the archipelago’s administrator; it’s love at first sight. As these two lovers from neighboring islands welcome a new son, Joséphin, a bright future seems possible. But Gabriel is hiding a terrible secret.

Lucien has everything he needs: a loving mama, a library full of books, and House of Earth, a private school nestled safely in the woods of upstate New York. It’s where Lucien is taught the importance of living in harmony with nature and building a peaceful and sustainable future. But when his youthful curiosity draws him into town and to Gabrielle, a public-school student living a life wholly different from his own, Lucien’s inquisitiveness about life beyond the commune and questions regarding the events of 9/11 threaten to unbalance everything he thought he knew.

After a long and trying journey from her home, Hannah arrives at a charming village nestled in the foothills of the Swabian Mountains, eager to find Helmut Kerner, a traveling seed merchant she loved and lost. Enchanted by the glorious wildflowers and thriving harvests stretching as far as the eye can see, Hannah feels less like an outsider with each passing hour, until she meets Seraphine, an ethereally beautiful dreamer engaged to be married to Helmut, the father of Hannah's unborn child.

Twenty-year-old Abigail Turner has only known her mother, Claire - who died shortly after she was born - through letters, videos, postcards, and journals. Abby's father, Josh, has raised his precious daughter himself, but his overprotectiveness has become stifling. Abby longs to forge out on her own and see the world after a childhood trapped indoors: she suffers from bronchopulmonary dysplasia, which means a case of the sniffles can rapidly escalate into life-threatening pneumonia.

When Tom's girlfriend walks out on him the day before Christmas, he feels humiliated but not necessarily heartbroken. Sadie wasn't, after all, The One. If we're being precise, she was number 85. And so, for reasons that are only mostly wrong, Tom embarks on a mission to bring his number of encounters up to a nice neat 100. Over the course of his quest he sleeps with a colleague, a colleague of a friend, a friend of a friend, a friend of a friend's wife, the estate agent selling his flat, and several more besides.

London, 2012. With her adoring fiancé, financial independence and a close-knit group of friends, Erika should have life all figured out - but she can’t shake the feeling that there’s something missing. And when she stumbles upon a reminder of her past one day, she’s confronted with a part of her life she’s spent almost twenty years trying to forget. 1995. Smart, tenacious Niamh is in her second year at Oxford University. Unlike her best friend Erika, she’s shy and feels like she doesn’t belong....

From the moment Henry Porcher first sees Ilsa Brandes, he worships her. Despite controversy surrounding the young girl, Henry is drawn to her, a fascination that turns into a lifelong infatuation. As the years pass, Ilsa’s memory never leaves him, not until the day he returns to their sleepy Southern hometown and renews their childhood friendship. Henry watches as she becomes a wife, then a mother, then a widow, irrevocably changed by tragedy. This rare and sought-after novel is a portrait of a remarkable woman bound by both the stifling conventions of her time and place, and her own sense of honor and purpose.

In the winter of 1941-1942, Leningrad is under siege, and Karen Hamilton, a seventeen-year-old American musician, finds herself trapped and struggling to survive. Throughout the city, people are dying of starvation and frostbite, and Karen knows that if she doesn't escape immediately, she will share their fate. If she has any hope of leaving Russia and reuniting with her fiancé, Bobby, in New York, she must do the impossible: cross enemy lines and then stow away.

Symphony Nelson has weathered more than her share of hardships - in part thanks to the faithfulness and affection of her adopted puppy, Toby. Her formerly chaotic life seems to be settling down, until a peaceful walk in the woods leads Symphony and Toby to the reclusive cabin of Caleb Showalter, who knows more about her past than he's telling.

Agnes Hussein, descendant of the last sultan of Singapore and the last surviving member of her immediate family, has grown up among her eccentric relatives in the crumbling Kampong Glam palace, a once-opulent relic given to her family in exchange for handing over Singapore to the British. Now Agnes is seventeen and her family has fallen into genteel poverty, surviving on her grandfather’s pension and the meager income they receive from a varied cast of boarders.

On the hot Texas army base she calls home, Katie spends the lazy days of her summer waiting: waiting to grow up; waiting for Dickie Mack to fall in love with her; waiting for her breasts to blossom; waiting for the beatings to stop. Since their mother died, Katie and her older sister, Diane, have struggled to understand their increasingly distant, often violent father. While Diane escapes into the arms of her boyfriend, Katie hides in her room or escapes to her best friend’s house - until Katie’s admiration for her strong-willed sister leads her on an adventure that transforms her life.

When childhood friend Victoria rejects his love, Jeremy takes his life on his 20th birthday.

On his 21st birthday, he wakes to find Victoria holding his hand, blissfully in love with him. Jeremy can’t remember the previous year, but he savors the miracle of waking up alongside the woman he loves. The next time he wakes, two years have passed and Jeremy is now a spectator of his own life. Victoria has given him a child, but the man alongside her is a cruel, egotistical, seemingly unknowable Jeremy. Is it amnesia? Insanity? Or has Jeremy been cursed for his selfish, destructive act?

At thirteen, William Sheppard was sent to the Swope Ranch Boys’ Reformatory for stabbing his abusive father in the chest with a pocketknife. Buried deep in the Colorado Mountains, Swope is shrouded in legend and defined by one prevailing rumor: the boys who go in never come out the same. Days from civilization with only one accessible road - any prisoner who attempts to escape will be shot down without hesitation.

In the midst of the first Gulf War, a young Iraqi girl huddles with her neighbours in an air raid shelter. There, she meets Nadia. The two girls quickly become best friends and together they imagine a world not torn apart by civil war, sharing their dreams, their hopes and their desires, and their first loves. But as they grow older and the bombs continue to fall, the international sanctions bite and friends begin to flee the country, the girls must face the fact that their lives will never be the same again.

Named after the first man at the creation of the world in Malagasy mythology, Ietsy Razak was raised to perpetuate the glory of his namesake and expected to be as illuminated as his Great Ancestor. But in the chaos of modernity, his young life is marked only by restlessness, maddening insomnia, and an adolescent apathy.

Kendall Jordan knows she doesn’t need an elaborate wedding with a Vera Wang dress and a three-tiered cake. All she needs is the love of her life, the hot and romantic Cruise Elton. But she’s been dreaming of a picture-perfect wedding since childhood, and so with her finances in peril and a rock band squatting in the Elton B and B Kendall must take extreme measures. She decides to pen a book about the kinky sexcapades of one Penny Whoredon and one Cruz Belton, but in order to do the writing justice she’ll need to conduct some sexy research with the love of her life.

Fifteen years ago, Berta fled from Madrid to London to escape the controlling mother who made her childhood a living nightmare. Now, following her mother’s death, she is forced to return and face the ghosts of her unhappy past. But it is not long before she discovers that her own bleak memories are nothing compared to the dark deception lurking in her family. How did her sister’s loveless marriage really end? And is the loyal housekeeper really hiding the truth about the strange disappearance of Berta’s father?

Frances believes she’s found a ticket to paradise when a wealthy couple hires her for the summer as their mother’s helper at their lakefront summer home in Maine. The vintage wooden boats, days at the country club, a shiny new bicycle and a tennis racquet—suddenly Frances has everything her modest childhood lacked. Best of all, she gets to spend the summer with Forrest Emerson, her father's charismatic childhood friend who escaped their neighborhood when he married into money.

Sara and Mia are more than just mother and daughter—they’re best friends, confidantes and partners in adventure. Mia’s dad’s identity may still be a mystery, but Mia’s independent, adventurous mum has more than made up for it over the years. So when Sara suggests a sun-soaked escape to Kos, the stunning Greek island shaped by volcanic forces, Mia jumps at the chance for their perfect summer getaway.