Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Literary Fiction

The day Jingo rode into Tower Creek, the town was busy celebrating its 20th anniversary. The big event of the festival was a high-stakes poker game in Joe Slade's saloon with Wally Rankin holding most of the chips. But it didn't take long for Jingo to figure out why: Rankin was cheating. And it would only take a couple of well-placed bullets to reveal it to the others in the room.

Nathan is a young artist traveling across Europe in search of the emotional fire that has been missing from his work. He's been deemed by his mentors and critics to be technically skillful but uninspired - criticisms he fears to be true. On a Paris street, he witnesses the volatile breakup of a young French woman and her beau. Nathan pursues a meeting with the woman, and it very quickly becomes evident that her provocative charisma and scathing beauty just may conjure the electricity he has been seeking.

In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament, marked by institutionalized oppression, that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, a perverse kind of heroism.

Small-town boys Caleb and Jake Boyd spend their days splitting logs and barely scraping by in the badlands of New Mexico. Caleb, a decorated war hero, wants to put his fighting days behind him, find a decent job, and start a quiet life with his new fiancée. But Jake is always dreaming bigger than he should, and when he stumbles across a large crop of marijuana hidden in the wilderness, he thinks he has finally hit the jackpot.

Richard Lazar is advancing in years but regressing in life. After a career as a literary novelist that has ground to a halt and landed him in a trailer in Phoenix, Richard is surprised to find sudden success publishing a gritty memoir about his service in Vietnam. Sent on a book tour by his publishing house, Richard encounters his biggest (and really only) fan: an awkward, despondent student named Vance with issues of his own - an absentee father, a depressive mother, his own acute shyness.

In the tumultuous aftermath of the Trojan War, a young man battles to save his home and his inheritance. Setting out to find his father, he ends up discovering himself. Telemachus' father, Odysseus, went off to war before he was born...and never came back. Aged 16, Telemachus finds himself abandoned, his father's house overrun with men pursuing his beautiful mother, Penelope, and devouring the family's wealth. Telemachus determines to leave Ithaca, his island home, and find the truth.

The Good Lieutenant literally starts with a bang as an operation led by Lieutenant Emma Fowler of the Twenty-Seventh Infantry Battalion goes spectacularly wrong. Men are dead - one, a young Iraqi, by her hand. Others were soldiers in her platoon. And the signals officer, Dixon Pulowski. Pulowski is another story entirely - Fowler and Pulowski had been lovers since they met at Fort Riley in Kansas.

Lions is set on the High Plains of Colorado, a nearly deserted place steeped in local legends and sparse in population. Built to be a glorious Western "city upon a hill", it was never fit for farming, mining, trading, or any of the illusory sources of wealth its pioneers imagined. The Walkers have been settled on its barren terrain for generations - a simple family in a town otherwise still taken in by stories of bigger, better, brighter.

Grade school teacher and aspiring author Peregrine Long sees a Chinese family on board a ship - in his morning tea. The image inspires him to write the story of this family, but then a woman turns up at his door, claiming that he's writing her family history exactly as it happened. She doesn't like it, but she has one question: What happened to the little boy of the family, her long-lost uncle?

What if a society banished its worst nightmare to the far edge of the solar system, destined to sip dregs of light and struggle for the barest living? What if that life thrived, grew, learned, and became far more than anyone ever expected, yearning to return to the sun? What if it didn't share your moral compass in any way? The Glittering Edge duology describes the clash of forces when an advanced society that has filled a solar system with flesh-and-blood life meets the near-AIs it banished long ago.

As a young man, Gigi Paulo arrives in New York and is immediately drawn to a girl he sees in a bar near Penn Station. Before he can approach her, she is gone. He returns to the bar for weeks in hopes of seeing her again, dreams of her at night, and searches the crowds for her face. Quiet and careful, he is not the type to become obsessed by a stranger. But obsessed he is. Two years later he meets her at a party. Her name is Corrine.

Absenting himself for a brief intimacy with a former girlfriend, Hugh Mcpherson leaves his surfing-obsessed sons on an isolated California beach. When he returns, the 11-year-old twins have vanished. A ferocious riptide has swept Takumi and Hitoshi out to sea, their bodies unrecovered. Devastated by the loss, Hugh and his Japanese wife, Setsuko, divorce. Severing all ties to America, Setsuko returns to Japan to live with her father, Kazuki Ono, a prominent author of mind-bending novels.

Katherine Kelly's mentor says she has the makings of a good reporter, but to be great she must learn to find the emotional core of a story and not hold back in its telling. Then he suggests one last graduate-school assignment: Find someone who has influenced her family, and tell that story. Katherine decides to pursue the only family story that has eluded her all her life: the identity of the father she never knew.

In The Conciliators, the conclusion of the Collectibles trilogy, Preston Wilson's life is once again imploding - this time as headline news, bylined by Katherine Kelly. Under fire thanks to the financial shenanigans of a longtime friend, the CEO finds himself in trouble with the FBI, the Russian Mafia, and his creditors. If he doesn't come up with a plan (and quickly), he could lose everything and find himself, his wife, and his shareholders in prison.

Thomas Hardy's moving story of star-crossed lovers shows human beings at the mercy of forces beyond their control, setting a tragic drama of human passion against a backdrop of space and scientific discovery. Unhappily married, Lady Constantine defies social standards when she falls in love with the youthful and socially inferior Swithin St. Cleeve. In an ancient monument converted into an astronomical observatory, they isolate themselves from society and create their own private universe.

Velveteen Vargas is an 11-year-old from Brooklyn who is granted a summer vacation in the country, courtesy of the nonprofit Fresh Air Fund. Her host family is a couple in upstate New York: Ginger, a failed artist on the fringe of Alcoholics Anonymous; and Paul, an academic who wonders what it will mean to "make a difference" in such a contrived situation.

For patriots like Billy Sinclair, the Iraq War started on 9/11. He is primed to kill in the backwoods of Montana, hunting with his buddy, Pete, under the tutelage of his grandfather, a decorated World War II veteran. When they kill their first deer, Grandpa smears its blood on their faces in honor of Pete's great-great-grandfather, a Sioux scout who corralled the first wild horses bearing the Sinclair brand. A more sublime boyhood is unimaginable, a more tragic adolescence unthinkable.

A woman flees the hospital even as her infant son is breathing his last breaths. An aging construction worker comes to grips with the end of the only life he's ever known. A deadbeat father meets his son for the first time, only to be blindsided by the boy's birth defect. A man steals a corpse in order to give his father the burial he wanted.

Family means safety. Family means protection. Until it doesn't. Eleven-year-old Kate Whitby, the youngest member of her odd family, leads an invisible life. They live in their historic small-town hotel, where she is an expert at keeping everyone's secrets: Her sister's a thief, her great-grandmother isn't as crazy as people think, her mother lives in the past, and her beloved grandfather might have killed his best friend.

It's 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain's northern Basque Country, a place with more secrets than inhabitants. Five years have passed since the kidnapping and murder of a young local politician - a family man and father - and the town's rhythms have almost returned to normal. But in the aftermath of the Atocha train bombings in Madrid, an act of terrorism that rocked the nation and the world, the townspeople want a reckoning of Muriga's own troubled past.