Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Literary Fiction

Eine beschauliches südfranzösisches Dorf ist in Aufruhr: Der prachtvolle alte Baum auf dem Marktplatz soll gefällt werden. Wo, wenn nicht in seinem wohltuenden Schatten wird die Barbesitzerin Suzanne Pastis servieren, wo Manu Artischocken verkaufen? Der junge Clément liebt es, in den Ästen zu klettern, und die Schwestern Suzanne und Adeline tröstet in ihrem Kummer über verflossene Träume und alte Lieben nichts so sehr wie der Anblick der Blätter, die sich seit ihrer Kindheit im Sommerwind wiegen. Widerstand formiert sich.

In Domenica Ruta’s profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise - and to celebrate as if the day is truly its last. On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. With sparkling wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination, Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears.

King of the Mississippi is an incisive, uproarious dissection of contemporary male vanity and delusion, centered around a "war" for dominance of a prestigious Houston consulting firm. On one side of the conflict is Brock Wharton, an old money ex-jock whose delight in telling clients to downsize is matched only by his firm conviction that people like himself deserve to run the world. On the other is Mike Fink, a newly hired wily former soldier trying to ride his veteran status to the top of a corporate world that lionizes "the troops" without truly understanding them.

From one of China’s most famous contemporary writers, here is a stunning collection of stories, selected from the best of Yu Hua’s early work, that shows his far-reaching influence on a pivotal period in Chinese literature. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yu Hua and other young Chinese writers began to reimagine their national literature. Departing from conventional realism in favor of a more surreal and subjective approach inspired by Kafka, Faulkner, and Borges, the boundary-pushing fiction of this period reflected the cultural changes sweeping the world’s most populous nation.

Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella's story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation.

Reeling from a breakup with his almost fiancée, the narrator of Andrew Palmer’s debut novel returns to his hometown in Iowa to house-sit for a family friend. There, a chance flick of the TV remote and a new correspondence with an old friend plunge him into unlikely twin obsessions: the reality show The Bachelor and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Berryman. As his heart begins to mend, his fascination with each deepens, and somewhere along the way, representations of reality become harder and harder to distinguish from real life.

In 1942, Friedrich, an even-keeled but unworldly young man, arrives in Berlin from bucolic Switzerland with dreams of becoming an artist. At a life drawing class, he is hypnotized by the beautiful model, Kristin, who soon becomes his energetic yet enigmatic guide to the bustling and cosmopolitan city. The war feels far away to Friedrich, who falls in love with Kristin as they spend time together in his rooms at the Grand Hotel, but as the months pass, the mood in the city darkens as the Nazis tighten their hold on Berlin, terrorizing any who are deemed foes of the Reich.

It’s the summer of 2019, and Professor Pi Suleman is a Black man from Memphis with a lot to endure - not only as a Black man in Trump’s America but in his hard-earned career as an adjunct professor. Pi is constantly forced to bite his tongue in the face of one of his tenured colleague’s prejudices and microaggressions. At the same time, he’s being blackmailed by a powerful professor who threatens to claim he has assaulted her, when in fact the truth is just the opposite, trapping him in a he-said-she-said with a white woman that, in this society, Pi knows he will never win.

Dr. Jessie Drake, in her mid-60s, following the sudden deaths of her parents and Kat, her partner of 20 years, has fled the Vermont life she has known for decades. In an effort to escape the oppressive constancy of grief, she accepts a job from an old flame from her residency in New York City's Roosevelt Hospital and agrees to assist Ben as the ship's doctor on a British liner.

1957, Clayton Valley, Ohio. Ellie has the best grades in her class. Her dream is to go to nursing school and marry Brick McGinty. A basketball star, Brick has the chance to escape his abusive father and become the first person in his blue-collar family to attend college. But when Ellie learns that she is pregnant, everything changes. Just as Brick and Ellie revise their plans and build a family, a knock on the front door threatens to destroy their lives.

Octavian Munroe is haunted by the life and death of his older brother in one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Mina Rose has never quite fit in and wishes she was anything but white. Once lovers, now estranged, they both left St. Louis for fresh starts in the wake of grief and heartbreak. Octavian and Mina travel homeward in the aftermath of Michael Brown's death and the awakening of the Black Lives Matter movement. In search of answers, they seek out the music that once gave their hearts a steady beat and their lives a sense of direction.

In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.

When Lucien flees Haiti with his wife, Marie-Ange, and their three children to New York City’s South Ozone Park, he does so hoping for reinvention, wealth, and comfort. He buys a run-down house in a quickly changing community, and begins life anew. Lucien and Marie-Ange call their home La Kay—“my mother’s house”—and it becomes a place where their fellow immigrants can find peace, a good meal, and necessary legal help.

The three Brennan siblings are well on their way in the world. Samantha, the youngest, is a ballerina who recently joined the ranks of a Russian dance company; her brother Jonah is a grad student studying elephants in the rain forest of Gabon; and the eldest, Gavin, has stayed closer to home, living in Los Angeles and acting in a television series. But as the holidays draw near, all three find themselves in profoundly troubling, though distinctly different, predicaments.

This classic novel and winner of the Pulitzer Prize tells the story of an Italian-American major in World War II who wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700-year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists. Although stituated during one of the most devastating experiences in human history, John Hersey's story speaks with unflinching patriotism and humanity.

When Kate Quaile meets Max Rippon in the first week of university, so begins a life-changing friendship. Over the next four years, the two become inseparable. For him, she breaks her solitude; for her, he leaves his busy circles behind. But knowing Max means knowing his family: the wealthy Rippons, all generosity, social ease, and quiet repression. Theirs is a very different world from Kate’s own upbringing, and yet she finds herself quickly drawn into their gilded lives, and the secrets that lie beneath.

Meet the members of the Sunset Club: Pandit Preetam Sharma, Nawab Barkatullah Baig, and Sardar Boota Singh. Friends for over 40 years, they are now in their 80s. And every evening, at the sunset hour, they sit together on a bench in Lodhi Gardens to exchange news and views on the events of the day, talking about everything from love, lust, sex, and scandal to religion and politics. As he follows a year in the lives of the three men - from January 26, 2009, to January 26, 2010 - Khushwant Singh brings his characters vibrantly to life.

Ib lives with his schizophrenic father and his "nice" mother negotiating life, not knowing what to do, steered by uncaring winds and pushy people. From his slimy, unmiraculous birth to the tragic death of a loved one, Ib wanders the city, from one thing to another, confused, lost, and alone, all the while reflecting on his predicament. He is searching for something - what he does not know - and must overcome many obstacles: family, religion, love, and finally, death. Will he be defeated by "this wreckage of modern life?" Will a mysterious woman lift him out of the "cement" in his soul?

In a crumbling neighborhood in New Delhi, a child waits for a mother to return home from work. And, in parallel, in a snow-swept town in Germany on the Baltic Sea coast a woman, her memory fading, shows up at a deserted hotel. Worlds apart, both embark, in the course of that night, on harrowing journeys through the lost and the missing, the living and the dead, until they meet in an ending that breaks the heart - and holds the promise of putting it back together again.

Ein literarisches Meisterwerk von der Wucht eines Kazuo Ishiguro und Haruki Murakami. In einem alternativen England, 1979. Die Drillinge Vincent, Lawrence und William wachsen in einem Heim für Waisen auf. Das alte Herrenhaus ist abgelegen und weitläufig, die Jungen erhalten Privatunterricht und es fehlt ihnen scheinbar an nichts. Doch warum dürfen sie keinen Kontakt zu Kindern außerhalb des Heims haben? Warum müssen sie täglich eine besondere Pille schlucken? Und warum träumen alle drei regelmäßig von einem kleinen Mädchen in einem dunklen Wald?