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

Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees writing on the body of everyone she meets - names, dates, details both banal and profound - and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see her name on his cheek. He's in Paris for the summer, studying a medieval pilgrimage to the rocky coast of Spain, where the body of Saint Jacques was said to have washed ashore, covered in scallop shells.

When Skip Granger, the assistant coach for the Washington Redskins, first sees Jesse Smoke, she is on the beach in Belize. And she has just thrown a regulation football a mile. Granger knows that Smoke's talent is unprecedented for a woman and nearly unparalleled among men.

On a searing summer Friday, Eddie Chapman has been stuck for hours in a traffic jam. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car and run home, he sees that the trees along the edge of a stream have been burnt, and the water in the streambed is gone. Something is very wrong. When he arrives home, the power is out, and there is no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, have gone dry.

Ellie Taber's final year at university is hurtling to a close at alarming speed. Defeated by her philosophy dissertation and uncertain as to why she can't quite commit to her faultlessly supportive boyfriend, she is disenchanted with university life. Charlie, on the other hand, is determined to use his final year to become the man he was always meant to be. He plans to play the field, do just enough work to secure his degree, finally develop his brilliant business idea and basically have an awesome time. They are both in for a surprise.

Jerusalem, 1920: in an already fractured city, 11-year-old Prudence feels the tension rising as her architect father launches an ambitious and wildly eccentric plan to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert. Prue, known as the 'little witness', eavesdrops underneath the tables of tearooms and behind the curtains of the dance halls of the city's elite, watching everything but rarely being watched herself.

Charlie, a curious boy with a dangerous Dictaphone habit, eavesdrops on the eccentric guests of the Mirage Hotel as the African nation of Bwalo prepares for the annual appearance of its Glorious Leader Tafumo. Sean, an Irishman who's given his heart (and the best part of his liver) to Bwalo, struggles to write the great African novel - if only his crazed fiancée and fierce thirst would stop distracting him.

Renuka Sharma is a dutiful wife, mother, and daughter-in-law holding the fort in a modest rental in Delhi while her husband tries to rack up savings in Dubai. Working as a receptionist and committed to finding a place for her family in the new Indian dream of air-conditioned malls and high-paid jobs at multinationals, life is going as planned until the day she strikes up a conversation with an uncommonly self-possessed stranger at a Metro station.

Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight. Searching for his own lover in the midst of this turmoil is Jaz - cocky, handsome, and glib.

Us Conductors is the story of the man who created the most magical musical instrument in the world, the theremin. It's a tale of electricity and espionage, jazz and kung-fu, Harlem and Siberia, and the way even doomed love can keep you alive. Locked in a cabin aboard a ship bearing him back to Russia and away from the love of his life, Lev Sergeyvich Termen begins to type his story: a tale of electricity, romance, and the invention of the world's strangest instrument, the theremin.

In a lush meadow, bounded by dense forest and a sparkling river, the flags of several tents flutter in the breeze, rich with the promise of halcyon days. Yet all is not as tranquil as it may seem: The balance of power wrought between the occupants of The Great Field, as it is properly known, is a delicate one, and relationships are stretched to breaking point when a new, large and disciplined group offers to share its surplus of milk pudding.

A Colombian writer is witness to a murder that will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman's bed 20 kilometers away. Through blood-soaked betrayal, a love affair, murder, and long-meditated revenge, Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality, and landscape with these fragmented lives.

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.

In the beautiful, barren landscape of the Far North, under the ever-present midnight sun, Frances and Yasha are surprised to find refuge in each other. Their lives have been upended - Frances has fled heartbreak and claustrophobic Manhattan for an isolated artist colony; Yasha arrives from Brooklyn to fulfill his beloved father's last wish: to be buried "at the top of the world. They have come to learn how to be alone.

In a boxy apartment building in an Illinois university town, Romola Mitra, a newly arrived young bride, anxiously awaits her first letter from home in India. When she accidentally opens the wrong letter, it changes her life. Decades later, her son Amit finds that letter and thinks he has discovered his mother's secret. But secrets have their own secrets sometimes.

Danger has followed the lawyer Spike Sanguinetti back to Gibraltar. The disturbing question of what happened to Spike's girlfriend, Zahra, is still unanswered. He hasn't heard from her since she vanished in Malta months ago, when suddenly his phone rings. It's Zahra, but she sounds strange. She tells him that he has to stop looking for her and that if he doesn’t, Žigon will come after those closest to him.

Bobby Hale is a Union veteran several times over. After the war, he sets his sights on California, but only makes it to Montana. As he stumbles around the West, from the Wyoming Territory to the Black Hills of the Dakotas, he finds meaning in the people he meets - settlers and native people - and the violent history he both participates in and witnesses.

James Dwyer was born in rural county Limerick before moving to Dublin as a teenager and ultimately settling in Ann Arbor. One night James’ past appears in the form of a down-and-out man named Walter, who issues an invitation for James to come to Upstate New York to visit his old childhood neighbor, Kevin Lyons. Although neither James nor Kevin particularly cares for each other, there’s no denying their complicated past.

Billy's mother is dead. He knows-because he reads about it in magazines-that people die every day in ways that are more random and tragic and stupid than hers, but for nineteen-year-old Billy and his little brother, Oscar, their mother's death in a bungled street robbery is the most random and tragic and stupid thing that could possibly have happened to them.

Nicky has always known Russell was rich, but he has no idea how astronomically rich Russell is until his friend drops dead, on his 50th birthday, in his San Francisco mansion, with Nicky as the only witness. For forty years the two men have kept up their friendship, with Russell's birthday offering him an annual opportunity to remind Nicky of how much more successful Russell is, and how much further he has come since their English suburban childhood.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.