Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Magical Realism

Fearless Queen Sigrid wants her twin children to fulfill their destinies: her son, Olaf, to become heir to the kingdom of Svealand, and her gifted daughter, Estrid, to secure passage to the underworld as she is promised to Hel, the Norse goddess of death. But Olaf's ascension to the throne depends on Sigrid's former husband, King Erik the Victorious, who despises her and suspects the twins are not his but Sweyn Forkbeard's, Denmark's exiled king.

On the highest point of an island, in a house clinging to the edge of a cliff, live Mary Rose and Harold Grapes, a retired couple still mourning the death of their son thirty-five years before. Weighed down by decades of grief and memories, the Grapeses have never moved past the tragedy. Then they’re uprooted by a violent storm. The disbelieving Grapeses and their home take a free-fall slide into the white-capped sea and float away. As the past that once moored them recedes and disappears, Mary Rose and Harold are delivered from decades of sorrow by the ebb and flow of the waves.

After her husband’s infidelity, devastated Katrine Blackthorn reluctantly returns to Faith Falls, Minnesota, to her family’s Queen Anne mansion on the hill and the magic that binds them all. Her grandmother Velda charms everyone she meets. Her mother, Ursula, is a brewer of potions who sees a threat around every corner. And there’s her estranged sister, Jasmine, broken by something no one will name. With Katrine’s return, all that the Blackthorns have feared seems to be manifesting.

Elliot West has built her brand on rejecting love. On her hit radio show, she trashes fairy-tale endings and insists happily ever afters are nothing more than a marketing ploy. Cynicism sells, and for Elliot, it’s paid off big-time. But when a mysterious tarot card reader casts a spell on her, Elliot laughs it off…until she wakes up the next morning in a life she doesn’t recognize. Leo, her summer fling, is suddenly her boyfriend, as if they never said goodbye.

Med school dropout Harlan Winter returns to his impoverished West Virginia hometown, where the law is scarce, arsonists are turning everything to ash, and his family’s turbulent history lingers. All he wants is to keep the peace in a community cowering from the Lighthouse, a local cult preying on people’s fears. Harlan’s own fears, too, when he’s hired to play detective and find a young couple gone missing.

It’s been two years since Celine lost her daughter Libby. Desperate to escape her grief, Celine throws herself into her work, determined to be the strong, capable woman the world believes her to be. But there’s no fooling her family. A shocking intervention brings an impossible choice: confront her grief or risk losing the family she still has. Reeling, Celine wonders what her life would have been like if she’d chosen her first love instead of her husband and avoided this pain altogether.

After the sudden death of her husband, Hope finds herself reeling from the loss in more ways than one. First a young wife and now a grieving widow, she feels like fodder for never-ending town gossip. But when Hope meets Will, a screenwriter back in town to run his family’s inn, she sees in him another resident oddball. And like her, Will has been navigating a loss of his own.

30-year-old Bronwyn Artair, feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist, much to the dismay of her mentor, Diane Fenwick. After a year of living alone in Southern New Hampshire, enduring the indignities of her job, dumped by her boyfriend, she discovers her deep connection to the natural world has given her an ability to affect natural forces. When she finally accepts she really possesses this startling capability, she must then negotiate a new relationship to the world. Who will she tell?

It was supposed to be a fresh start for eighteen-year-old Devon Grace and her father, but fate had other, darker plans. The Appalachian town of Millicent, Ohio, is poor and forgotten by the world - the perfect setting for a disgraced cop and his artistic "misfit" daughter to regroup after a tragic mistake upends their lives. Trouble is, the young men of Millicent are disappearing, including Devon's sole confidant and first love.

Orphaned into an unforgiving foster home and raised as an outsider, Weird-Eye shoulders her unflattering nickname. She relies on her vivid imagination to sustain her work as a midwife bringing newborns into the world while World War II overruns her native Finland, desecrating life. She finds herself drawn to the handsome, otherworldly Johannes Angelhurst, a war photographer working for the SS.

When Dom bumps into Mia, his ex-fiancée whom he hasn't seen in almost a decade, he believes they've been given a second chance and asks her out. When Mia dies tragically on their date, Dom makes a desperate wish: to be given the chance to save her life. And when he wakes the next morning to the shock that she's alive, he thinks his wish may have been granted. But day after day, no matter what he changes about their time together, she still meets a terrible fate.

In this visionary novel framed as a hagiography, the ruminative, subjective memories of Gabriel’s witnesses - spiritual, familial, romantic, and political - converge to make sense of the man’s confounding works and message. As they do, a surprising portrait develops...not only of the deepening mystery of Gabriel Romero himself but also of a country in conflict and the faith it takes to fight the suspicion and fear that divide us.

In a small Georgia town, Nelle’s life has been carefully scripted by her creator and captor, the reclusive author Wallace Quill. Born from ink and imagination, every breath she takes is dictated by his pen. But on a star-studded Fourth of July night, she meets James—a young man with dreams as vivid as the fireworks above them—and suddenly, the unwritten becomes possible.

Tenochtitlan, 1551. Thirty years after the Spanish Conquest destroyed everything she loved, the last Aztec empress has passed and left behind a pristine yet tenuous legacy for her children. As her last will and testament is read out, her daughter Isabel suspects that another account of her mother’s life may exist, hidden away, chapter by chapter, in the Valley of Mexico. Following each clue, Isabel is determined to find out who her mother really was and to discover the secrets she buried in order to survive.

Nora, Daisy, and Soraya think their marriages are just fine. Until their husbands prove them wrong. Nora’s says he needs distance and flits off to a wellness retreat in Chile. Daisy’s confesses to an affair with someone younger. And Soraya’s sends her a pic of that special part of himself—meant for another woman. At a loss for what to do, they follow their intuition right into Lady’s Mantle Apothecary.

Winner of the Icelandic Literary Prize, A Fist or a Heart is a gripping, artfully interwoven novel of power, secrets, and isolation by one of the most bracing and original voices of the author’s generation.

At Naysay Inc., rising star Megan’s job is to whisper negative thoughts straight into the minds of clients in the Real World. It’s all in a day’s dirty work in Naysayland, the parallel reality where your negativity is manufactured and self-doubt is a commodity. But when she is assigned to sabotage a romance between lifestyle influencer Lily and author Jasper, Megan’s carefully constructed reality begins to unravel. The project teams her with Ben, the smug but cute whisperer in the next cubicle.

Harlan Winter has returned to his corner of Appalachia, where his fiery history with a depraved cult has made him a legend. All Harlan wants is to run his occult bookshop and get on with his life—if only his unsettling visions would let him. But when a fellow devotee of the dark arts moves to Coopersville and Harlan’s coveted grimoire is stolen, he’s pulled into a world deadlier than the one that already scarred his soul.

In Jos, Nigeria, Dareng Pamson is slowly winning back the trust of his pregnant wife after his infidelity shook their marriage. When a young Muslim woman comes in out of the rain looking for work in Dareng’s auto repair shop, Dareng cautiously agrees—against his better judgment. She’s passionate and willing to learn. Besides, it’s time he started doing things differently. After being back in her hometown for only a week, Murmula Denge finds who she’s looking for: Dareng, the Christian man whose coldhearted ambition and greed shattered her family.

Cutthroat NYC lawyer Mary Whelton just buried her problematic old mentor. But as she leaves the mourners and protesters behind, the press stays hot on her heels. Desperate to escape, she unwittingly barrels deep into a remote forest in upstate New York. Until a collision—with a buzzing, oozing throng of cicadas—stops her dead in her tracks. She awakens in a crude cabin, held captive by Girl, a simple, hulking woman who mistakes Mary for her derelict mother and obsesses over a mysterious Brood.