Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in World Literature

In vivid, poetic prose, Nancy Kricorian’s The Burning Heart of the World tells the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during, and after the Lebanese Civil War. Returning to the fabular tone of Zabelle, her popular first novel, Kricorian conjures up the lost worlds and intergenerational traumas that haunt a family in permanent exile. Leavened with humor and imbued with the timelessness of a folktale, The Burning Heart of the World is a sweeping saga that takes listeners on an epic journey from the mountains of Cilicia to contemporary New York City.

A grieving Hector Peterson and his estranged father Winston Telemacque arrive on the lush island of Dominica in 2017 to spread his mother’s ashes when Hurricane Maria strikes. Amid the devastation, the fragile peace between father and son is tested as long-buried family secrets at the heart of Hector’s identity are unearthed. Hector faces down his failed marriage, shipwrecked career, and his own failures as a father, while Winston, after three decades of striving as an immigrant in Boston, seeks to reclaim the losses from a painful childhood and the bloody betrayal by his one true love.

"Where does all the grief go when it's not tugging at your wrist?" Enyegue's debut collection is an ode to girlhood, to Blackness, to generational trauma, sexual assault, and mental health. This collection does not aim to heal anyone who listens to it, but instead help them confront their own healing. Rather than sugar-coated bullets that enter you lightly, these poems are designed to hurt.

Hans van Rooyen is a former police general raised by two women who survived the 1899 South African War. He finds himself being cared for in an old age home by the daughter of liberation struggle activists. At 80, he carries with him the memories of crimes he committed as an officer under the apartheid government. Having eluded the public confessions at the TRC for his time in the Border Wars, he retained his position in the democratic South Africa, serving as an institutional memory for a new generation of police recruits.

Rich with authentic detail and insight, these compelling stories sweep the listener along on an intimate, uniquely Jewish journey from 1974 through the first decade of the new millennium as the characters wrestle with identity, independence, ambition, sexuality, faith, and love.

When news of her grandfather’s stroke sends Jo Beth Ellis back to the family farm, she finds it in danger of foreclosure. Lone Oaks Crossing is in rough shape, but Jo has big plans—she’ll use her expertise as a Derby-winning horse trainer to reinvent the property as a healing retreat. But renovating while trying to keep her independent grandfather in check is a huge job for one woman—and even more challenging when she receives her first client, the unruly fourteen-year-old Cheyenne, who is determined to do anything but cooperate.

As a late spring blizzard brews, Father Christopher, a cloistered monk at Blue Mountain Monastery in Vermont, rushes to tend to his Ida Red and Northern Spy apple trees in advance of the unseasonal storm. When snow brings a young Somali refugee, Sahro Abdi Muse, to the monastery, Christopher is pulled back into the world and their lives intersect in surprising and illuminating ways. North traces the epic journey of Sahro from her home in Somalia throughout the Americas until her last attempt to cross into safety in Canada.

When Aden’s 8-year-old daughter asks him this one morning in Paris, he is taken aback. The question is innocent, but the answer is not so simple. Unable to resist Béa’s inquisitive spirit, he moves silkily between memories of his childhood: from his silent, mysterious mother and the shanty roofs of his neighborhood to the malicious attack that changed his life forever and the ensuing struggle that made him a man.

Moving from small Philippine villages of the past to the hurricane-beaten coast of near-future Florida, When the Hibiscus Falls examines the triumphs and sorrows that connect generations of women. Daughters, sisters, mothers, aunties, cousins, and lolas commune with their ancestors and their descendants, mourning what is lost when an older generation dies, celebrating what is gained when we safeguard their legacy for those who come after us.

In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire

Since childhood, identical twins Leona and Fiona Dunbar have been getting in—and out—of trouble by pretending to be each other. Yet underneath, they couldn’t be more different. Outspoken Leona lives to break rules, have a good time, and scandalize their respectable hometown of Lexington. Fiona is a seemingly demure churchgoing girl who is the apple of her domineering, widowed mother Mavis’s eye. But together, the twins have fooled teachers, boyfriends, bosses, racist police—and most importantly, straitlaced Mavis.

When Edie Gardner's life in New York falls apart, her grandmother Adele "Punk" Cheramie coaxes her back to tiny Bayou du Chêne, Mississippi. Edie spent many happy summers there, a stone's throw from untamed Horn Island, where she once found love. Can she now demystify the island's strange new light?

In a world where love and duty collide, Florence finds herself wedded young to a stern man, her life a silent testament to obedience and sacrifice. Cast out into the cold from seeking solace in forbidden arms, she faces her exile with the weight of a shattered family—one son by her side, the other left behind in the grip of her unforgiving husband. With doors shut firmly by those she once called family and the church that promised sanctuary, Florence embarks on a humble journey as a nurse.

Freedom fighter, brilliant businessperson, devoted wife, master of languages, and ultimately, savior of a European dynasty. Claudia Patterson would become all of these—spurred on by the fiercely powerful loves and losses along the way … Denny Clark. An abused thirteen-year-old White boy whose life twelve-year-old Claudia saves—complicating her own life for years to come.

Emilia and Gregorio spent their childhood following their grandmother through the mountains of central México, gathering the ingredients she used for curandera work and learning about the supernatural world. When she passes away, the siblings are left alone. So they scrape together their money and pay coyotes to smuggle them to their father in the United States. The siblings are exhausted before they even reach the border, where the coyotes seize Emilia for their own harsh ends.

The story is about three women, one of them has mental illness; they are just girls that were growing up in a typical Yoruba family. There is a kind of loss involved so they were moved around among relatives as house-helps to take care of the children. I’m following the journey of these three women.

In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them.