Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in World Literature

When the Germans invade Belgium in 1940, chemistry professor André Sauverin fears the worst. His colleagues believe their social and political positions will protect them during the occupation, but André knows better. He has watched Hitler’s rise to power and knows the Nazis will do anything to destroy their enemies. For the Sauverins are Jews, non-practicing, yes, but that won’t matter to the Germans - or to the Belgians desperate to protect themselves by informing on their neighbors. And so André and his brother Alex take their parents, wives, and children and flee south.

From the outside, Frank and Grace seem to have the perfect family. He’s a loving husband, she’s a devoted wife, and together they have two happy children. But appearances can be deceiving. A strange series of misfortunes has left them reeling: an unexplained break-in, a catastrophic handgun accident, and a bizarre poisoning that’s left Grace feeling especially unnerved. Packing up their RV for a move across the country, they’re ready for a fresh start, expecting to leave all their problems safely behind.

Dead clients are bad for business, something Tom Winter, head of security for a discrete Swiss private bank, knows all too well. After a helicopter explodes, leaving behind the charred bodies of a client and a colleague, he teams up with Fatima, a mysterious Egyptian businesswoman. Together they follow the money trail around the world and back into the Swiss mountains, the NSA watching their every move. When taciturn Winter, a former special forces commander, closes in on the truth, they turn from being the hunters to the hunted and realize they are in a deadly race against the clock.

Private investigator Heredia has many phantoms - and one of his most haunting has come calling. Argentine investigative journalist Fernanda Arredondo, an old flame he loved and lost, needs to see him after saying good-bye years ago. All it takes is a single day for Heredia to lose her again when she’s found dead - an apparent suicide in a lonely hotel room in Santiago. Heredia has more than his instincts to tell him that it was murder.

Oksana Zabuzhko, Ukraine's leading public intellectual, is called upon to make sense of the unthinkable reality of our times. In this breathtaking short story collection, she turns the concept of truth over in her hands like a beautifully crafted pair of gloves. From the triumph of the Orange Revolution, which marked the start of the twenty-first century, to domestic victories in matchmaking, sibling rivalry, and even tennis, Zabuzhko - manages to shock the listener by juxtaposing things as they are.

In "The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s eulogy for all that is buried after World War I, April promises a flowering. But as the world mourns the spirit of a bygone era, what future can emerge from the cold, dead, infertile ground? Doubt and fear grip the narrator, too, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” - a self-examination of an anxious, overeducated man unable to act against feelings of paralyzing impotence.

Immune to the consequences of immorality, five privileged young men in Bogotá bond over a shared code: worship drugs and drink, exploit women, and scorn the underclass. As males, they declare the right to freedom of pleasure. As friends, only disloyalty to each other is forbidden. When a little girl from the slums disappears, the limits of a perverse and sacred bond will be tested in ways none of them could have imagined.

Once upon a time, Melanie Layton and Tennyson O'Rourke were inseparable - but their friends-4ever promises were shattered when an explosive secret was revealed at Mel's wedding, a secret that destroyed her family. The two haven't spoken for the past twenty-some-odd years, and they'd be happy if they never crossed paths again.

2015 World Poetry Slam Champion and Woman of the World co-Champion Emtithal "Emi" Mahmoud presents her hauntingly beautiful debut poetry collection. Brimming with rage, sorrow, and resilience, this collection traverses an expansive terrain: genocide; diaspora; the guilt of surviving; racism and Islamophobia; the burdens of girlhood; the solace of sisterhood; the innocence of a first kiss. Heart-wrenching and raw, defiant and empowering, Sisters’ Entrance explores how to speak the unspeakable.

The body of a young man has been found in the woods outside Newberg, dead from a close-range shotgun blast. The gun - his own - lies beside the body. Certain things don’t add up for Detective Tia Suarez. Where did the fat envelope of cash in his pocket come from? Who called the police to report the body, then disappeared before the cops arrived? The trail leads Tia to an institution for juvenile incarceration and to the leader of a local mega-church, a political and economic powerhouse in the region. Newberg’s mayor and the medical examiner keep trying to close the case.

As the Russians advance into East Prussia, women and children are forced out of their homes to make way for the victorious troops. Their fight for survival is only just beginning. Facing critical food shortages and the onset of a bitterly cold winter, some of the older children, the 'wolf children' secretly cross the border into Lithuania, begging the local farmers for work or food they can take back to their starving families.

Everything seemed possible in the summer of 1951. Back then Betty Stern was an eighteen-year-old knockout working at her grandparents’ lakeside resort. The "Catskills of the Midwest" was the perfect place for Betty to prepare for bigger things. She’d head to college in New York City. Her career as a fashion editor would flourish. But first, she’d enjoy a wondrous last summer at the beach falling deeply in love with an irresistible college boy and competing in the annual Miss South Haven pageant. On the precipice of a well-planned life, Betty’s future was limitless.

Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit.

Juliette has come to Tel Aviv to be with the love of her life. But when she shows up at Elias’s apartment, he’s with another woman. With nowhere else to go, Juliette falls in with a tight-knit group of French expats living in this city by the sea. There’s Manu, the retired adult film star turned real estate agent; Diabolo, a former mobster and aspiring media mogul; and Olga, a head-turning beauty who becomes fast friends with Juliette. When Elias, a film school dropout, initiates a scheme intended to make him some fast cash, he unwittingly gets Juliette and Olga thrown in jail.

As a novelist, Matija makes things up for a living. Not yet thirty, he’s written two well-received books. It’s his third that is as big a failure as his private life. Unable to confine his fabrications to fiction, he’s been abandoned by his girlfriend over his lies. But all Matija has is invention. Especially when it comes to his childhood and the death of his father. Whatever happened to Matija as a young boy, he can’t remember. He feels frightened, angry, and responsible....

Growing up together in the Surra section of central Kuwait, Katkout, Fahd, and Sadiq share neither ethnic origin nor religious denomination - only friendship and a rage against the unconscionable sectarian divide turning their lives into war-zone rubble. To lay bare the ugly truths, they form the protest group Fuada’s Kids. Their righteous transgressions have made them targets of both Sunni and Shi’a extremists. They’ve also elicited the concern of Fahd’s grandmother, Mama Hissa, who cautions them that should they anger God, the sky will surely fall.

When a music festival rolls through the sleepy town of Hesterville, Georgia, the Dixon family’s lives are forever changed. On the final night, a storm muffles the sound of the blaring music, and Rachel tucks her baby into bed before falling into a deep sleep. So deep, she doesn’t hear the kitchen door opening. When she and her husband wake up in the morning, the crib is empty. Emily is gone. Vicki Robart is one of the thousands at the festival, but she’s not feeling the music. She’s feeling the emptiness over the loss of her own baby several months before.

Every morning, seventeen-year-old Maria Anís Rosario takes the subway an hour from her boisterous and close-knit family in Queens to her private high school on the Upper East Side, where she struggles to fit in as one of the only Latina students - until Rocky welcomes her into this new life. White, rebellious, and ignored by her wealthy parents, Rocky uses her money toward one goal: to get away with anything. To Maria, it’s a dazzling privilege.

Ceferino Carrión is desperate for a new life - one of opportunity, fortune, and fame. But he knows he’ll never find this life in war-torn Spain. With his home country under the heel of the devastating Franco dictatorship and call-up papers on his doorstep, Cefe knows there’s only one thing he can do: run. A new life awaits in America, as does a new name - Jean Leon. From the concrete valleys of the Bronx to the sun-soaked hills of California, Jean crosses paths with legendary superstars, political powerhouses, and dangerous mobsters as he flees his past and pursues his dreams.

Jerusalem, 1947: Judith, a young Jewish woman who survived Dachau concentration camp, arrives in Palestine after a treacherous journey and seeks refuge with her only remaining relative, her uncle. When Judith learns her uncle has died, she tries to take her own life in despair. In Hadassah Hospital, Hana, an Arab nurse, saves Judith’s life by donating her own blood. A fragile bond of friendship develops between the two women, but it will face a harsh test over time.