Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in World Literature

Ever since childhood, Emma Merrill and Sophia Mason were bound by a passion for painting. Like all young best friends, they promised to never lose touch. But the girls came from different worlds, and their paths diverged when Emma went to an elite college and Sophie worked her way through state school. After a decade they’ve reconnected, both in a time of need. Emma has been struggling with depression since her college years, and she’s lost herself under the suffocating influence of her controlling and manipulative mother.

Andy Bellows is in a right state. Plagued with insomnia, anxiety and neckache, he’s convinced there’s something seriously wrong with him. And the worst thing is that his doctor agrees. The diagnosis: Andy is in the grip of a self-destructive addiction to technology - he just cannot put that bloody mobile phone down. Texting, tweeting, gaming and online dating - technology rules Andy’s life. His phone even monitors his bowel movements. So how will he cope when he’s forced to follow doctor’s orders and step away from all of his beloved screens?

With the summer season on Sandhamn comes an unsettling mystery for Detective Inspector Thomas Andreasson. A bullied young boy has vanished from a sailing camp on neighboring Lökholmen Island. Has the terrorized eleven-year-old run away? Or, in this isolated vacation spot where strangers lurk, is it something more ominous?

The new summer house on Sandhamn Island is an architectural dream for its owner, Carsten Jonsson. It’s a nightmare for the locals. The venture capitalist has flouted local traditions, property lines, and the natural beauty of the coastline. He’s also too wealthy and arrogant to heed the anonymous warnings to leave. The threats escalate when his guest lodge is burned to the ground and an unidentifiable corpse is found in the charred ruins.

Biographer Ellie Connor is in Gideon, Texas, to research blues singer Mabel Beauvais who, on the verge of fame, mysteriously disappeared more than forty years ago. Gideon holds another mystery for Ellie. It’s the truth about her parents—a restless mother who died young and a father she never knew. They are an unsettled piece of Ellie’s own past. Somewhere in this town is the answer to both of her quests.

Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in the Himalayan foothills of China - dubbed the true Shangri-La - and heads south into the jungles of Burma. But after the mysterious death of their tour leader, the carefully laid plans fall apart, and disharmony breaks out among the pleasure-seekers.

Seasoned journalist Tom Flynn shares his experiences on that "forever September morning" from his perspective as a journalist and neutral observer who stands apart from the event, but also as a participant, a survivor, and now a defining chronicler of the morning that changed our nation forever: September 11, 2001.

When Charlotte McKay wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of how she got there, all she wants is to go back to the perfect London flat she shares with her husband, and the impressive career she’s worked so hard to build. But something’s not right. Her husband David is at her bedside - but so is a three-year-old girl, and she’s calling Charlotte "Mummy"....

When novelist Manuel Ortigosa learns that his husband, Álvaro, has been killed in a car crash, it comes as a devastating shock. It won’t be the last. He’s now arrived in Galicia. It’s where Álvaro died. It’s where the case has already been quickly closed as a tragic accident. It’s also where Álvaro hid his secrets. The man to whom Manuel was married for fifteen years was not the unassuming man he knew.

Morton Hall, with its beautiful, ruined grounds and its reclusive mistress, Emilia Morton, is full of mysteries. For freelance editor Anne Marie, the wild garden has become a serene and secret refuge from her loveless marriage. The only other regular visitor is Cape, the hall's part-time gardener, who is forbidden to tend to anything except the magnificent maze or to meet his enigmatic employer. When Emilia dies, Cape and Anne Marie are astonished to find themselves among an unlikely group of villagers named in her strange will.

Ashley Dunne is a bad boy, a notorious member of Dublin’s most ruthless gang. But when privileged daddy’s girl Ryan Mahony finds herself living on an urban estate they control, she can’t help feeling he’s not that bad at all. Ryan and Ash were never meant to cross paths: she’s always been sheltered by her successful barrister father. But when he’s unexpectedly sent to prison, she’s forced to move in with estranged relatives in the city, where a chance encounter with Ash sends sparks flying.

Vinh Doan has a problem. Ten million of them, in fact. He’s a high-level fixer for global conglomerates, which means big money…and big troubles. When ten million dollars go missing from one of his accounts, he needs a top-notch hacker to find it. His first thought? Emily MacDonald, his high school ex. While Vinh has been taking the financial world by storm, Emily has been struggling. After her dad died, she dropped out of college and put her dreams aside. Her job in tech support has seriously tested her sunny disposition and her finances.

Imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto, Elsi discovers her mother's desperate attempt to end her pregnancy and comes face-to-face with the impossibility of their situation. Risking her own life, Elsi joins a resistance group to sabotage the regime. Blonde, blue-eyed Matilda is wrenched from her family in Romania and taken to Germany, where her captors attempt to mold her into the perfect Aryan child. Spirited and brave, she must inspire hope in the other stolen children to make her dreams of escape a reality.

Southern China, 1923. Desperate to secure her future, Mei Ling’s parents arrange a marriage to a widower in California. To enter the country, she must pretend to be her husband’s first wife - a paper wife. On the perilous voyage, Mei Ling takes an orphan girl named Siew under her wing. Dreams of a better life in America give Mei Ling the strength to endure the treacherous journey and detainment on Angel Island. But when she finally reaches San Francisco, she’s met with a surprise. Her husband, Chinn Kai Li, is a houseboy, not the successful merchant he led her to believe.

1941. Steven Katz is the son of prosperous landowners in rural California. Although his parents don’t approve, he’s found true friends in Nick, Suki, and Ollie, sons of field workers. The group is inseparable. But Steven is in turmoil. He’s beginning to acknowledge that his feelings for Nick amount to more than friendship. When the bombing of Pearl Harbor draws the US into World War II, Suki and his family are forced to leave their home for the internment camp at Manzanar. Ollie enlists in the army and ships out. And Nick must flee.

Inspired as a boy by the multiple meanings to be found for a single word in the dictionary, Kohei Araki is devoted to the notion that a dictionary is a boat to carry us across the sea of words. But after thirty-seven years creating them at Gembu Books, it's time for him to retire and find his replacement. He discovers a kindred spirit in Mitsuya Majime - a young, disheveled square peg with a penchant for collecting antiquarian books and a background in linguistics - whom he swipes from his company's sales department.

With her thirtieth birthday on the horizon, Anna Kotze has accepted that there are some family secrets she’ll never know. While her mother’s Zimbabwean roots are woven into her life, all her father will say is that he was adopted. But when she finds an engraved necklace hidden among his things, a surprise piece of the puzzle finally falls into place: her father wasn’t just adopted—he was abandoned. The only clue to her grandmother’s identity is the inscription, ‘Indira’, Anna’s own middle name. But who was her namesake and where is she now?

When Olympia leaves her small Virginia town, she doesn’t expect to look back, much less ever come home. But after a year on the road, her sister’s engagement pulls Olympia into everything she left behind: her family, her husband, and the grief she’s been trying to forget. She’s determined to stay a few days, maybe a week—just enough time to visit gravestones and sign off on the divorce her husband, Spencer, asked for. But he’s reeling from their shared loss, as well as complications with his aging parents, leaving his heart just as fragile as Olympia’s.

It’s Midsummer’s Eve, the celebration of the longest day of the year, and on Sandhamn it’s the longest party of the year. But the fun comes to a dead halt when a young reveler is murdered, a teenage girl is found drugged and dazed on the beach, and other young women vanish. So far, what links the victims is a mystery. For Nora Linde and her new boyfriend, Jonas Sköld, the crimes are personal: one of the missing girls is Wilma, Jonas’s daughter. And her disappearance could test Nora and Jonas’s relationship in ways they never expected.

Becky’s father is not just absent: he’s a total mystery, a hole in her life. He died before she was born and for her mother, Laura, the subject is strictly off-limits. When Laura books a spontaneous trip to Greece, Becky decides to join her, determined to get closer to her mother - and to the truth. But as they make their way to the island of Santorini, it becomes clear that this holiday is not as impulsive as Becky thought. Laura’s hiding something from her daughter - and she’s been hiding it for Becky’s whole life.