Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in World Literature

Sol Reyes has had a rough year. After a series of workplace incidents at her university lab culminates in a plagiarism accusation, Sol is put on probation. Dutiful visits to her homophobic father aren’t helping her mental health, and she finds her nightly glass of wine becoming more of an all-day—and all-bottle—event. Her wife, Alice Song, is far more optimistic. After all, the two finally managed to buy a house in the beautiful gated community of Maneless Grove. However, the neighbors are a little too friendly in Sol’s opinion.

Glory is fleeting, fate sometimes cruel. For more than sixty years, the Florios have reigned supreme, establishing the city of Palermo as a European beacon of commerce, and making Sicily one of Italy’s most powerful regions. But now fate has taken a turn. As social and economic pressures erode the stability of a young Italy, the Florios—despite their wealth and power—must watch as their iron grip over the South begins to weaken.

A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.

The Institute of Special Technologies teaches students just one thing: the magic that allows them to become parts of speech, and in doing so, transforming into a specific piece of grammar (a verb, or an adjective, or an article) so they will be able to shape the world around them. As the new provost, though, Sasha is facing an enormous problem: the students in the world she just created, her “world without fear,” are unable to master the curriculum. Whether it’s the magic or the natural order of things, what they need to learn and become—Speech—is the basis of the material world.

Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.

Spanning three generations and 150 years, The Lehman Trilogy is a moving epic that dares to tell the story of modern capitalism through the saga of the Lehman brothers and their descendants. Surprising and exciting, brilliant and inventive, Stefano Massini’s masterpiece - like Hamilton - is a story of immigration, ambition, and success; it is the story of America itself from a daring and original perspective.

Jialing is only seven years old in 1908, when she is abandoned in the courtyard of a once-lavish estate near Shanghai. Jialing is zazhong - Eurasian - and faces a lifetime of contempt from both Chinese and Europeans. Without her mother's protection, she can survive only if the estate's new owners, the Yang family, agree to take her in.

Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits he was never just a restaurateur - he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred.

Tokyo, 1938. An amateur quartet, led by the compassionate Yu, gathers to practice. Suddenly, their rehearsal is brutally interrupted by military police. In the ensuing skirmish, Yu’s violin is smashed while his son, Rei, witnesses his father’s arrest. He will never see him again. Salvaging his father’s instrument, Rei escapes thanks to a mysterious lieutenant. Paris, 2003. Raised in France, Rei–now Jacques–has dedicated his life to the broken violin’s repair: studying music, becoming an apprentice, and, eventually, a luthier.

When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and her marriage, while turning her Red Diary - hidden where Gil will find it - into a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping listen.

Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances? I went home, of course.

It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island.

1942: As the Vichy government hunts for Jews across France, Claudette Pelletier, a young and talented seamstress and lover of romance novels, falls in love with a Jewish man who seeks shelter at the château where she works. Their whirlwind and desperate romance before he must flee leaves her pregnant and terrified. When the Nazis invade the Free Zone shortly after the birth of her child, the disabled Claudette is forced to make a heartbreaking choice and escapes to Spain, leaving her baby in the care of his nursemaid.

In an unnamed Latin American country, a mysterious plague quickly spreads, erasing the memory of anyone infected. Angustias Romero flees with her family, but their flight is tragically cut short when she loses both her children. Consumed by grief, she finds herself within the hallucinatory expanse of Mezquite—a town corrupted by greed and populated by storytellers, refugees, and violent, predatory gangs. Here, Angustias is finally able to lay her children to rest at the Third Country, a cemetery run by the larger-than-life Visitación Salazar and a refuge beyond suffering and fear.

In President Me, Carolla shares his vision for a different, better America free from big issues like big government down to small problems like hotel alarm clock placement. Running on an anti-narcissism platform, President Carolla calls for a return to the values of an earlier time when stew and casserole were on every dinner table and there were no “service dogs” on airplanes. President Me hits right at the heart of what makes our country really annoying, and offers a plan to make all of our lives, but mostly Adam’s, much better.

From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival.

China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, 19-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than 100 students, faculty, and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.

The first of his family to go to college, Anil Patel, the golden son, carries the weight of tradition and his family's expectations when he leaves his tiny Indian village to begin a medical residency in Dallas, Texas, at one of the busiest and most competitive hospitals in America. When his father dies, Anil becomes the de facto head of the Patel household and inherits the mantle of arbiter for all of the village's disputes.

Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there’s a lot she doesn’t understand. She’s never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history.

A young Native American, Abel has come home from war to find himself caught between two worlds. The first is the world of his father’s, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, and the ancient rites and traditions of his people. But the other world - modern, industrial America - pulls at Abel, demanding his loyalty, trying to claim his soul, and goading him into a destructive, compulsive cycle of depravity and disgust.