Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in World Literature

Bestselling advice columnist Vandy Guru built her career teaching others how to live honestly and courageously, but after the loss of her husband, Vandy’s public veneer can barely conceal her grief. When her beloved daughter Mallika suddenly disappears and her estranged childhood best friend Rani returns, stirring up long-buried secrets, Vandy’s carefully crafted life feels at risk.

In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonizing decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal.

Life is built on single decisions. Choose wisely. It’s one of life coach Nikki Parekh’s mottos. That and being open to opportunities and taking leaps without fear. But when Nikki accepts her boyfriend’s casual proposal of marriage, she wonders if it’s just too soon, too spontaneous—and so sudden that she seeks out the advice of her not-so-nurturing mother, Tara. To Nikki’s surprise, Tara, who raised her daughter to be self-sufficient, urges Nikki to trust her decision.

In this first-ever translation of Lu Yao’s Life, we meet Gao Jialin, a stubborn, idealistic, and ambitious young man from a small country village whose life is upended when corrupt local politics cost him his beloved job as a schoolteacher, prompting him to reject rural life and try to make it in the big city. Against the vivid, gritty backdrop of 1980s China, Lu Yao traces the proud and passionate Gao Jialin’s difficult path to professional, romantic, and personal fulfillment - or at least hard-won acceptance.

Max Anger is a man on the edge. The former fighter in an elite band of special-ops soldiers in Sweden, Anger is haunted by battle scars, a childhood spent in the Stockholm archipelago, and his own mysterious family past. Now behind a desk at Vektor, a think tank conducting research on Russia, he’s met his match - and fallen in love - with fierce fellow operative Pashie Kovalenko. Like all of Vektor, she’s set her sights on the tenuous future of her country.

A collection of thrilling verse, including both new poems and beloved favorites, from the celebrated poet, modern cult icon, and author of Chelsea Girls. Eileen Myles’ work is known for its blend of reality and fiction, the sublime and the ephemeral. Her work opens readers to astonishing new considerations of familiar places, like the East Village in her iconic Chelsea Girls, and invites them into lush - and sometimes horrid - dream worlds, imbuing the landscapes of her writing with the vividness and energy of fantasy.

It’s 1849 on the west coast of Ireland. Resilient Honora O’Donoghue is accustomed to fending for herself and to reading the language of the natural world. It was always said she’d been marked for something different, but it’s not until she suffers devastating losses in a country gripped by the Famine that Honora begins to understand how that difference will save her. With the hope of a better life in America calling, Honora keeps moving toward her freedom.

Classical guitarist Satoshi Makino has toured the world and is at the height of his career when he first lays eyes on journalist Yoko Komine. Their bond forms instantly. Upon their first meeting, after Makino’s concert in Tokyo, they begin a conversation that will go on for years, with long spells of silence broken by powerful moments of connection. She’s drawn by Makino’s tender music and his sensitivity, and he is intrigued by Yoko’s refinement and intellect. But neither knows enough about love to see it blooming nor has the confidence to make the first move.

Okano, a convenience store employee with a troubled past, is but one of the many unforgettable characters found in this collection of four stories. Among the others are three boys facing a frightening lesson in mortality, a woman using garbage to fill a hole in her heart, and a nurse struggling to cope with the oft-brutal cycle of birth, life, and death. Remaining constant even as it fades in and out of view is the great Mount Fuji, one of Japan’s Three Holy Mountains. It serves as the anchor for these characters’ lives, and for Randy Taguchi’s Fujisan, an exploration of redemption, discovery, loss, and remembrance.

In May 1845, Sir John Franklin, commander of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, departed England to seek a navigable route across the top of the Americas. He and his 128 men never returned. Four years later, Royal Navy Lieutenant Frederick Robinson and Assistant Surgeon Edward Adams are determined to find the men missing in the Arctic. While they are united in purpose, they are divided in ambition. The pious and idealistic Adams strives to save his boyhood hero. Robinson hungers for promotion through the Admiralty ranks.

Photographer Cat Cochran has been to exotic places most people only dream about, but all she wants to do is settle down and get her life in order. One last assignment and she can put her past behind her. But first she must photograph the mysterious and elusive ship designer T.H. Danvers and his awesome creations.

Since the tragic loss of her parents, Enid has lived alone in a coastal cottage in Jersey. But this year someone new has come into her life: Fred, who truly gets her, and who knows how to make her happy. The only problem is that Enid has Asperger’s and doesn’t like to leave her comfort zone - and Fred lives in Australia. Like Enid, Fred has survived heartbreak and is searching for a way to start again. Could a stranger on the other side of the world really bring new meaning to his life, or is he just setting himself up for another fall?

Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.

It’s taken Chef Josie Babineaux six months to reconcile the debts left from her husband Brian’s gambling along with her broken heart. But now with a promising tourist season heating up and a travel magazine declaring her the spice queen of the bayou, she may be able to save her family’s historic Cajun restaurant. Repairing her relationship with her daughter, Minnow, while hiding the true reason she left her husband is a bigger issue.

For Jodi Wexler, a Florida doctor with a flourishing practice, only one thing’s missing: the chance to spend more time getting to know her eight-year-old granddaughter, Macallan. When Jodi’s restauranteur daughter asks her to watch Macallan in the Berkshires while she takes care of some business out of town, Jodi can’t say yes fast enough. Neither Jodi’s podiatric patients nor her just-fired, suddenly retired husband can keep her away. But when Jodi arrives, she discovers she’s not the only grandma at Lisa’s house.

The day nine-year-old San San and her twelve-year-old brother, Ah Liam, discover their grandmother taking a hammer to a framed portrait of Chairman Mao is the day that forever changes their lives. To prove his loyalty to the Party, Ah Liam reports his grandmother to the authorities. But his belief in doing the right thing sets in motion a terrible chain of events.

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people’s living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase “follow your bliss” entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. After years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone and read the world’s great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story.

Late one night, a man calls the local emergency line. He's in a cemetery, and he's just discovered a freshly dug grave marked with a wooden cross bearing his name. The dispatcher thinks it's the ravings of a drunk - until the police find the man's body the next day. What seemed like a morbid prank soon becomes a living nightmare for Berlin detective Jan Tommen. Recently reinstated to the force after a harrowing case's tragic conclusion, Jan enlists his friends.

On an isolated Texas ranch, Dr. Lucy cares for abandoned animals. The solitude allows her to avoid the people and places that remind her of the past. Not that any of the townsfolk care. In 1959, no one is interested in a woman doctor. Nor are they welcoming Calvin and Justin Bell, a newly arrived African American father and son.

Spending summer away from home for the first time, fifteen-year-old Wren Pritchard and her younger sister, Sylvie, arrive at Five Oaks, their grandparents’ Arkansas lake house. As it was for their grandmother and mother before them, it’s a place for coming of age, first love, triumphs and failures, and keeping secrets. This year, it’s Wren’s end-of-girlhood season. And Sylvie vows to keep all her secrets: Wren slipping away in the middle of the night, the boy on the dock, racing with him on the dark back roads, and slipping quietly into bed before dawn, carrying the scent of adventure.