Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in United States

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.

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.

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.

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.

Catalina de Cerrato is being raised by her widowed father, Don Alonso, in 1551 Guatemala, scarcely thirty years since the Spanish invasion. A ruling member of the oppressive Spanish hierarchy, Don Alonso holds sway over the newly relegated lower class of Indigenous communities. Fiercely independent, Catalina struggles to honor her father and her late mother, a Maya noblewoman to whom Catalina made a vow that only she can keep: preserve the lost sacred text of the Popol Vuh, the treasured and now forbidden history of the K’iche’ people.

Anita is over her life in New York: her dead-end job, tiny studio apartment, self-obsessed friends, and overbearing mom. So she moves west to Los Angeles in search of a new career, enlightenment, and that nebulous target...wellness. She discovers an elite workout class called the Goddess Effect, run by a lifestyle guru named Venus who’s the very definition of #goals. One look at her Lululemon-clad acolytes sweating out their demons while dripping with confidence and Anita’s all in.

The pain of China’s Cultural Revolution well behind them, Benfu and his treasured Calla Lily are content in their old age surrounded by their family of adopted daughters. Once abandoned, the girls are now cherished members of the Zheng family. Yet there remains an emptiness in their hearts: their only biological daughter, Dahlia, was abducted as a newborn 30 years before. When their daughter Linnea discovers an unexpected clue about what really happened to Dahlia, the elderly couple’s hopes are reignited.

When runners aren't running, they are talking about running, planning their next run, shopping for running. This book contains stories from runners, telling their stories to other runners about. running - how it has changed their lives, their bodies, and their spirits. Runners will love these inspirational stories of fellow runners challenging themselves, recovering from injuries, and staying motivated.

How often have you seen a teenage girl pretend to be perturbed, but secretly smile, when she is told that she acts or looks just like her mother? Fathers, brothers, and friends sometimes shake their heads in wonder as girls "turn into their mothers". This new collection from Chicken Soup represents the best stories from Chicken Soup's library on the special bond between mothers and daughters, and the magical, mysterious similarities between them.

Former seamstress turned couturier turned spy Sira Quiroga is finally ready to embrace serenity with her British diplomat husband, Marcus, and the upcoming prospect of motherhood. But tranquility proves elusive. Fate has other plans for Sira. Installed in Jerusalem under the British Mandate, and enmeshed in the murky world of shady operators, political menace, and catastrophic violence, Sira finds her future with Marcus put to the ultimate test.

At twenty-one years old, Gia Kumari finally leaves the Delhi orphanage where she was raised. With few prospects for the future, she receives an unexpected invitation from a stranger named Sonia Shah in San Francisco: an internship at Sonia’s weddings and events company. Gia and America. It’s love at first sight as she navigates an unfamiliar but irresistible new world of firsts.

Detective Veranda Cruz’s single-minded mission to destroy the Villalobos crime family has cost her more than she ever would have imagined, both professionally and personally. And put her squarely in their sights. A brutal enforcer has agreed to turn state’s evidence, offering vital information that will end the Villalobos dynasty’s thirty-year reign of terror. But when an extradition operation crashes and burns, a new series of murders terrorizes the city.

More like sisters than best friends, Issa Bui and Olivia Nong grew up dreaming of becoming movie stars. But for young Vietnamese women in 1930s Hollywood, the MGM back lot seems unreachable. Undeterred, Issa knows she’s meant for great things. The blood of shamans runs through her veins. To find fame in this town, for herself and for Olivia, Issa needs to make connections. For starters, with her dead grandmother Bà Ngoại.

Los Angeles brims with opportunity in 1959—though not for aspiring fashion designer Cordelia Mai Yin, the first-generation child of Vietnamese immigrants, who finds the city unkind to outsiders and as dispirited as her own family. When Cordi rents a cheap loft in an old apartment building, she quickly warms to kindred souls Tessa, Audrey, and Silly. They also want better things and have pasts they’d rather forget. That they all share the same middle name makes their friendship seem like destiny.

For generations, the Windsors have lived on the family's grand estate in Crestwood, South Carolina, as intertwined with local life as sweet tea and pecan pie. Now, on the anniversary of her daughter Emily's death, Sarabess Windsor believes she may be the last to carry the family name - unless she can find her second daughter, Trinity, who disappeared 15 years ago.

Following the death of their matriarch, the lives of Chye Hoon's family are turned upside down. Now that the British have fled and the Japanese have conquered, their once-benign world changes overnight. Amid the turmoil, Chye Hoon's daughter-in-law, Mei Foong, must fend for her family as her husband, Weng Yu, becomes increasingly embittered. Challenged in ways she never could have imagined and forced into hiding, Mei Foong finds a deep reservoir of resilience she did not know she had and soon draws the attentions of another man.

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

There is a special bond between mothers and their sons, and it never goes away. This book contains some of the best stories and poems from Chicken Soup's library honoring that lifelong relationship between mothers and their male offspring.

For a good part of Daphne Witt’s life, she was a supportive wife and dutiful mother. Now that she’s divorced and her daughter, Ellery, is all grown up, Daphne’s celebrating the best part of her life, a successful career, and a flirtation with an attentive hunk fifteen years her junior...who happens to be her daughter’s ex-boyfriend. Ellery is starting over, too. She’s fresh out of college. Her job prospects are dim. And to support her fiancé in med school, she’s returned home as her mother’s new assistant.