Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Literature & Fiction

GLORY IS FAMOUS FOR TWO THINGS: businesses that front for seedier—if not illegal—enterprises, and the suicides that happen along the Indigo River. Mars is desperate to escape the “bed-and-breakfast” where her mother works as a prostitute—and where her own eventual fate has been decided—and she wants to give her little sister a better life.

Alix Leclaire has a plan: graduate high school and land her dream job as a feather artist at Mille et une Plume, where her creations will help define high fashion. Her best friend Jeanne will get a record contract and they’ll take over the Paris art scene together. But then Jeanne dies. Alix is lost, until the day she feels Jeanne pushing her to the feather boutique.

The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders live in a luxurious, climate-controlled biodome. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with black-market robotics, in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs. Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm. As a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, her cargo includes the city’s most vulnerable abandoned children.

Despite her name, Taína Perez doesn’t know anything about her Taíno heritage, nor has she ever tried to learn. After all, how would ancient Puerto Rican history help with everything going on? There’s constant trouble at school and in her neighborhood, her older brother was kicked out of the house, and with her mom at work, she’s left alone to care for her little brother and aging grandmother. It’s a lot for a fourteen-year-old to manage. But life takes a wild turn when her abuela tells her she is a direct descendant of Anacaona, the beloved Taíno leader, warrior, and poet.

Annulis is a dying world. Nothing can stop the doom all say is coming. Some simply accept it, embracing the end. Others hold to a better future—a way of escape from the dark days ahead. Sarah and her people sojourn the land, searching for a city none have seen, but some believe exists as an escape from these troubling times. Elliott follows an army with a mandate calling for the purging of all that would hinder a glorious global rebirth.

Eighteen-year-old Filipino American Ruby Santos has been unmoored since her mother’s death. She’s always dreamed of going to art school, but instead, she and her father have had to move into the basement of their home and rent out the main floor while they work to pay back her mother’s hospital bills. Then Ruby finds out her father has been living a secret life as a delivery person for a magical underworld—he “jumps” train lines to help deliver packages for a powerful family. Recently, he’s fallen behind on deliveries (and deeper into a fog of alcohol).

Tanya has been working at her tavern, the Smiling Snake, since she was able to see above the bar. She broke up her first fight at age eight. By the time she was a teenager, she could run the place with her eyes closed. And now, at seventeen, she’s confident enough that she’d never let anyone take advantage of her—whether it be a drunkard or captain of the Queen’s guard. But when her guardian dies, she might lose it all: the bar, her home, and her purpose in life.

The game of love is afoot in the halls of Reginald R. Hero High. And this time, Huck and Winston—Curtis's younger brother—are center stage. Soon after Ms. Gregoire assigns the works of Sherlock Holmes in English class, Huck realizes someone is trying to sabotage Win's acceptance to the school. It's a plot only Huck can unravel—but as sparks begin to fly between the two boys, Huck has to choose whether to give in to his growing attraction to Win or focus on the case. The solution? Team up together to uncover the culprit.

Eighteen-year-old Joaquín del Toro’s future looks bright. With his older brother in the priesthood, he’s set to inherit his family’s Texas ranch. He’s in love with Dulceña—and she’s in love with him. But it’s 1915, and trouble has been brewing along the US-Mexico border. On one side, the Mexican Revolution is taking hold; on the other, Texas Rangers fight Tejano insurgents, and ordinary citizens are caught in the middle. As tensions grow, Joaquín is torn away from Dulceña, whose father’s critical reporting on the Rangers in the local newspaper has driven a wedge between their families.

Diego Benevides works hard. His single mother encourages him to stay focused on school, on getting into college, on getting out of their crumbling neighborhood. That’s why she gave him her car. Diego’s best friend, Lawson, needs a ride? because Lawson is dealing. As long as Diego’s not carrying, not selling, it’s cool. It’s just weed. But when Lawson starts carrying powder and pills and worse, their friendship is tested and their lives are threatened.

In the heart of the Great Depression, Rancho Las Moras, like everywhere else in Texas, is gripped by the drought of the Dust Bowl, and resentment is building among white farmers against Mexican Americans. All around town, signs go up proclaiming “No Dogs or Mexicans” and “No Mexicans Allowed.” When Estrella organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos in their town of Monteseco, Texas, her whole family becomes a target of “repatriation” efforts to send Mexicans “back to Mexico”—whether they were ever Mexican citizens or not.

All seventeen-year-old Quill wants is a break from the family business. Flowers, plants, the generations-old garden. What he wouldn’t give for a taste of the outside world. Normalcy. But his mom won’t let him out of the house, telling him he’s just not ready … All because he’s a dryad. Well, not just any dryad, but a male dryad—the first ever. And unlike everyone else in his family, he hasn’t a lick of magic. Just a shock of green hair, matching green eyes, and a growing frustration that there’s an entire world out there waiting to be discovered.

Eugene Guterman’s junior year in high school is off to a rocky start. No love life, no new theater production, and if his mother has her way, no more of his favorite comfort food—donuts. Eugene would just as soon spend the year playing small, but that’s hard to do when you’re the biggest kid in your class. Things change when he accidentally tackles the school’s star quarterback and Coach sees the possibilities and recruits the plus-size playwright onto the varsity football team. Eugene is suddenly catapulted into the world of the “The Pops,” the exclusive clique of popular athletes.

Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream—a gift from the Mapou—tells Lucille to go to her village’s section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family’s at risk.

For over a century, the Blackwells have protected the town of Hollow Cliff from vengeful spirits. Seventeen-year-old Nev is ready to take over for her ailing grandmother as the town’s witch protector—unlike her mother, who left when Nev was a child and never looked back. When a stranger arrives at Blackwell House of Spirits to fill a tour guide opening, Nev reluctantly offers him the job. Nev doesn’t trust Cal. He knows more than he’s letting on about Blackwell House—and about Nev herself.

Teenage Stella Grey has always felt an intense recurring sense of déjà vu … often plagued by strong dreams that feel more real than her waking moments. One ill-fated morning, her dream from the night before actually comes to life as she awakens and finds her house ransacked and her mother unconscious near their broken-in front door. Her next moments are scary, shocking, and earth-shattering as she is kidnapped and delivered to a Gothic mansion, the Manor de Rêves. Over the next few days, Stella grapples with where she is and why she was taken.

The ship was built for one thing: to carry the delegations of two warring nations into neutral waters, where the heads of state would sign a peace treaty and end the war that has been raging for a generation. When it goes down, a pair of survivors—Cora, daughter of a Duran newspaper reporter, and Vivienne, lady’s maid to an Ariminthian princess—wash up on a remote island. At first, it seems like they have nothing in common—not even whether or not they want to be rescued. But the arrival of a pirate ship brings them to the realization that they do have a shared purpose: peace.

Rat Evans knows that they shouldn’t have made a deal with Isola, a shadowy raven knight older than the stars and more powerful than the strongest arcanists. They know Isola can’t be trusted, know that promising to go with her once all of this is over was a mistake. But they’d needed to make sure their friends were safe—that Harker was safe, even though they’re still not sure if he’s a friend or a rival or something more complicated. And even if Isola’s been keeping him locked away at the tower for almost two months.

What began in Highland Park has now spread nationwide: students are disappearing after boarding school buses. This terrifying sequel takes Kaitlin and Jamie on a journey deeper into the unknown than ever before—one filled with fear, impossible choices, and the shocking truth behind the buses. But this time, the danger is bigger, the horrors more overwhelming, and survival is far from guaranteed. All of your favorite characters are back … but not everyone will make it out alive.

So much is forgotten in the Republic: the way the seasons used to turn like pages in a book, the technology that once made life easy for everyone, even the art of reading. For fifteen-year-old June, the forgetting goes even deeper, ever since a mysterious accident six years ago stole her mother and her memory. When a strange circus with ties to her family comes through town, she follows them without a second thought. In the outside world, June has to navigate a landscape and society pushed to the edge by the powerful forces of climate change, and to decide who she can trust.