Showing results by narrator "Ari Fliakos" in All Categories

Meet Samuel: stalled writer, bored teacher at a local college, obsessive player of online video games. He hasn't seen his mother, Faye, in decades, not since she abandoned her family when he was a boy. Now she has suddenly reappeared, having committed an absurd politically motivated crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a divided America. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high school sweetheart.

Emery Blackwood's life was forever changed on the eve of her high school graduation, when the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her best friend, Lily. She'd once dreamt of running away with August, eager to escape the misty, remote shores of Saoirse Island and chase new dreams together. Now, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence among this tight-knit community steeped in folklore and tradition, ruled by the seasons and ancient superstitions.

Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands and an online bank of thousands of people’s dreams – the star is back, and the limitless scale and ambition of Karl Ove’s new universe is clear. This is life, death, the human condition, and the opportunity to bring listeners in on the real-time creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.

Con man Milan Berg has a photographic memory. But he’s hiding a secret: He can’t read. Unable to interpret the world around him, Milan finds increasingly crafty ways to navigate it. That is, until he comes across a car in traffic with a girl in the back seat. She desperately holds a written note up to the window, but what does it say? Fearing the girl is in mortal danger, Milan determines to search for her. As he follows a series of clues, each darker and scarier than the next, he’s thrust into a nightmarish odyssey with a deepening, disturbing progression: The clues are tied to his past.

John Dies at the End is a genre-bending, humorous account of two college drop-outs inadvertently charged with saving their small town—and the world—from a host of supernatural and paranormal invasions.

Weeks before NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is to marry his long-time love, Mary Catherine, an assassin announces their presence in the city with a string of murders. All of the victims are young women. And each has been killed in a manner as precise as it was gruesome. Tasked with working alongside the FBI, Bennett uncovers multiple cold-case homicides across the country that fit the same distinctive pattern. Bennett promises Mary Catherine that the case won't affect their upcoming wedding. But, as he struggles to connect the killings, Bennett may be walking into a deadly trap.

Bookish dreamer Arthur Oakes is a student at Rackham College, Maine, renowned for its frosty winters and beautiful buildings. But his idyll - and burgeoning romance with Gwen Underfoot - is shattered when local drug dealers force him into a terrible crime: stealing rare and valuable books from the exceptional college library. Trapped and desperate, Arthur turns to his closest friends for help: the wealthy, irrepressible Colin Wren; brave, beautiful Alison Shiner; the battling twins Donna and Donovan McBride; and brainy, bold Gwen.

This is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. Over the course of three weeks in present-day Washington, DC, three sons watch their parents' marriage falter and their family home fall apart. Meanwhile, a larger catastrophe is engulfing another part of the world: a massive earthquake devastates the Middle East, sparking a pan-Arab invasion of Israel. With global upheaval in the background and domestic collapse in the foreground, Jonathan Safran Foer asks us: what is the true meaning of home?

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship from Bremerhaven to Portland, Maine, and anti-Semites murder her mother in Portland. In the orphanage at St. Cloud’s, it’s clear to Dr Larch, the physician and director of the orphanage, that the abandoned child not only knows she’s Jewish, but she’s familiar with the biblical Queen Esther she was named for. Dr Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; he doubts he’ll find any family to adopt her.

Tap Duvarney lost his innocence in the War Between the States and then put his skills to the test as a soldier in the frontier army. Now, leaving behind a devoted fiancée, he is trying to make his fortune on the Texas coast, working a ranch as the partner of his old friend Tom Kittery - and finding himself in the middle of a feud between Kittery and the neighboring Munson family.

In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to a content aggregator. His job is routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free from the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing about lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his work episodes from his trainwreck of a life. We learn that his apartment in Miniature Aleppo has been stripped of furniture after his wife ran off with his best friend - who Noah believes has possessed his body.

Daniel Carter used to be a homicide detective, but his last case - the hunt for a serial killer - went wrong in strange ways and soured the job for him. Now he's a private investigator trying to live a quiet life. Strangeness, however, has not finished with him. First, he inherits a bookstore in Providence from someone he's never heard of, along with an indignant bookseller who doesn't want a new boss.

Coco Wells hasn’t seen another living person since she was a teenager. All of Manhattan is reliving the same few seconds, minutes, or hours on a loop…and they have been for years. Everything looks normal from a distance, but up close, it’s a nightmare.

A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to epitomize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.

The first collection of short fiction from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. Jeffrey Eugenides' best-selling novels have shown that he is an astute observer of the crises of adolescence, sexual identity, self-discovery, family love and what it means to be an American in our times. The stories in Fresh Complaint continue that tradition.

Russell Green has it all: a loving family, a successful career and a beautiful house. But underneath his seemingly perfect world, cracks are beginning to appear...and no one is more surprised than Russ when the life he took for granted is turned upside down. Finding himself single-handedly caring for his young daughter while trying to launch his own business, the only thing Russ knows is that he must shelter his little girl from the consequences of these changes.

Set in our world, spanning the near to distant future, the author, Arwen Elys Dayton, explores the possible consequences of advanced medical breakthroughs and how they may shape and reshape humanity. From organ donation to plastic surgery to full bodily reconstruction, these stories take you by your (for now, organic) hand and lead you into a future where the line between person and machine becomes increasingly blurred. Deeply thoughtful, poignant, horrifying and action-packed, this novel strikes new ground while also seeming so strangely...likely. Just try to disconnect.

The Flame is a stunning collection of Leonard Cohen's last poems, selected and ordered by the author in the final months of his life. Featuring lyrics, prose pieces and illustrations, the book also contains an extensive selection from Cohen's notebooks, which he kept in poetic form throughout his life, and offers an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker.

The Unfolded World is a bitter and unfriendly place for Daniel Carter and Emily Lovecraft. In this world the Cold War never happened because the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1941. In this world the Nazi Großdeutschland is the premier superpower and is not merely tolerated but indulged because, in this world, the Holocaust happened behind the ruins of the Iron Curtain and consumed only Bolsheviks, Communists, and others the West was glad to see gone. In this world there are monsters, and not all of them are human.

From the internationally bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies comes an exquisitely crafted work of fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri sets her gaze on the eternally beautiful city, illuminating the frailties of the human condition and dissecting lives lived on the margins.