Showing results by narrator "Neil Shah" in All Categories

When a six-year-old girl disappears and calling the police isn’t an option, her desperate mother, Pernilla, turns to an unlikely source for help. She finds a cryptic ad online for a private investigator: “Need help, but can’t contact the police?” That’s where Kouplan comes in. He’s an Iranian refugee living in hiding. He was forced to leave Iran after news of his and his brother's involvement with a radical newspaper hated by the regime was discovered. He makes a living as a P.I. working under the radar, waiting for the day he can legally apply for asylum.

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.

When Jack and his family moved into their new house, he thought his life was getting an upgrade. A manor, rather than his old small apartment? He could have many adventures, even if his family did move from the city to a tiny town. Except, he's started seeing the ghost of a young girl holding a teddy bear at the edge of his vision. Following him. Everywhere he turns, he sees her. Getting slowly closer.

The eyes of the world are gazing at India - the world's largest democracy. But the books you read about this Asian giant only show part of the picture. Delhi Noir offers bone-chilling, mesmerizing takes on the country's chaotic capital, a city where opulence and poverty are constantly clashing, where old-world values and the information age wage a constant battle. Delhi Noir's 15 original stories are written by the best Indian writers alive today - the ones you haven't yet heard of but should have.

After years of harsh monsoon seasons, a forest on the river island of Majuli is in danger of being slowly washed away. Jadav is determined to save the forest he loves. This is the true story of how one young boy dedicated his life to creating and cultivating an expansive forest that continues to grow to this day. In a world impacted by climate change, Jadav Payeng’s inspirational story shows how one person’s contributions can make a difference in helping to save our environment. 

X doesn’t have a name. He thought he had one—or many—but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X. He’s also not as human as he believes himself to be. But when he discovers the existence of another—above ground, outside the protection of the Warren—X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

Baby—the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Diwan family’s household help—has been raped and brutalized. Vansh Diwan, a criminal lawyer, finds himself torn between a shot at justice for the girl and a very powerful client. He cannot bring himself to proceed at the risk of all that he has secured for his family. His wife, Priti, distraught and devastated at her husband’s decision, turns to an old friend for help. Akash Hingorani, top criminal lawyer and best friend to Priti and Vansh, must step up.

Nikhil is a passive landowner. His houseguest is Sandip, a headstrong anti-imperialist. Between them is Nikhil’s wife, Bimala, dutiful to her conventional husband yet drawn to the fiery independence and bold flirtations of the charismatic Sandip. As Bimala questions her role as a woman and the possibilities for her life outside marriage, the three undergo an emotional struggle that will change their lives forever—just as their country undergoes a radical upheaval of its own. 

A Syria-born dancer offers his deeply personal story of war, statelessness, and the pursuit of the art of dance in this inspirational memoir.

In the lush world-banking capital of Geneva, Switzerland, three friends from Harvard Business School find their lives and their work unexpectedly intertwined. Catherine and Majid are handling investments for clients with dubious pedigrees. When their friend Rafe shows up in Geneva, he claims to be just another start-up hedge fund manager. But Rafe, after a moral awakening, is now an undercover agent with the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and he’s in Geneva secretly investigating his old friends, one of whom was his former lover. 

A master of the short story, Saadat Hasan Manto opens a window onto Bombay's demimonde - its prostitutes, rickshaw drivers, artists, and strays as well, probing the pain and bewilderment of the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs ripped apart by the India-Pakistan Partition. From a stray dog caught in the crossfire at the fresh border of India and Pakistan, to friendly neighbors turned enemy soldiers pausing for tea together in a momentary ceasefire - Manto shines incandescent light into hidden corners with an unflinching gaze, and a fierce humanism.

Fox is a memory editor—one of the best—gifted with the skill to create real life in the digital world. When he wakes up in Field of Reeds Centre for Memory Reconstruction with no idea how he got there, the therapists tell him he was a victim in a terrorist bombing by Khadija Banks, the pioneer of memory editing technology turned revolutionary. A bombing which shredded the memory archives of all its victims, including his husband Gabe. Thrust into reconstructions of his memories exploded from the fragments that survived the blast, Fox tries to rebuild his life, his marriage and himself.

In the city of Mardin, near Turkey’s border with Syria, the orphaned Avdo finds purpose when an old mason takes him on as an apprentice. From Master Josef, he learns the importance of their art, which looks after the dead and bears witness to their lives. Avdo then travels the country and meets a woman he loves wholeheartedly, only to lose her through a tragic crime. Resigned to a lonely existence, he retreats from the world into his cemetery workshop, but even there, life, with all its sorrows, joys, injustices, and gifts, draws him in unexpected directions.

In a world gone wrong, heroes and villains are not always easy to distinguish and every individual has the ability to contribute something powerful. In this stunning collection of original and rediscovered stories of tragedy and hope, the stars are a diverse group of students, street kids, good girls, kidnappers, and child laborers pitted against their environments, their governments, differing cultures, and sometimes one another as they seek answers in their dystopian worlds.