Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Genre Fiction

Jimi Hendrix, Francis Bacon, the boxer Jack Johnson, Miles Davis, and a space-age Muhammad Ali find themselves in the otherworldly hands of Jeffery Renard Allen, reimagined and transformed to bring us news of America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The two strands in this brilliant story collection—speculative history and tender, painful depictions of Black life in urban America—are joined by African notions of circular time in which past, present, and future exist all at once.

What does our nature writing say about us, and more urgently, what would it say without us? Tom Comitta investigates these questions and more in The Nature Book, a "literary supercut" that arranges writing about the natural world from three hundred works of fiction into a provocative re-envisioning of the novel. With fiction's traditional background of flora and fauna brought to the fore, people and their structures disappear, giving center stage to animals, landforms, and weather patterns—honored in their own right rather than for their ambient role in human drama.

After years of skilled work and dedication, Trisha Donahue is denied a well-earned promotion by her company's male executives, who give it instead to an underqualified man. Devastated, forty-four-year-old Trisha begins to reckon with the demands that exhaust her, the injustices that confront her, and the ways she has betrayed herself "just to fit in" with coworkers who resent and belittle her abilities. But at the Rose & Emerald, her company's annual Banquet Day sets in motion a surprising adventure, revealing unexpected allies, hidden passageways, and an interstellar secret.

When Shouji Arai crosses one of his company's most powerful clients, he must leave Akakawa immediately or risk his life. But his girlfriend Youko is nowhere to be found. Haunted by dreams of drowning and the words of a fortune teller who warned him away from three women with water in their names, he travels to Tokyo, where he tries in vain to track Youko down. But Shouji soon realizes that not everything Youko told him about herself was true. Who is the real woman he once lived with and loved, and where could she be hiding?

In a nameless country under military occupation, two friends prepare to attend a wedding. The young man is from the occupied region ("This Place"), the woman is from the occupying nation-state ("That Place"). The complicated relationship between these two protagonists with unusual professions--he is a Protest Designer and she is a De-programmer--is tested when, on the eve of the wedding, the occupying power, That Place, formally annexes This Place and declares a curfew.

In Great Uncle Edward, a family gathers for dinner. At ninety-three, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy.

After World War II, Needham family members migrated north to Philadelphia from South Carolina, leaving behind the tragic injustice surrounding the violent death of their patriarch, King. His devoted widow, Selma, remains on the old home place. Over the years, she raises King's children, including his great-grandson, Rayne, on whom falls the responsibility to bring the family together to save the family land and mend the rift between him and his mother.

A novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America's young people to flee its borders into an unwelcoming world. One such American is Ron Patterson, who finds himself on distant shores, working as a repairman and sharing a room with other refugees. In an unnamed city wedged between ocean and lush mountainous forest, Ron can almost imagine a stable life for himself. Especially when he makes the first friend he has had in years—a mysterious migrant named Marlise, who bears a striking resemblance to a onetime classmate.

A darkly funny meditation on creativity and family, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything tracks the life of a middle-aged author who is struggling to write his next novel while trying to come to grips with his son's disabilities, set against a backdrop of ecological catastrophe and escalating human insanity in contemporary Los Angeles. A beautiful, powerful, concise work of autofiction, Be Brief documents the stops and starts of adulthood and marriage, and the joys and challenges of parenting, while defining what it means to be a good man, and a good writer.

Fourteenth-century Europe. The Black Death has killed half the known world, and in an isolated convent, a small group of nuns spends their days in work, austerity, and devotion, chanting the Liturgy of the Hours. But their community is threatened. Rumors of heresy and a scandalous Book of Ursula, based on the teachings of the charismatic former abbess and founder of the order, have prompted the male church hierarchy to launch an investigation. Disrespect and rebellion infect some novices, and the youngest among them pines for the bishop's chief inquisitor.

Lil Chris is just nineteen when he arrives at Angola as an AU—an admitting unit, a fresh fish, a new 'vict. He's got a life sentence with no chance of parole, but he's also got a clear mind and sharp awareness—one that picks up quickly on the details of the system, his fellow inmates, and what he can do to claim a place at the top. When he meets Rise, a mature inmate who's already spent years in the system, Lil Chris learns to find his way in a system bent on repressing every means he has to express himself. 

At age eleven, Helen disappeared in the wilderness of Mount Rainier National Park while camping with her father, Benjamin. She was gone for almost a week before being discovered and returned to her family. It is now twenty-five years later, and after more than two decades of estrangement, Helen and Benjamin reconnect at his home in Portland, Oregon, to try to understand what happened during the days she was gone. Meanwhile, Benjamin meets an odd pair, a woman and boy who seem driven to help him learn more about Helen's disappearance.

While in the hospital recuperating from a gunshot wound, Chicago PI Sam Kelson is approached by a nurse who's troubled by three recent deaths. No pattern, no connection—except that three patients died when they shouldn't have. Initially skeptical, Kelson starts asking questions—and the more he uncovers, the clearer it becomes that something isn't right. What exactly has been going on at Clement Memorial Hospital? Has someone been killing patients? If so, why? As Kelson digs deeper, he comes to realize that someone is determined to prevent him finding out the truth. Whatever it takes.

Ten years after the world's oil went sour and a pandemic killed most of the population, Sam Edison is the chief of police of The Little Five, a walled-in community near Atlanta, Georgia. Those who survived share the world with what are known as hollow-heads: creatures who are no longer fully human. A man and a pregnant teenager arrive at the gate and are welcomed into the town. They begin to settle in when suddenly both are murdered by an unknown assailant. In the course of investigation, Chief Edison discovers that the girl was fleeing a life of sexual slavery, and that some members of the community were complicit in the human trafficking network that had ensnared her.

Gina Perini manages a bookstore in one of San Francisco's most lively neighborhoods. Although she thrives in her world of books, her harrowing escape from the war in the Balkans years earlier remains fresh in her mind. There are still those who are searching for her and who are intent on vengeance. Gina suddenly gets news that someone from her past is still alive - someone she had given up hope of finding. This sets in motion a chain of events that will stretch across the country and push her love and resourcefulness to the limit.

It’s 1956, and working-mother Ava Lark and her son, Lewis, have rented a house in a less-than-welcoming Boston suburb. There, Lewis finds he is only able to befriend the other fatherless kids on the block, Jimmy and Rose. But when Jimmy goes missing, neighborhood paranoia ramps to new heights, further ostracizing Ava and Lewis.

In the small Minnesota shore town of Flame Lake, a close-knit group of friends find their comfortable lives taking some unforeseen turns. Best friends Devera and BiDi were recently voted "Least Changed" at their twentieth high school reunion, but Devera is starting to think of the label as insulting. Sure, she loves her husband and still believes being a wife and mother is the main entrie on life's plate...but she longs for some more exotic side dishes.

The terrors of a young soldier come to life in shocking, almost hallucinatory detail in a powerful first novel that follows in the footsteps of The Red Badge of Courage and Farewell to Arms.

Nathan Carter, a man in his 20s, moves from Boston to Eden, Vermont, following the death of his father and the end of yet another failed romance. When Carter's Jeep goes off the road in a snowstorm, 79-year-old Wallace Fiske nurses him back to health and the two become unlikely friends.

David Brenner draws on highlights from his "Laughter to the People" tour's stand-up material to show how humor can give us the power to transcend personal and world problems, from the unavoidable, like aging, to the uncontrollable, like war. His observations cover a wide range of issues, including fear of flying, going bald, marriage and divorce, pets, politics, terrorism, losing and gaining weight, money problems, and religion.