Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Biographical Fiction

Anthony Opoka and Florence Okori are coming of age in Uganda in the 1990s. Outstanding students, they believe in being good humans before they are kidnapped and forced into the fanatical Lord’s Resistance Army. In a legion of young recruits, no one gets closer than Anthony to powerful messianic warlord Joseph Kony and his darkest secrets. To stay sane as he spirals through chaos, Anthony clings to his childhood lessons about being a good human. Florence’s upbringing grounds her, too, helping her keep her dreams alive even as she’s pulled deeper into the insanity of Kony’s war.

In late March 1944, as Stalin’s forces push into Ukraine, young Emil and Adeline Martel must make a terrible decision: Do they wait for the Soviet bear’s intrusion and risk being sent to Siberia? Or do they reluctantly follow the wolves—murderous Nazi officers who have pledged to protect “pure-blood” Germans? The Martels are one of many families of German heritage whose ancestors have farmed in Ukraine for more than a century.

Pino Lella wants nothing to do with the war or the Nazis. He's a normal Italian teenager - obsessed with music, food, and girls - but his days of innocence are numbered. When his family home in Milan is destroyed by Allied bombs, Pino joins an underground railroad helping Jews escape over the Alps, and falls for Anna, a beautiful widow six years his senior. In an attempt to protect him, Pino's parents force him to enlist as a German soldier - a move they think will keep him out of combat.

A book of unparalleled scope and vision, Your Name Here is a spectacular honeycomb of books-within-books. In this death-defying feat of ambition, collaborators Helen Dewitt and Ilya Gridneff weave together America’s “War on Terror,” countless years of literary history, authorial sleight of hand, Scientology, dream analysis, multiple languages, emails, images, graphs, into something wondrous and unique.

Del Wensley, wife of the most celebrated preacher in Harlan County, tries to mind her place. Until her husband’s infidelity pushes an already strained marriage to a breaking point. Clinging to her last hope for self-respect, Del turns her back on the rigid life she’s known. A coal train is rolling through the valley. With her eyes wide open to the unfamiliar, and to the freedom she craves, Del takes to the rails.

Germany, 1942. Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage - in name only - to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too - atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken once again by the inescapable rumble of war.

Sam Carlson is a projectionist in small-town Minnesota, where fantasies unspool in glorious black and white—for him and for his sweetheart, college-bound math whiz Sarah Haber. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Sam is sent to the Philippines and captured as a POW. Brutalized but unbroken by the Bataan Death March and POW camps, Sam is one of eighteen hundred starved and weakened prisoners herded into the cargo hold of a barbaric hell ship called the Arisan Maru, his survival doubtful.

Paris, 1940. The Nazis have occupied the city - and the Ritz. The opulent old hotel, so loved by Parisians, is now full of swaggering officers, their minions and their mistresses. For American Olivia Olsen, working as a chambermaid at the hotel means denying her nationality and living a lie, every day bringing the danger of discovery closer. When Hitler’s right-hand man moves in and makes her his pet, she sees an opportunity to help the Resistance - and draw closer to Jack, her contact, whose brusque instructions may be a shield for something more....

Cousins Masha and Rachel Morgenstern board the luxury liner the SS Manhattan bound for New York, desperate to escape the concentration camps that claimed the rest of their family. America offers a safe haven, but to reach it they must survive a hazardous Atlantic crossing. Among their fellow passengers fleeing the war, each with their own conflicts, secrets, and surprises, are the composer Igor Stravinsky, making a new start after a decade of tragedy, and Rose Kennedy, determined to keep her four children from harm.

Sebastien Ranes’s single mom and her feckless boyfriend can’t be bothered to take care of a stuttering 12-year-old. Banished to live with his grandmother on the far side of the country, the boy can barely understand a bus schedule when he gets dumped at the Greyhound station in Stockton, California. Given $35 and a one-way ticket to Altoona, Pennsylvania, Sebastien must cross the country - alone, without a clue how to fend for himself. Filled with youthful anger and naïveté, Sebastien heads out into the "Morning in America" of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s.

1857. Three women—once strangers—come together in unpredictable Utah Territory. Hopeful, desperate, and willful, they’ll allow nothing on Earth or in Heaven to stand in their way. Following the call of their newfound Mormon faith, Tamar Loader and her family weather a brutal pilgrimage from England to Utah, where Tamar is united with her destined husband, Thomas Ricks. Clinging to a promise for the future, she abides an unexpected surprise: Thomas is already wedded to one woman—Tabitha, a local healer—and betrothed to still another.

It’s 1947 when Sister Mary Agnes arrives in New Mexico. Her mission is to establish a monastery in the town of Roswell, where weeks before rumors of the crash landing of an unidentified craft have triggered a crisis of faith. Residents are drifting away from the divine, awed no longer by the heavens but rather the stars.

In 1944, newly married Copper Reilly arrives in Paris soon after the liberation. While the city celebrates its freedom, she's stuck in the prison of an unhappy marriage. When her husband commits one betrayal too many, Copper demands a separation. Alone in Paris, she finds an unlikely new friend: an obscure, middle-aged designer from the back rooms of a decaying fashion house whose timid nature and reluctance for fame clash with the bold brilliance of his designs. His name is Christian Dior.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”

Born in the bustling artist quarter of Rome, Artemisia, daughter of renowned painter Orazio Gentileschi, is unavoidably drawn into a profession unheard of for women. With an innate grasp of color, light, and composition, and inspired by the mercurial Caravaggio, the fiery Artemisia embraces her calling with a precocious brilliance. But as a young woman, she also finds herself oppressed by a powerful patriarchy, and she is forced to endure emotional and physical abuse at the hands of men.

Born a veritable great lion of God to a devout Jewish family, Saul of Tarsus is raised by his parents to embrace their love of humanity. Dogged by what he perceives as a lack of true faith, he embarks on a journey to save his people from sacrilege. But on the road to Damascus a vision of the resurrected Jesus changes the course of his life. Converting to Christianity, the newly christened Paul transforms from persecutor of blasphemers into apostle to the gentiles, becoming one of the supreme influences on the Catholic Church and the Western world.

Hoping to make a clean break from a fractured marriage, Agatha Christie boards the Orient Express in disguise. But unlike her famous detective Hercule Poirot, she can't neatly unravel the mysteries she encounters on this fateful journey. Her cabinmate Katharine Keeling's first marriage ended in tragedy, propelling her toward a second relationship mired in deceit. Nancy Nelson - newly married but carrying another man's child - is desperate to conceal the pregnancy and teeters on the brink of utter despair.

In the midst of the first Gulf War, a young Iraqi girl huddles with her neighbours in an air raid shelter. There, she meets Nadia. The two girls quickly become best friends and together they imagine a world not torn apart by civil war, sharing their dreams, their hopes and their desires, and their first loves. But as they grow older and the bombs continue to fall, the international sanctions bite and friends begin to flee the country, the girls must face the fact that their lives will never be the same again.

It’s 1927. Letty Hart’s father is long gone, but his old winery provides a meager wage and a legal livelihood for selling sacramental wine. But when that contract goes bust, Letty stumbles upon a desperate option: her father’s hidden cellar—and enough liquor to tempt Letty to bootleg the secret stash. In an underworld dominated by merciless men, Letty is building an empire.

Caecilia, Roman born but Etruscan wed, forsakes Rome to return to her husband, Vel Mastarna, exposing herself to the enmity of his people while knowing the Romans will give her a traitor's death if Veii falls. Semni, a reckless Etruscan servant in the House of Mastarna, embroils herself in schemes that threaten Caecilia's son and Semni's own chance for love. Pinna, a destitute Roman prostitute, uses coercion to gain the attention of Rome's greatest general at the risk of betraying Caecilia's cousin.