Showing results by publisher "Highbridge Audio" in Literary Fiction

 At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything - her husband and only child dead within months of each other - leaving her loosely tethered to this world.

"Momma set me on the jukebox." So begins the personal story of Denise (Sweetie) Wooten, set between a post-civil rights era New York City and a growing but stale rural Alabama. We are thrust in the midst of a family longing for normalcy, but instead struggling with illness and all that comes with it - denial, anger, misunderstanding, and love. As cultures clash, we see the family through a child's eyes and walk with her as she makes sense of war fought far away, but with effects close to home, and a tragedy that changes her life forever.

Clinton Salter is the sheriff who never wanted to be sheriff. A World War II veteran and widower, he is elected due to the political machinations of his brother. His new territory is the fabled Madison County, North Carolina—a place of the steepest mountain ridges and most isolated coves and valleys. A place where the seasons matter more than the calendar and the past is as real as the present.

The long-awaited return of a quintessentially American storyteller "You're as likely to be hit twice by lightning on a Monday as see a wood chipper pull a man into its maw." So begins North of Ordinary, John Rolfe Gardiner's virtuosic story collection of survivors getting by despite the odds in...

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.

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. 

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.

J. D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn's Salinger is a young American World War II draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war - from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood. 

When his father leaves town, 12-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner - and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time criminal world. After a simple heist goes violently wrong, Rodney becomes an unwitting fugitive, swept away from his mother to the primitive mountain sanctuary of the mysterious Lester Fanning. 

A moose walks into a rural Maine town called Oslo. Pierre Roy, a brilliant 12-year-old, loses his memory in an accident. Three families are changed for worse and better as they grapple with trauma, marriage, ambition, and their fraught relationship with the natural world. Oslo, Maine inspects the strengths and limitations of seven average yet extraordinary people as they reckon with their considerable collective failure around Pierre's accident.