Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

December 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. Five years after their college graduation, the fiercely devoted friends at the heart of this richly absorbing novel remain as inseparable as ever.

Bridge and Nicole are hired by a wealthy businessman to find his daughter, who’s been kidnapped. Ava Dermott has been taken by someone named Gemini, and Bridge follows the clues, with the case taking him back to an old place he’d rather not go. But there’s something more to this case than meets the eye. It’s not a simple kidnapping. There’s something else at play. But will Bridge and Nicole find out what it is before it’s too late? Someone will get double-crossed. The question is: Who?

From a team of leading Ukrainian reporters, 77 Days of February is the bracingly powerful and intimate story of the early days of the Russian invasion of their thriving independent nation. It brings to the world, in a way not seen before, the experiences of everyday Ukrainians whose lives have been forever torn apart by this brutal and illegal war, and celebrates their monumental strength and resilience.

When an unsuspecting scientist and explorer discovers “The Red One,” a totem worshipped by headhunting natives, his fate is sealed.

Even today, it’s considered one of the most thrilling races in Olympic history. The one-hundred-meter sprint final at the 1924 Paris Games, featuring the world’s three fastest swimmers—American legends Duke Kahanamoku and Johnny Weissmuller and Japanese upstart Katsuo Takaishi—had the cultural impact of the Super Bowl and Wimbledon and the World Cup finals put together. Never before had a major swimming event featured athletes of different races, and never had it been broadcast live. Across the globe, fans held their breath.

The stories in Paul Alan Ruben's Terms of Engagement explore father and son as intimate enemies, each yearning to be understood, acknowledged, and validated by the other. Raw and gripping as delivered by a cast of incredible narrators, these nine stories take place in collision territory - where father and son engage in trying to repair their alienation.    

A lyrical and spellbinding story of love, loss, and war from a standout new voice in fiction. Katy Simpson Smith has already been acclaimed as an "heir apparent to to Michael Ondaatje and Marilynne Robinson." August 1793. On the hot, humid coast of North Carolina, nine-year-old Tabitha fills her pockets with fish bones and shells, to bring the ocean back to her room. The act, perhaps, of a child conceived at sea.

It's an age where high tech rules supreme. Computers do all the work while humans spend their lives enjoying drug-induced fantasies. Only a handful live and work in the traditional sense - managing the few affairs that still need attention. At the center of this system is the Mnemonist, the man who directs everything that happens. But now he has reached an advanced age and must carefully choose a dreamer capable of taking over his crucial position.

From the rugged mudflats of the Northwestern frontier to a rusting strip mall, West of Here is a conversation between two epochs. In his eagerly awaited second novel, Jonathan Evison tells the stories of the people who first inhabited the mythical town of Port Bonita in Washington State from 1887-1891. Moving ahead more than a century to 2005-06, he introduces those who live there now and must deal with the damage done by their predecessors.

In Domenica Ruta’s profoundly original novel, the end of the world comes once a year. Every May 28, humanity gathers to anticipate the planet’s demise - and to celebrate as if the day is truly its last. On this holiday, three intersecting sets of characters embark on a possibly last-chance quest for redemption. With sparkling wit, verbal ingenuity, and wild imagination, Ruta has created an alternate world in which an ancient holiday brings into stark reflection our deepest dreams, desires, hopes, and fears.

From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of the Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amid the old-moneyed decadence of Halifax. 

February 1939. Europe teeters on the brink of war. In a Hell’s Kitchen bar, Charles Mossman is reeling from the loss of his job and the demise of his marriage. His estranged wife and their six-year-old daughter, Emma, now live in a quiet brownstone in a German-speaking New York City neighborhood where support for Hitler is common. Charles, just out of prison, struggles to put his life back together, while across the hall from his family, a kindly Swiss couple have taken a liking to Emma. But Charles begins to suspect that they might not be who they say they are.

Brooks Haxton has been writing for years about the connections between human beings and the creatures we find fascinating. Mister Toebones, his new collection, draws its title from a nickname Haxton gives to a daddy longlegs he sees at his father's grave. In another poem, the poet and his mother, in search of a swimming hole, find a copperhead rearing to strike, about to birth its live young. Elsewhere, waist-deep in the Mississippi River, under the Atlantic Ocean, on the cracked ice of a frozen pond, even in outer space, the poet explores forces that seem past endurance.

Something is wrong out West. The Buffalo Soldiers sent to subdue the Cheyenne are deserting and joining their former enemy. The Sioux are leaving their reservations in hordes. And armed bands of Apaches have been sighted riding east of the Mississippi! Lemuel Rowland, formerly Poyeshao, a son of the Seneca, has spent his life learning the white man's ways. A Washington bureaucrat, he must now choose between his successful career and his ancient heritage.

Amy O’Sullivan finds an invitation to a masquerade dinner party in her refrigerator, balanced atop a bottle of pinot grigio. If she accepts the invitation, Amy will be picked up by a limousine. She and four competing strangers must wear masks to the party. The winner will receive a choice of either 50,000 dollars cash or a free murder of anyone the winner designates.

When Michael "Blue" Whitley -- a former party boy turned up-and-coming Brooklyn chef -- returns with three friends to the remote Canadian commune of his birth, he discovers that his entire life has been a carefully orchestrated lie. He is in fact someone else altogether, a replacement for a local child who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. He is something not quite human.