Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Coming of Age

Thirteen year old Callie is accused of bullying at school, but Rebecca knows the kind and gentle girl she's raised is innocent. While Callie is eventually exonerated, threatening notes from her alleged victim, Robyn, begin to surface, and as the notes become suicidal, Rebecca is determined to save the unbalanced Robyn. As Rebecca navigates school disapproval and mean moms while trying to comfort Callie and help Robyn, she recalls her own intense betrayals and best-friendships at that age.

A few months after doctors tell him he has only a year to live, a precocious fifteen-year-old from a small town in Virginia has an intense reaction to The Catcher in the Rye. Deriving inspiration from J. D. Salinger’s narrative, Daniel Landon begins to question the intentions and authority of those around him in his own search for identity in the face of death.

Thanks to her wealthy and well-connected family, twenty-six-year-old Marta is used to getting whatever she wants. And what she wants is a good time. That is, until her father's wife - the woman who raised her - becomes ill. Beautiful young Marta is forced to witness her unfaithful, brutish father abandon her adoptive mother in her final moments. After her father's swift remarriage, Marta is surprised to discover that she is now the sole heir of her late mother's sizeable estate.

Kate Riordan fears two things as she grows up in the small Appalachian town of Swan River: that she’ll be a frustrated townie forever or that she’ll turn into one of the mysterious and terrifying wild girls, killers who start fires and menace the community. Struggling to better her chances of escaping, Kate attends the posh Swan River Academy and finds herself divided between her hometown - and its dark history - and the realm of privilege and achievement at the Academy. Explosive friendships with Mason, a boy from the wrong side of town, and Willow, a wealthy and popular queen bee from school, are slowly pulling her apart.

There's nothing like a cheating boyfriend to make you reconsider your life. And for Paris Tehrani, an impromptu move to Manhattan is the perfect reset button. Determined to avoid crawling back to her dead-end life in California, Paris applies for an assistant position to a hedge fund CEO. Sure, she's not totally qualified for the position, but who is these days? Fake it till you make it, right? Wrong. All too quickly, Paris realizes her "job" is to cater to the whims of a maniacal dictator intent on ruining her day and possibly even her life.

After the performance of a lifetime at the sold-out Stade de France, comic Édouard Bresson decides to vanish. Très drôle. His estranged son Arthur isn’t laughing. Édouard has sent him a letter and instructions to a puzzle - a treasure hunt for the son he ignored and misses and loves. If Arthur is willing to find out everything there is to know about his father and to understand the choices he made, all he has to do is put the pieces together. As the trail of clues winds its way through the past, what unfolds is a surprising journey of forgiveness, family, and self-discovery.

For misfit Libby Archer, social expectations for young women in Rochester, New York, in the mid-1950s don't work. Her father has died, leaving her without parents, and her well-meaning friends are pressuring her to do what any sensible single girl must do: marry a passionate, persistent hometown suitor with a promising future. Yet Libby boldly defies conventional wisdom and plans to delay marriage - to anyone - by departing for her uncle's Belfast estate.

Mikhail was fired for blowing a deal with the Italians and throwing an unauthorized office party that got him arrested, so he can’t believe his luck when his former boss offers him easy money and the Land Rover of his dreams for the simple job of teaching the boss’s son, teenager Sergei, how to "be a man". Of course, Sergei’s not the Internet-obsessed recluse his father believes, and Mikhail can’t help but fall for Sergei’s beautiful secret girlfriend, Marina, himself. Mikhail finds himself lying to his boss about Sergei’s activities, lying to Marina about Sergei’s identity, and lying to Sergei about his love for Marina.

Estranged from her bohemian Brooklyn family and fired for an impropriety at work, Claudia Silver is officially in over her head. When her younger sister lands on her doorstep urgently in need of help, twenty-something Claudia desperately wants to offer the rescue that she herself has longed for. But Claudia missteps dramatically, straight into a disastrous love affair that disrupts three very different New York households.

Juliette has come to Tel Aviv to be with the love of her life. But when she shows up at Elias’s apartment, he’s with another woman. With nowhere else to go, Juliette falls in with a tight-knit group of French expats living in this city by the sea. There’s Manu, the retired adult film star turned real estate agent; Diabolo, a former mobster and aspiring media mogul; and Olga, a head-turning beauty who becomes fast friends with Juliette. When Elias, a film school dropout, initiates a scheme intended to make him some fast cash, he unwittingly gets Juliette and Olga thrown in jail.

Leo Brice is dead, in a sense (not the traditional one). When the neurotic law student meets his cosmic match in Fiona Haeberle, an impulsive spirit and burgeoning soap star, all seems well - the two fall fast in love, and spend three years navigating their twenties in wide-eyed wonder. But once the fantastical woman who had defined his future bolts to pursue a fantasy life of her own, Leo is forced to come to terms with a reality that more closely resembles an epilogue than the story he'd hoped it might be.

Decisively aimless, dangerously self-destructive, and impulsively in and out of love, Elsie is a young woman who feels stuck. She has a tumultuous relationship with an abusive boyfriend, a dead-end job at a newspaper, and a sharp intelligence that is at odds with the bad decisions she's making. When her initial attempts to improve her life go awry, Elsie decides that a dramatic change is the only way to fix things - to somehow make more of herself, to find a new way to live.

Seventeen-year-old Çaglar is just another apathetic teenager - except when it comes to his sister, Çigdem, who he believes is the world's most beautiful and brilliant nine-year-old. Determined to display her genius, Çaglar grooms Çigdem's talent into a perfect Michael Jackson impersonation and pursues a sure route to fame: YouTube. Tragically, Çaglar's efforts are sabotaged by a little incident internationally known as the Taksim riots.

>In this beautifully imaginative collection, young people attempt to negotiate the often surreal terrain of childhood and adolescence where family, friends, clergy, and teachers often pose a threat instead of providing safe harbor. At the heart of the collection is the relationship between the meek narrator, his best friend alpha-male Clip, and the near-feral Roger - but there are also agoraphobic mothers, gorgeous babysitters from New Zealand, paranoid stoned veterans, and deeply sad older sisters.

Bright, ambitious Sophie Landgraf has landed a job as a Wall Street analyst. The small-town girl finally has her ticket to the American elite, but she doesn’t realize the toll it will take — on her boyfriend, on her family, and on her. It isn’t long before Sophie is floundering in this male-dominated world, and things are about to get worse. With the financial crisis looming, Sophie becomes embroiled in a multibillion-dollar merger that could make or break her career.

In the winter of 1836, a young journalist named Charles Dickens held an infant in his arms. Only eight months of age, Ruby Spriggs was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London. Crushing poverty seemed her only future. Through the intervention of kind patrons, the child blossoms into a young woman instilled with a love of learning and books. But the forces that Dickens fought against for most of his life threaten to destroy her.

Mayu. Mayu. Mayu. His whispered plea intertwines with a girl's silent cry. Help. Help. Somebody help. Everywhere Mayu turns she can feel the unspoken cries of the suffering. No one else seems to notice those most in need - but Mayu is compelled to do something. When she meets seven-year-old Anna, whose eyes speak to the unthinkable abuses in her past, Mayu knows the only escape for this victim is more violence. Mayu must unearth a brutal courage she never knew she had…Help. Help. Somebody help.

In this novel, award-winning author Dale Peck recounts the childhood of his father, Dale Peck Sr. Raised in poverty with seven brothers and sisters in suburban Long Island, terrorized by an abusive mother, Dale Sr.’s life changes when his alcoholic father dumps him at his uncle’s dairy farm in upstate New York. There, he begins to thrive, finding real love and connection with his Uncle Wallace and Aunt Bess. But ultimately, he is unable to outrun the chaos and violence of his old life.

The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand, without benefit of a wheel, measuring device, or any other tool. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for though is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends.

In the south of France farm life unfolds with the rhythm of the seasons. But the lives of these villagers in Amour Provence reflect the reality that the midi is a place of extremes, the summers of unbearable heat and the winters that are often rude and harsh. Like the climate, the characters find themselves swept away by storms of unannounced and devastating intensity. A vintner's adolescent son has a passionate romance with his schoolmate's mother and they suffer different and enduring consequences.