Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

Francine du Plessix Gray’s beautifully realized historical novel reveals the untold love story between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette. The romance begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing nobleman first meets the mesmerizing 19-year-old dauphine, wife of the reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter launches a love affair that will span the course of the French Revolution.

D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.

In 1897, Odd Einar Eide returns home from a near-death experience in the Arctic only to discover his own funeral underway. His wife, Inger, stunned to see him alive, is slow to warm back up to him, having spent many sleepless nights convinced she had lost both him and their daughter, Thea, who traveled to America two years earlier but has yet to send even a single letter back to them in Hammerfest, their small Norwegian town at the top of the earth.

Central Park is perhaps the most well-trod and familiar green space in the country. It is both a refuge from the city and Manhattan's very heart; a respite from the urban grind and a hive of activity all its own. Eight hundred forty-three carefully planned acres allow some 37 million visitors each year to come and get lost in a sense of nature. Unsurprisingly, the park also inspires a wealth of great writing, and here Andrew Blauner collects some of the finest fiction and nonfiction - 20 pieces in all.

Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia's richest man, he now resides in exile in London, where he is waging a crusade against the kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion is protected by armed bodyguards. Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia's vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov's name off his kill list.

Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his childhood and teenage years, his infatuation with rock music, his relationship with his loving yet almost invisible mother and his distant and unpredictable father and his bewilderment and grief on his father’s death. When Karl Ove becomes a father himself, he must balance the demands of caring for a young family with his determination to write great literature. Knausgaard has created a universal story of the struggles, great and small, that we all face in our lives.

From master storyteller Stewart O'Nan comes a timely moral thriller about the Jewish underground resistance in Jerusalem after the Second World War. In 1945, with no homes to return to, Jewish refugees set out for Palestine by the tens of thousands. Those who made it were hunted as illegals by the British mandatory authorities there and relied on the underground to shelter them; taking fake names, they blended with the population, joining the wildly different factions fighting for the independence of Israel.

This friendly, fun biography series focuses on the traits that made our heroes great - the traits that kids can aspire to in order to live heroically themselves. Each book tells the story of an icon in a lively, conversational way that works well for the youngest nonfiction listeners and that always includes the hero's childhood influences. This book features Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance artist and inventor. 

New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by the Chinese diaspora around the world. Danlin's explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers - and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom.

Would you risk your life for total strangers? When she is assaulted while on vacation in Key West, the unforgettable Kate Bowers marshals her skills as a former homicide detective and Army MP. As she hunts down her assailant, she discovers women enslaved in a high-end sex trafficking operation on a luxury super-yacht. That’s only the first complication. The president’s daughter is missing and in mortal danger.

Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforth's life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question. As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world.

Paolo the dachshund is trapped. Although he lives in Rome, a city filled with history and adventure, he is confined to a hair salon. Paolo dreams of the sweet life - la dolce vita - in the Eternal City. And then, one day, he escapes! Paolo throws himself into the city, finding adventure at every turn. Join our hero as he discovers the wonders of Rome: the ruins, the food, the art, the opera, and - of course - the cats. Everyone will cheer the daring of this bighearted dog, whose story shows that even the smallest among us can achieve great things.

After a harrowing tour in Afghanistan, intelligence officer Amy Cornwall is eager to return home to her husband and their young daughter. But as soon as she steps into the house, she knows that something is terribly wrong. Her family is missing. The kidnappers leave a message: if she wants to see her husband and daughter alive again, Amy must complete a near impossible task...and she has 48 hours to do it. She'll do whatever it takes to bring them home.

A masterpiece of American individualism, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is considered by many to be one of the most important pieces of political and philosophical writings ever produced by an American. Thoreau wrote the essay because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. When the government engages in actions that are unjust, he believed that citizens should completely withdraw their support of the government and stop paying taxes, even if it results in imprisonment or violence.

In Naples, a new kind of gang rules the streets: the ‘Paranze’, the ‘Children’s Gangs’, groups of teenage boys who divide their time between Facebook or playing Call of Duty on their PlayStations and patrolling the streets armed with pistols and AK-47s, terrorising local residents in order to mark out the territories of their Mafia bosses.

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet old man and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to. Until Josef tells her the evil secret he's kept for sixty years…

This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the story's told. In this extraordinary audiobook, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

Jean Zimmerman's new novel tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart eighteen-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society. Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of Edith Wharton - era Manhattan like a bomb. A series of suitors, both young and old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl's illicit lovers begin to turn up murdered.

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.

Joyce always had an uneasy feeling about her son, Michael. Serious baby, then a serious kid, then a serious grown-up. His large, dark eyes. He always kept everything inside. When he misses coming home for his birthday, Joyce believes the worst and takes a drive upstate, desperate to find him. What she finds will strain her sanity. Intimate and unsettling, The Wolfs Mother Speaks is perfect for fans of Jeff VanderMeer, Victor LaValle, and Drew Magary.