Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while singlehandedly raising his unusual nine-year-old son, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is funny, loving, and filled with plans. He thinks and feels deeply, and can spend hours painting elaborate pictures of the endangered animals he loves. He is also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face.

Drawn to the ocean, 10-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife, Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.

In the remote Aspromonte Mountains in southern Calabria, Italy, three best friends embark on a life of crime in order to raise themselves up out of the poverty of their childhoods and the suffering of their parents. Black Souls draws on centuries of brigand lore, peasant rebellion history, mountain mythology, and colonial suffering to offer a gripping morality tale about how violence begets violence.

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 this urgent outpouring of American voices, our poets speak to us as they shelter in place, addressing our collective fear, grief, and hope from eloquent and diverse individual perspectives.

Continuing her tradition of writing provocative fiction about fascinating women, here Marie NDiaye gives us the story of a Great Female Chef - a chef who was celebrated as one of the best in a world where men dominate, and the way that her pursuit of love, pleasure, and gustatory delights helped shape her life and career. Told from the perspective of her former assistant (and unrequited lover), now an aged chef himself, here is the story of a woman's quest to the front of the kitchen - and the extraordinary journey she takes along the way.

Businessman Hunter Alden, Jr., thinks he has it all: a beautiful wife, a wonderful teenage son, and billions in the bank. However, his life is turned upside down one night when he finds the severed head of his chauffeur stuffed into a bag painted with his son's initials in blood. But the price to get him back might be too high - even for one of the world's richest men.

Neal Stephenson's sweeping, prescient new novel transports listeners to a near-future world where the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics.

A new kind of hero emerges on the streets of Washington. Kate Bowers is gritty, compassionate, and deadly. Her battle scars constantly remind her of the friends she lost in combat. Now one of DC’s top homicide detectives, she seeks justice for victims and a little redemption by hunting down a sadistic killer obsessed with capturing her attention.

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.

Someone is murdering the retired ladies of the lunch club. Jack McCall, ably assisted by Nora Burke and Max Logan, is hired by the governor - the brother of one of the victims. At the start, it seems a cushy job: nice weather, good pay, and an attractive Florida State cop is assigned to assist Jack. But in typical Jack McCall fashion, this murder case quickly turns screwy.

In False Flag, Israeli-born Dalia Artzi, a tactical genius and specialist at Princeton in the study of maneuver warfare, uncovers a fiendish plot by a small group of Israeli fanatics to commit a horrific crime against the United States government and pin the blame on Iran. At first Dalia, a pacifist, is hesitant to get involved. But, strong in her Jewish faith, she believes that the goal of her religion is not to crush one's enemies but to practice tikkun olam, to repair the world.

Modern-day Rome: Two American archaeologists suddenly die in an underground passageway in the Roman Forum leading to the buried rooms of Emperor Nero's Golden Palace. The Italian authorities conclude the deaths were caused by a devastating and highly contagious virus. Tom Stewart, an NYU forensic archaeologist who was present when the deaths occurred, becomes entangled in the race to find the supply of the virus - a race involving many powerful players desperately seeking the deadly contagion.

The epitome of intelligence, high-powered energy, and grace, Blaise McCarthy is an icon in the world of television news, asking the tough questions and taking on the emotionally charged issues of world affairs and politics with courage and insight. A single mother, she manages her well-ordered career meticulously, always prepared on the air or interviewing world-renowned figures and heads of state. To her audience, Blaise seems to have it all. But privately, and off the set, there is another untold story she has kept hidden for years.

In this gripping cyber thriller, the United States' top-secret quantum research labs are compromised by a suspected Chinese informant, inciting a mole hunt of history-altering proportions. CIA officer Harris Chang leads the charge, pursuing his target from the towering cityscape of Singapore to the lush hills of the Pacific Northwest, the mountains of Mexico, and beyond. The investigation is obsessive, destructive, and, above all, uncertain.

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.

Legendary art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon joins forces with a brilliant and beautiful master-thief to track down the world’s most valuable missing painting but soon finds himself in a desperate race to prevent an unthinkable conflict between Russia and the West.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.

Faldistoire’s grandfather thinks he’s a ghost. Sylvie’s mother reads Tarot and summons storm clouds to mete her witch’s justice. Behind his Dad-of-the-Year demeanor, Sébastien’s father hides dark designs. It’s Croustine’s grandfather who makes the boy a pair of slippers from the dead family dog, but it’s his dad, the uncannily named Kevin Lambert, who always seems to be nearby when tragedy strikes, and in the cemetery, under the expressionless gazes of toads, small graves are continuously being dug: Chicoutimi, Quebec, is a dangerous place for children.

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.