Showing results by narrator "Mark Bramhall" in All Categories

In this panoramic tale of manifest destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer.

After a company retreat in a remote country house, senior employees of Alemany Cosmetics return with a dark secret. They’ve each received an anonymous, menacing email of only two words: “Never forget”. What’s worse, the message is accompanied by a nightmarish photo attachment showing the bodies of dogs—hung to death from a tree—near the very same farm estate they just visited. When they begin killing themselves, one by one, the connection between the shocking photos and the suicides baffles Barcelona law enforcement and corporate think tanks alike.

It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin - the German-Jewish critic and philosopher - has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.

The envelope is unremarkable. There is no return address. It contains a single folded sheet of white paper. The envelope drops through the mail slot like any other piece of post. But for the nine complete strangers who receive it—each of them recognising just one name, their own, on the enclosed list—it will be the most life altering letter they ever receive. It could also be the last, as one by one, they start to meet their end.

It’s hard enough being barely above average when your brothers include the deadliest swordsman of the realm, a saint, prodigies - and the greatest hero of the Middle Ages. But what if you haven’t seen your queen of love in years and she's imprisoned by a one-armed religious zealot and lethal librarians? Even worse, your only allies are vicious killers with rather bad manners and outsized appetites who all want to murder your heroic brother.

This exciting novel about Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, and Lillian Hellman, author of The Children’s Hour, reintroduces their larger-than-life personalities and the vicissitudes of their affair that spanned three decades.

A hard-charging CEO of a large enterprise, Ben Feder discovers that he is losing the very things that sustained him over his years of business success. Unsettled by his insight and determined to rebuild family relationships and rejuvenate his sense of purpose, he risks his career on a life-altering physical and emotional journey. Together with his wife and children, Feder sets off for an exotic island on a self-prescribed sabbatical year. That experience transforms them all.

What happens when loneliness engulfs us? How do we manage life when the absence of adequate connections becomes an excruciating hunger? During his extraordinary decades-long career as an attorney, J. W. Freiberg consulted on hundreds of cases involving clients affected by chronic and debilitating loneliness. Here, in four adapted stories from his practice, he reveals how loneliness can impact us in every season of our lives.

On a farm in Jutland, Fredrik Gregersen struggles to keep his children fed, supplementing his income by smuggling refugees through Denmark into Sweden. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Polina, a young Polish Jew, has been forced into prostitution by the Nazis. When Fredrik steals an heirloom necklace from a helpless Jewish family, his fate becomes intertwined with Polina's, entrapping them both in a complex web that takes decades to unravel.

Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald 'Sully' Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him. Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-boyfriend.

There's a place beyond this world, beyond the land of the living, where ghosts go to write their unfinished stories - stories that ended too soon. It's a place for unexplained phenomena: mysteries that have never been solved, spirits that have never been laid to rest. And there's only one way in or out. It's called the Library, and you can get there with a special key. But beware! Don't start a story you can't finish. Because in this library, the stories you can't finish just might finish you.

From the up-and-coming young American writer who has contributed to McSweeney's and written for the New Yorker comes a masterful collection of short stories that has already received rave reviews from many of the most prominent writers working today. Some of the stories are comic masterpieces, some embody as dark a vision of the universe as you are likely to encounter, and all of them showcase a writer grappling with the great questions of modern life.

Willard is a tormented veteran who can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from a slow death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his 'prayer log'. Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, trawl America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. The spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick are running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin, Willard and Charlotte's orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

From the author of the international publishing sensation Life of Pi comes the story of a quest for a lost relic. The journey takes us from Africa in the 1600s through Portugal at the turn of the last century to contemporary North America. Showcasing Martel's trademark delight in the fundamental stories that unite us, The High Mountains of Portugal unfolds with a dazzling lightness of touch.

After Sara’s father, famous sculptor Thomas “TR” Harlow, is badly injured in a fire, she’s suddenly forced to care for a man who is more of a stranger than a parent. Once known as his muse, Sara long ago lost her father to his desire to live the celebrity life. Now TR’s abrasive and unpredictable presence in her home is reopening old wounds - and causing the rift in her already-strained marriage to deepen. As her young son begins bonding with the grandfather he never knew, Sara must decide if she can find it within herself to forgive the man who broke her heart all those years ago.

This is an eye-opening exploration of the many types of work that go into building our world - from the making of a bridge to a wind farm, an amusement park, and even the books that line a library's shelves. An architect may dream up the plans for a house, but someone has to actually work the saws and pound the nails. This audiobook is a thank-you to the skilled women and men who work tirelessly to see our dreams brought to life.

MediMiracle Corporation manufactures Sophrosyne, a miracle cure for opiate addiction. Ellison Ricard, a research-analyst for the company, claims to have uncovered data that proves Black users of Sophrosyne experience fatal side effects far more often than people of other races. When Ricard confronts MediMiracle’s charismatic founder and CEO, Peyton Burke, a violent confrontation ensues. The wheelchair bound Ricard—a Black man himself, severely injured years earlier—is fired that very day.

The year is 1843; the place: New York City. Aurora reporter Walt Whitman arrives at the Tombs prison yard, where his friend, Lena Stowe, is scheduled to hang for the murder of her husband, Abraham. Walt intends to present evidence on Lena's behalf, but Sheriff Harris turns him away. Lena drops to her death, and Walt vows to posthumously exonerate her.

In this collection on love and loss, hopes and dreams, and memory and regret, The Old Men Who Row Boats and Other Stories takes the listener on an insightful journey through Spain and Portugal. These 14 stories convey real emotion through compelling, simple language and human interaction that resonates in the authentic beauty of small moments.

In this emotional debut, a New York executive, restless in his success, is sent to West Virginia,where a small-town girl and her son open his eyes to a richer life than hecould have imagined. On the surface, Charlie Burden and Natty Oakes could not be more different: she, the daughter of many generations of rural farmers; he, an executive at a multinational engineering firm. But in each other they find the new lease on life they both so desperately need.