Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Literary Fiction

Packed with authentic Southern flavor and characters as colorful as an azalea in full bloom, The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes serves up stinging one-liners and earthy wisdom in equal measure.

Hayley Jo Zimmerman is gone. Taken. And the people of the small town of Twisted Tree must come to terms with this terrible loss and their place in it. In this brilliantly written novel, one girl's story unfolds through the stories of those who knew her.

With his simulated day-by-day reportage, prize-winning journalist-historian Jeffrey St. John makes you an eyewitness to the 1787-1788 political battle to ratify the U.S. Constitution. And what a battle it was!

Everyone knows the story of Aneira Hope Jones, the woman swallowed up by a tornado, and of the painful legacy bestowed upon her children. Larken, Gaelan, and Bonnie have grown into adulthood enshrouded in myth and unresolved grief, longing for closure and for release from their identities as motherless children. Both knowingly and unknowingly, the Jones siblings have condemned themselves to the task of interpreting and paying homage to their mother's life; thus, they have never claimed their own.

A neurotic young graduate student looking for distraction from her doomed thesis is inexplicably swept off her feet by a narcissistic philosophy professor. The obsession continues even after he has dumped her for someone even needier and she has given up on school and become a television writer. Meeting again in New York, they begin an adulterous affair that, of course, can only end in some kind of crisis.

The story opens in the country parsonage of Dr. Primrose, a kindly man who has a good heart, a good family, and a good income. Suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes, and he ends up in prison. Yet, despite all this calamity and injustice, the vicar never loses sight of Christian morality, a conviction which lends him genuine nobility and, in the end, also brings justice and the restoration of his family and fortune.

In the folklore of Eastern European Jewry, a dybbuk is a wandering soul that comes to rest in the body of a living person. In this case, the dybbuk is an impoverished student that possesses a young bride on her wedding day. She is taken to a great Chassidic rabbi for exorcism. But before he can expel the spirit, the sage must discover who the dybbuk was in life, why he has possessed the maiden, and most importantly, how to balance the scales of cosmic justice.

The German occupation of the Eternal City has ended, the war in Europe is over, the atomic bomb has yet to fall on Japan, and Rome is under the jurisdiction of the victors. An American Vatican prelate and lawyer, Brendan Doherty, is involved in two crusades. Abhorring capital punishment, he means to avert the execution of the Nazi collaborator Pietro Koch. In addition, as devil’s advocate, Doherty intends to prove the hypocrisy of Alessandro Serenelli, the man who 40 years before murdered Maria Goretti. Converted by a vision, Serenelli has spent his life, in prison and out, promoting the beatification of his victim.

Catherine, wife of one-handed Edgar, daughter of a Jewish merchant, and mother of two small children, is a Christian convert. Agnes, her estranged sister, has returned to Paris with the news that she is to marry a German lord. She wants no part of her Jewish family, except the sizable dowry her father can provide.

It's 1959. Sixteen-year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his 14th car and frankly doesn't know why. His divorced, working-class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy plant in Detroit and looks forward to the flask in his glove compartment and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan, home. Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Times reviewer called "one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction."

Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of stories set in a fictitious town in the 1890s, has long been considered Sherwood Anderson's masterpiece. Haunting and powerful, it draws readers into the streets and houses of Winesburg - and into the darkly complex lives of each of Anderson's unforgettable "grotesques."

A witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, Pepys chronicled the events of his day. His diary provides an astonishingly frank and diverting account of political intrigues, naval, church, and cultural affairs, as well as a quotidian journal of daily life in London during the Restoration.

When we meet septuagenarian Margaret Hughes, she is living alone in a mansion in Seattle with only a massive collection of valuable antiques for company. Enter Wanda Schultz, a young woman with a broken heart who has come to Seattle to search for her wayward boyfriend. Both women are guarding dark secrets and have spent many years building up protective armor against the outside world.

This spare, mesmerizing novel is Edith Wharton's money-can't-buy-happiness tale. Young Stephen Glennard, a lawyer, is poor, but he has an unanticipated gambling chip: a collection of love letters from a scorned, but now famous, lover, the distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn. To raise money for his forthcoming wedding to another woman, Stephen stoops to selling the letters.

The funny man is a middling comic in an unnamed city. By day he takes care of his infant son, by night he performs in small clubs, sandwiched between other aspiring comics. His wife waits tables to support the family. It doesn't sound like much, but they're happy, more or less. Until the day he comes up with it. His thing. His gimmick. And everything changes. He's a headliner, and the venues get bigger fast. Pretty soon it's Hollywood and a starring role in a blockbuster, all thanks to the gimmick.

Through 23 connected short stories, the author looks into the lives of the inhabitants of a small town in the American heartland. In a simple and intense style, these psychological portraits of the sensitive and imaginative of Winesburg's population are seen through the eyes of a young reporter-narrator, George Willard. Their stories are about loneliness and alienation, passion and virginity, wealth and poverty, thrift and profligacy, carelessness and abandon.

Newly divorced and robbed of his farm by his real-estate shark of an ex-wife, 60-something Cliff is off on a road trip across America, on a mission to rename all the states and state birds and redeem them from the banal names men have given them.Cliff's adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high-school teaching days 20-some years before, to a snake farm in Arizona owned by an old classmate, and into the high-octane existence of his son, a big-time movie producer.

In rural Turkey, Meryem is raped by her uncle. Outcast for shaming her family, she is expected to kill herself. Her commando cousin instead tells her he will take her to Istanbul. By chance, they meet Irfan, a celebrity professor who has left his wife, and the three embark on a journey that shows what unexpected things can happen in the space between wounded people.

On an early spring afternoon in rural New Hampshire, two brothers, Ed and Allard, are ice skating when they discover a girl who, with her dogs, has broken through thin ice and is caught in the river's eddy. They are able to rescue her, and as a result, a special bond forms among all three - but particularly between Allard and Sarah. As they grow up, the brothers remain close, creating their own film production company to shoot nature footage in the wild. Sarah, gaining success on her own as a writer, always manages to remain a part of their lives.

This luminous love story centers on Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq war confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist. When Honor touches Milo’s destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core.