Showing results for "Brilliance" in World Literature

FBI Special Agent Daniela “Dani” Vega was seventeen when her mother murdered her father. Ten years after Dani’s own damning eyewitness testimony sealed her mother’s fate, she’s starting to have doubts. What if she got it all wrong? A veteran NYPD homicide detective agrees to reopen the closed case on one condition—Dani must help him find a serial killer who’s been operating throughout New York City for the past decade. If anyone can decipher his patterns, and his riddles, it’s a trained codebreaker like Dani. The killer knows this too. And his next riddle—and victim—is meant just for her.

Life is built on single decisions. Choose wisely. It’s one of life coach Nikki Parekh’s mottos. That and being open to opportunities and taking leaps without fear. But when Nikki accepts her boyfriend’s casual proposal of marriage, she wonders if it’s just too soon, too spontaneous—and so sudden that she seeks out the advice of her not-so-nurturing mother, Tara. To Nikki’s surprise, Tara, who raised her daughter to be self-sufficient, urges Nikki to trust her decision.

Anthony Opoka and Florence Okori are coming of age in Uganda in the 1990s. Outstanding students, they believe in being good humans before they are kidnapped and forced into the fanatical Lord’s Resistance Army. In a legion of young recruits, no one gets closer than Anthony to powerful messianic warlord Joseph Kony and his darkest secrets. To stay sane as he spirals through chaos, Anthony clings to his childhood lessons about being a good human. Florence’s upbringing grounds her, too, helping her keep her dreams alive even as she’s pulled deeper into the insanity of Kony’s war.

The Naik sisters escaped their traumatic past in Mumbai to come to the States, but their journeys have been vastly different. Simi is working toward a bright future as a pediatric nurse in a small town in Kentucky when Rupi shows up at her door in distress, on the run, and as always, dragging trouble in her wake. With Rupi’s safety in jeopardy, the sisters hatch a desperate plan to keep her in the country: Rupi must get married—and fast—even if it means Simi recruiting the man she’s been secretly dating as her sister’s groom. A perfect plan? Not quite. But there aren’t many alternatives.

Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in the Himalayan foothills of China - dubbed the true Shangri-La - and heads south into the jungles of Burma. But after the mysterious death of their tour leader, the carefully laid plans fall apart, and disharmony breaks out among the pleasure-seekers.

Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.

After her parents moved her and her brother to America, Preeti Desai never meant to tear her family apart. All she did was fall in love with a white Christian carnivore instead of a conventional Indian boy. Years later, with her parents not speaking to her and her controversial relationship in tatters, all Preeti has left is her career at a prestigious Los Angeles law firm. But when Preeti receives word of a terrible accident in the city where she was born, she returns to India, where she’ll have to face her estranged parents...and the complicated past they left behind.

On a December morning in 1982, the courtyard of a Beijing siheyuan - a lively quadrangle of homes - begins to stir. Auntie Xue’s son Jiyue is getting married today, and she is determined to make the day a triumph. Despite Jiyue’s woeful ignorance in matters of the heart - and the body. Despite a chef in training tasked with the onerous responsibility of preparing the banquet.

1940. Aiyi Shao is a young heiress and the owner of a formerly popular and glamorous Shanghai nightclub. Ernest Reismann is a penniless Jewish refugee driven out of Germany, an outsider searching for shelter in a city wary of strangers. He loses nearly all hope until he crosses paths with Aiyi. When she hires Ernest to play piano at her club, her defiance of custom causes a sensation. His instant fame makes Aiyi’s club once again the hottest spot in Shanghai. Soon they realize they share more than a passion for jazz - but their differences seem insurmountable....

Tenochtitlan, 1551. Thirty years after the Spanish Conquest destroyed everything she loved, the last Aztec empress has passed and left behind a pristine yet tenuous legacy for her children. As her last will and testament is read out, her daughter Isabel suspects that another account of her mother’s life may exist, hidden away, chapter by chapter, in the Valley of Mexico. Following each clue, Isabel is determined to find out who her mother really was and to discover the secrets she buried in order to survive.

There is a special bond between mothers and their sons, and it never goes away. This book contains some of the best stories and poems from Chicken Soup's library honoring that lifelong relationship between mothers and their male offspring.

After the tragic loss of his wife, Helen, Luke Hansard is desperate to keep her memory alive. In an effort to stay close to her, he reaches out to an online friend Helen often mentioned: a reclusive photographer with a curious interest in beautiful but broken objects. But first he must find her - and she doesn’t want to be found. Orla Kendrick lives alone in the ruins of a remote Suffolk castle, hiding from the haunting past that has left her physically and emotionally scarred.

Selling real estate full time, raising two young daughters, clinging to a slipping marriage—Audrey’s life is definitely a balancing act. But when a tumble down the stairs leaves her with more than just a bump on the head, she wakes up five years in the past, before the first tear in her marriage threatened her trust in Travis.

At the end of World War II, American army officer Captain Sean O’Sullivan is commissioned with rebuilding Berlin. Reeling from the death of his brothers at German hands and faced with the direct horrors of the Holocaust, O’Sullivan struggles against his animosity towards the nation he is helping restore. Meanwhile, Soviet forces blockade Germany in a bid for power, and the Western Allies must unite to prevent a communist takeover. When the airlift begins, the Allies find their deepest convictions tested as they fight against a threat even more dangerous than Hitler.

As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life - on the airwaves and in print - for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics.

Left suddenly penniless, the Honorable Sophia Grafton, a viscount's orphaned daughter, sails to the New World to claim the only property left to her name: a tobacco plantation in the remote wilds of colonial Virginia. Enlisting the reluctant assistance of a handsome young French spy - at gunpoint - she gathers an unlikely group of escaped slaves and indentured servants, each seeking their own safe haven in the untamed New World.

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.

Growing up on a farm in early twentieth-century rural Iceland, Karitas Ólafsdóttir, one of six siblings, yearns for a new life. An artist, Karitas has a powerful calling and is determined to never let go of her true being, one unsuited for the conventional. But she is powerless against the fateful turns of real life and all its expectations of women. Pulled back time and again by design and by chance to the Icelandic countryside - as dutiful daughter, loving mother, and fisherman’s wife - she struggles to thrive, to be what she was meant to be.

Martin Arrowsmith’s youthful curiosity for science has blossomed into an altruistic devotion to medicine and research. The doctor moves from small towns to big cities and from local offices to prestigious institutes. With every step upward that Arrowsmith takes in his career, his idealism is challenged by the greed, corruption, and commercialism of the scientific community, as well as by the temptations of women, money, power, and glory. Against the odds, and through loss and groundbreaking discovery, Dr. Arrowsmith must stay true.

It's the dawn of the twentieth century, post-Reconstruction, in the Commonwealth of Virginia. From the ancestral blood and sweat of its settlers - the immigrants, the slaves, the Cherokee - a new generation strives for prosperity in the united township of Grafton. Across the unfolding decades, childhood friends, mothers and daughters, wives and lovers will have their bonds tested. New hopes and dreams lie beyond the river, and as allegiances are challenged, a harmonious community finds itself grappling with inevitable cultural change.