Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Contemporary Fiction

Margaret O'Shea never thought she'd find herself praying for the life of an English soldier. But with her grandson Eoin fighting in Iraq, Margaret can't do anything but say the rosary and hope that he comes home unscathed. His fiancée Katarzyna is a good Catholic girl, even if she goes to Nottingham's Polish church rather than its Irish one. What Margaret doesn't know is that Kathy's way of coping with Eoin's absence goes beyond prayer or reading horoscopes.

This doubt gnaws at him until he seizes an opportunity to have their blood tested and his horrible fears confirmed. Furious, confused, and hurt, he lashes out at his ex-wife. She retaliates by refusing to let him see Sam, and by telling the boy that his beloved father is really no such thing. Peter sues for the return of years of generous child support payments. In the ensuing courtroom battle, he is forced to confront whether he can still be a father to a boy who has no biological or legal connection to him.

In a world ravaged by a deadly pandemic, former rock star Chris Price leaves New York and sets out on a long journey home to England. It’s been six years of devastation since the plague killed his wife and daughter, and Chris is determined to find out if any of his family has survived. His passage leaves him scarred, in body and mind, by exposure to humankind at its most desperate and dangerous. But the greatest ordeal awaits him beyond the urban ruins, in an idyllic country refuge where Chris meets a woman, Pauline, who is largely untouched by the world’s horrors.

Writing under the name Beento Blackbird, Solomon Wilberforce writes best-selling books that reconnect Africa's children around the world with their glorious heritage. But when his father dies, Solomon is forced to break the cyclical patterns of his routine to attend the funeral, and all of the neat compartments of his life begin to tumble in on one another.

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.

At the age of 46, Daphne Miller is a first-time homeowner, a divorced college administrator whose daughter has moved in with her father. On a dirt road in the green mountains of southern Vermont, Daphne has at last found a home of her own. It may be tiny, but the rustic cottage is hers, and she’s determined to make it perfect. Just down the lane, Jack Hamilton and his young family move in. The newly appointed English professor, Jack has long dreamed of teaching at his prestigious alma mater, but his wife Carey Ann is terribly unhappy in rural New England.

In The Establishment, Howard Fast pulls the listener into the turbulent and passionate lives of the Dan Lavette family story begun in The Immigrants and continued in Second Generation.

World-famous anthropologist Gray Kaiser has almost everything. She is brilliance, self-sufficient, and beautiful. But at 59, one thing is still missing from her life. She has never been in love. Her assistant Errol McEchern has loved her for many years, but she doesn't know.

A daughter holds clues to her father's shocking secrets and her mother would risk anything to protect those secrets. Grace Truscott, in the biography of her father - a great civil-rights advocate and Senator - raises questions about a death. Was her own father guilty of killing Ned Emory, the husband of his African-American secretary?

Spitcat, a raging forest fire in the Sierra Nevada of California, had a lifespan of merely eleven days, "yet its effects could be reckoned ahead in centuries." So writes George R. Stewart in this engrossing novel of a fire started by lightning in the dry heat of September, and fanned out of control by unexpected winds. The book begins with the origins of the fire - smoldering quietly at first, unnoticed, then suddenly bursting into a terrifying inferno, devouring trees and animals over acre after acre and leaving nothing but desolation in its wake.

In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband.

When Alice's aunt Polly, The Pie Queen of Ipswitch, passes away, she takes with her the secret to her world-famous piecrust recipe. Or does she? In her will, Polly leaves the recipe to her extraordinarily fat, remarkably disagreeable cat, Lardo...and then leaves Lardo in the care of Alice.

Rachel and Rose, now women with grown children of their own, find themselves face-to-face at last with the destiny that has haunted them nearly half a century, since the two of them were switched at birth in the chaos of a hospital fire.

What confronts them now threatens to uproot a lifetime of deeply buried secrets: the impending marriage of Rose's capable and caring son to Rachel's emotionally troubled daughter.

Nell St. John is not living the life she imagined for herself - not by a long shot. She was once a glamorous young actress married to influential director, Marlow St. John. Together, the A-list couple was the toast of the town. But then Marlow’s star fades and tensions at home skyrocket. Marlow takes up with another woman and abandons Nell, leaving her to pay the bills and raise their two boisterous young children. A string of attractive suitors is not the answer to her lack of fulfillment, but what is?

At first glance Emma and Lucie seem very different, but they share an unspeakable vice. Beautiful, wealthy Emma appears to have it all with a loving husband and a seemingly successful life, but a restless craving has driven her to foolish actions. Meanwhile, young widow Lucie is struggling to make ends meet while coping with a troubled five-year-old.

When Lydia Southland, the glamorous star of a hit television series, balks at finishing her tell-all memoirs, Kate Weston, executive editor of a New York publishing house, soon finds herself on a plane to L.A. Fearful of revealing her life to public scrutiny, Lydia wants to cancel the project, and is none too thrilled when Kate shows up on her Benedict Canyon doorstep.