Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Alternate History

Nineteenth-century art expert Derryn Witt documents an impossible find: gorgeously detailed paintings depicting the modern world…from 1859. But when a massive solar flare forces a shutdown of all integrated technology, her discovery is jeopardized. The threat intensifies when a group of rebels attack the college, their movement resting upon the rejection of technology. Derryn flees to New York with the help of a sympathetic Sovereign, under the guise of being one herself.

Thirteenth-century Europe has been saved from annihilation at the hands of the Mongols, to be sure, but new and terrible threats are at hand: political and religious turmoil threaten to turn the warriors' world upside down once more. Painted against a rich backdrop of medieval mysticism and Russian folklore, Katabasis weaves together the tales of victor and victim alike in a fearless exploration of what it means not just to survive, but to truly live again.

The vampire King Louis XIV reigns supreme over a terrorized France, determined to protect his empire at any cost. When a mysterious renegade vampire named the Lady of Miracles ascends to power in an underworld Parisian court and claims the city for herself, Louis feels threatened for the first time in centuries. His secret weapon to fight back? Mademoiselle Diane de Gastefriche, a young baronette who earned the king’s trust through her own cunning and wit. He sends Diane to squash the new threat to his power.

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.

Echo London never wanted to be the curator of the People’s Library, a digital collection of human consciousness. But when she’s assigned as its head librarian, Echo is entrusted with humanity’s greatest minds and historical figures, all of whom have been recreated through controversial consciousness-capturing technology that lets visitors interact with the dead. But an anti-tech rebellion is stirring. When a rebel attack results in tragedy, a mysterious woman wearing an ancient death mask leaves behind cryptic final words for Echo: It all begins with nothing.

What if Europe had never colonized the world? It is a world that never had overseas empires, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Protestant Reformation. There is, however, in an obscure island nation called England, a woman running for her life. Marie, Duchess of Suffolk, has no choice. In this society, women are a reproductive commodity. Marriage is the only available occupation. And barren wives like Marie are expendable trade. After absconding with the family jewels, Marie fakes her own death and seeks a life outside the confines of her family and her marriage.

London, 1958. By crafting magical outfits for his friend, Princess Katherine, cloth mage Paul Gallagher is getting ahead. It’s not a seamless path. Not since the Virtuis Party came to power. The far-right faction is using criminals to create a protective barrier around England. The enchanted uniforms the prisoners wear may beget a demand for mages, but using luckless convicts as tools for warmongering reactionaries isn’t Paul’s dream for cloth magic.

CHRONOS historians Madi, Tyson, and Katherine and their cohorts are on the enemy’s trail, fixing the mess that sociopath Saul Rand has made of history - and of the Temporal Dilemma rules. Another time shift is on the horizon, and this time, it’s one that reflects Saul’s twisted vision. When the shift hits, it plunges the United States into a modern dark age where superstition trumps science and 17th-century witch hunts are no longer a thing of the past. But Saul has added a new hurdle to this insane reality: he’s hunting the Sisters of Prudence.

It’s 1914. The Great War grips the world - and from the Western Front a strange story emerges...a story of St. George and a brigade of angels descending from heaven to fight beside the beleaguered British troops. But can there be any truth to it?

When two time-traveling historians cross paths during one of the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, history goes helter-skelter. But which one broke the timeline? In 2136 Madison Grace uncovers a key to the origins of CHRONOS, a time-travel agency with ties to her family’s mysterious past. Just as she is starting to jump through history, she returns to her timeline to find millions of lives erased - and only the people inside her house realize anything has changed.

1923 in Midland, Texas, and Miss Dara falls in love with her best friend - who also happens to be a girl. Terrified, Miss Dara takes a job at Sugar Land Prison for men, hoping to keep her secret attractions under lock and key. Once there, she befriends inmate and soon-to-be legendary blues singer Leadbelly, who sings his way out (true story) - but only after he makes her promise to free herself from her own prison. Sugar Land is a triumphant, beautiful debut novel about the heart’s refusal to be denied what the heart wants.

Ocyrhoe, a young, cunning fugitive from Rome, safeguards a chalice of subtle but great power. Finding herself in France, she allies with the persecuted, pacifist Cathar sect in their legendary mountaintop stronghold, Montségur. There she resists agents of the Roman Church and its Inquisition, fights off escalating, bloody besiegement by troops of the King of France, and shields the mysterious cup from the designs of many. Percival, the heroic Shield-Brethren knight from The Mongoliad, consumed by his mystical visions of the Holy Grail, is also drawn to Montségur - where the chalice holds the key to his destiny.

When a merchant appears at the Catalonian chapter house of the Shield-Brethren, seeking to hire guards for his caravan, young Andreas is suspicious. Knights with his martial prowess are above protecting mere cargo wagons. Yet Andreas’s wanderlust outweighs his concern, and soon the group is headed to the merchant’s mountain village - and into great danger. As the caravan approaches, a woman suffering from terrifying visions feverishly paints her latest revelation - in her own blood. The image horrifies her fellow villagers, who fear an imminent attack, or worse, the return of the brutal Inquisition.

Many were displeased with the “peace” King Richard of England brokered in the Holy Land, and his return from the Crusades wasn’t greeted with cheers, but rather shackles. Now a “guest” of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Lion-Hearted is being held for an exorbitant ransom…so much money that it seems unlikely that the silver will make its way from Britain to Germany.

Raphael of Acre, a young initiate of the Shield-Brethren, becomes a war hero during a vicious battle for control of a Muslim stronghold. One of his companions, Eptor, is wounded in the battle and falls under the influence of strange hallucinations. When a superior plots to manipulate Eptor’s visions into war propaganda, Raphael struggles between duty to the cause and duty to his faith. Unable to reconcile his roles as Christian and soldier, Raphael seeks out an unlikely source of counsel - Francis of Assisi.

Sigrid is a Shield-Maiden who yearns to break free of the restrictions of her father’s home and join the Sworn Men in an actual raiding expedition. When a small diplomatic party that includes members of the Shield-Brethren lands at her family’s holding on Göttland, the party’s second in command, Halldor, sees in Sigrid a vision of beauty and power that might challenge - and even destroy - many men.

Some time after the events of Fiendish Schemes, George Dower finds himself a widower, of sorts. On her deathbed, Miss McThane entrusts Dower with a small, ticking clockwork box. The box is mysteriously linked to her. When she breathes her last, the box stops ticking and Dower is able to open it, to find hundreds of letters - written in an unknown hand, signed only with the initial S. They’re not love letters, but refer instead to the letter-writer’s ongoing search for some other person. The last is a simple note, reading “Found him”...

An untested group of Shield-Brethren initiates stand before the sprawling Mongol army in a bloody circus of sadistic violence, while a hardened company of their finest roam the desolate wasteland of the Mongol empire, wrapping their dead in blood-soaked soil and struggling to find the strength to fight even as they mourn. The warrior-monks, both in the East and the West, sharpen their swords for a final battle. The Khan of Khans must be slain if Christendom is to survive.

It is 1777, in a colonial America where the internet, social media, and ubiquitous electronic communications are fully woven into the fabric of society. Hours after a top-secret Congressional sub-committee uploads the Articles of Confederation, a mysterious internet plague breaks loose in the cloud, killing any user who accesses a networked device.

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler's parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the 20th century, Mailer's novel delivers myriad twists and surprises along with characteristically astonishing insights into the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all.