Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

When Luca Spaghetti (yes, that's really his name) was asked to show a writer named Elizabeth Gilbert around Rome, he had no idea how his life was about to change. She embraced his Roman ebullience, and Luca in turn became her guardian angel, determined that his city would help Liz out of her funk. Filled with colorful anecdotes about food, language, soccer, daily life in Rome, and Luca's own fish-out-of-water moments as a visitor to the United States, Un Amico Italiano is an audiobook that no fan of Eat, Pray, Love will want to miss.

Bridge and Nicole are hired by a wealthy businessman to find his daughter, who’s been kidnapped. Ava Dermott has been taken by someone named Gemini, and Bridge follows the clues, with the case taking him back to an old place he’d rather not go. But there’s something more to this case than meets the eye. It’s not a simple kidnapping. There’s something else at play. But will Bridge and Nicole find out what it is before it’s too late? Someone will get double-crossed. The question is: Who?

Centering us in Rome, but transporting us seamlessly into worlds as varied and exotic as they are emotionally real, these stories paint landscapes that are populated - vividly, hauntingly - by animals: from squawking, violent seagulls, to magical snakes, to a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road, to starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation.

At 34, Nick Walsh is a broken, deeply cynical man. Since the violent deaths of his parents 13 years earlier, he has been living alone in his childhood home in the suburban Midwest, drinking, drugging, and debauching himself into oblivion. A measure of solace is provided by his newly found relationship with Monica, a mysterious woman who seems to harbor as many secrets as he does. Obsessed with understanding the circumstances surrounding his parents' deaths and deranged by his relentless sorrow, Nick begins a campaign of spying on his neighbors via hidden cameras and microphones.

The year is 1806, and a new French Empire is rising from the shadow of the Reign of Terror. The citizens who shouted “Death to Kings” now chant “Vive l’Empereur!” for Napoleon, who is seeking to consolidate his power. While the peace and prosperity he promised is decadently enjoyed in Paris, fear spreads across Europe, and a new coalition has united against him.

There are two supreme predators on the planet with the most complex brains in nature: humans and orcas. In the 20th century alone, one of these animals killed 200 million members of its own species, the other killed none. Jeffrey Masson’s fascinating new book begins here: There is something different about us. In Beasts he demonstrates that the violence we perceive in the "wild" is mostly a matter of projection. We link the basest human behavior to animals, to "beasts" ("he behaved no better than a beast"), and claim the high ground for our species.

Amy O’Sullivan finds an invitation to a masquerade dinner party in her refrigerator, balanced atop a bottle of pinot grigio. If she accepts the invitation, Amy will be picked up by a limousine. She and four competing strangers must wear masks to the party. The winner will receive a choice of either 50,000 dollars cash or a free murder of anyone the winner designates.

Hal is a mild-mannered IRS bureaucrat who suspects that his wife is cheating with her younger, more virile coworker. At a drunken dinner party, Hal volunteers to fly to Belize in search of Susan's employer, the protagonist of Lydia Millet's much-lauded novel How the Dead Dream, who has vanished in a tropical jungle, initiating a darkly humorous descent into strange and unpredictable terrain.

Bridge is hired by a man employed by the CIA to find and rescue three kidnapped aid workers. After a rough start to their mission, Bridge gets the feeling that there is more to the story than he’s been told. Bridge and Nicole are given a couple of men local to the area to help facilitate the safe return of the aid workers. But can these men be trusted? Or are they loyal to the rebels that took the workers in the first place?

D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.

A new kind of hero emerges on the streets of Washington. Kate Bowers is gritty, compassionate, and deadly. Her battle scars constantly remind her of the friends she lost in combat. Now one of DC’s top homicide detectives, she seeks justice for victims and a little redemption by hunting down a sadistic killer obsessed with capturing her attention.

This is what we long for: the profound pleasure of being swept into vivid new worlds, worlds peopled by characters so intriguing and real that we can't shake them, even long after the story's told. In this extraordinary audiobook, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith brilliantly bridges the historical and the contemporary, tracking a collision course between a rare landscape by a female Dutch painter of the Golden Age, an inheritor of the work in 1950s Manhattan, and a celebrated Australian art historian who painted a forgery of it in her youth.

When Gus Dupin, literary critic and scholar, finds himself invited to the funeral of Peggy Firmin, celebrated novelist and now murder victim, he is determined to find out who killed her and why. As his investigation gets underway, it is not long before he finds himself at the center of an experiment at Marlow AI, a large language model company.

When you've got nothing left, you've got nothing left to lose. Cass County, Minnesota: A sheriff's deputy steps out of a diner on a rainy summer evening, and a few minutes later, he's lying dead in the mud. When BCA agent Kirk Stevens arrives on the scene, he discovers local authorities have taken into custody a single suspect: a hysterical young woman found sitting by the body, holding the deputy's own gun. She has no ID, speaks no English. A mystery woman.

Someone is murdering the retired ladies of the lunch club. Jack McCall, ably assisted by Nora Burke and Max Logan, is hired by the governor - the brother of one of the victims. At the start, it seems a cushy job: nice weather, good pay, and an attractive Florida State cop is assigned to assist Jack. But in typical Jack McCall fashion, this murder case quickly turns screwy.

As director of legendary Pommery Champagnes, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo was not generally someone in the habit of asking for help. Then, in 1993, an accident left him a quadriplegic. Passing his days hidden in his Paris townhouse, Philippe found himself the modern equivalent of an “untouchable.” The only person who seemed not to be bothered by Philippe’s condition was someone who had been marginalized his entire life - Abdel, the unemployed, uninhibited immigrant from the outskirts of society who would become Philippe’s caretaker.

These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction.

From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of the Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amid the old-moneyed decadence of Halifax.

Jean Zimmerman's new novel tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart eighteen-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society. Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of Edith Wharton - era Manhattan like a bomb. A series of suitors, both young and old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl's illicit lovers begin to turn up murdered.

It’s New York City, nowish. Lemurs brew espresso. Birds tend bar. There are bears on Wall Street, and a billionaire racehorse is mayor. Sea creatures are viewed with fear and disgust and there’s chatter about building a wall to keep them out. Alfonzo is a moody alpaca. His friend Mitchell is a sociable llama. They both work at City Hall, but their true passions are noise music and underground politics.