Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Genre Fiction

As an only son, Kiran has obligations - to excel in his studies, to honor the deities, to find a nice Indian girl, and, above all, to make his mother and father proud - standard stuff for a boy of his background. If only Kiran had anything in common with the other Indian kids besides the color of his skin. They reject him at every turn, and his cretinous public schoolmates are no better. Cincinnati in the early 1990s isn't exactly a hotbed of cultural diversity, and Kiran's not-so-well-kept secrets don't endear him to any group.

The members of an elite girls swim team are the reigning queens at their South African boarding school. And then Italian student Fiamma Coronna joins their ranks. Beautiful, athletic, and suddenly commanding all the coach's attention, Fiamma is the envy of every girl on the team—until the summer she walks into the rural grasslands surrounding the school and disappears.

When Eli Harpo was four, he underwent emergency open-heart surgery, flatlined on the operating table, and for a brief time, went to heaven and met Jesus. Or at least that's what his father, a loving but devout Baptist minister, has raised him to believe. Nine years later, Eli isn't so sure. His rounds with his father to evangelize at hospices and sell his father's self-published book, Heaven or Bust!, feel inauthentic and strange, especially now that he's started having sex dreams about Jesus.

Kate, a devoted wife and mother, has lived her whole life under the mythic bluff called Maiden Leap in a scenic river town. Her contented life is turned inside out when her former high school girlfriend Lucy returns to town as a graduate of a gay conversion therapy program. Now Kate must cope with her guilt and anger over how she and Lucy parted. As Kate struggles to balance her marriage to her reliable husband and her friendship with mercurial Lucy, their old flame is rekindled and a town secret is uncovered.

An honest story about recovery and coping with both past and present, framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the wide-reaching scope of the #metoo movement, Nirvana is Here explores issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor. Deftly told intertwining stories with rich, real characters are reminiscent of the sensuality and haunting nostalgia of Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name blended with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain's lyrics.

From an old family trunk comes a manuscript which never saw the light of day. Its pages tell of the life, times, and blackmail of a young queer aristocrat stepping into 1768 Society. A time of wig powder and heeled slippers. Duels and social climbers, when the most popular member of the government is declared an outlaw. Hugh Entwistle enters this world wealthy, witty, and well-connected. Everything to be a success—everything, except that thing stuck to the bottom of his heeled slipper.

Farah moves into Liberty House - an arcadia, a community in harmony with nature - at the tender age of six, with her family. The commune's spiritual leader, Arcady, preaches equality, non-violence, anti-speciesism, free love, and uninhibited desire for all. At 15, Farah learns she is intersex, and begins to go beyond the confines of gender, as she explores the arc of her own desires. What, Farah asks, is a man or a woman? What does it mean to be part of a community? What is utopia when there are refugees nearby seeking shelter who cannot enter?

Chef and Restaurateur Jake Ruiz left Newport, Washington, and never looked back. After his parents had practically disowned him for being gay, the town was nothing but bad memories for Jake. But, years later, a family emergency brings him back to his hometown. Grappling with the death of his husband and suddenly finding himself a single father to his five-year-old, Jake also has to now deal with his disapproving mother, his ailing father, a crumbling family restaurant, and the sudden reintroduction of Jake's childhood crush into his life, Colton Humphrey.

A woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and hair starts sprouting from the walls. These stories slip and slide between genres - from video games to fan fiction, body horror to choose-your-own-adventure - as characters cycle through giddying changes in gender, physiology, species, and identity. Collapsing boundaries between bodies and forms, these fictions interrogate the visceral, gross, and absurd.

When archaeologist Anna Baring announces the founding of the Lady Adventurers Club in May 1923, none of the other three members expect to ever meet again. After all, they live halfway around the world from each other. What could possibly bring them together once more? Then they each receive an unexpected letter. Anna has found a tomb that promises to be even grander than that of King Tutankhamun, and she wants them to come to Egypt for the opening. It's the find of the century. The tomb will make old Tut look like a pauper. But will the women of the Lady Adventurers Club get to see it?

Jade Brown, a twenty-four-year-old first-generation Jamaican woman living in Toronto, must find a way to pick up the pieces and discover who she is following the mysterious death of her twin sister. Grappling with her grief, Jade seeks solace in lovers and friends during an array of hilarious and heartbreaking adventures. As she investigates some of life's most frustrating paradoxes, she holds tight to old friends and her ex-girlfriend, lifelines between past and present.

Vulgarian Rhapsody immerses listeners in a fading bohemia of queer dive bars, drag clubs, and countercultural cafes. The book's narrator (a longtime frenemy of Harris who's every bit as snarky and annoying as he is) tells the story with sadistic relish and an ironist's eye for the absurd. Anyone feeling sickly from too many uplifting stories of personal empowerment, precious coming-of-age tales, or sugarcoated romances will find the perfect antidote in this hilariously acidic comedy of manners.

Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of "Nathalie Cray". When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's checkered past.

Ray Shepard is a wealthy architect who has mystified his friends by marrying Evelyn, a woman who works at a nail salon. Evelyn, in turn, hides a secret past about her former life in the circus, her ex-husband's mysterious death, and the colorful tattoos she carefully conceals under her clothes. When Evelyn starts to cave under the pressure of living in Ray's rarified world, she suggests they take in Ingrid, a 16-year-old girl with blue hair, a pet iguana, and no place to stay for the summer.

Annie Freckle is doing her best to be a productive and efficient worker among workers while living her life as a recovering alcoholic. Working as a barista in a busy downtown cafe, and as an accounting clerk for a quirky bookstore owner, Annie has her fair share of diverse characters that circle her wagon of life. It isn't until she signs up with Guardian Services—a monthly membership of fairy godmothers—that Annie's white bread life begins to take off in an adventure of self-examination and the pursuit of happiness.