Showing results by narrator "Mark Bramhall" in All Categories

Largely autobiographical, Christ in Concrete opens with the dramatic Good Friday collapse of a building under construction, crucifying in concrete an Italian construction worker, whose death leaves his pregnant wife and eight children impoverished. His oldest son, Paul, at just 12 years old, must take over his father’s role—and his job.

Father Dan is homeless. Dismissed by his conservative diocese for eccentricity and insubordination, he's made his exile into a kind of pilgrimage, transforming his Toyota Camry into a mobile monk's cell. He intends to spend his trip in peaceful contemplation. But then he sees a minivan sideswipe a coyote. Unable to suppress his Franciscan impulses, he takes the wild animal in, wrapping its broken leg with an old T-shirt and feeding it Spam with a plastic spoon. But the coyote is far from the only oddity fate has delivered into this churchless priest's care....

Marcus is an agent of the Library - a place filled with tales that don't have an ending. Mysteries that won't be solved until Marcus and his friends Theo and Lu step in to finish them. Before it's too late. Because mysterious accidents are disturbing a middle school in Massachusetts. Windows shatter for no reason. Bleachers collapse at a pep rally. Most of the students think they're just having a string of bad luck, but Marcus suspects something a lot more dangerous. Something like witchcraft. When the black moon rises, this story must come to an end...one way or another.

Man Riding West starts out innocently enough when Jim Gary comes upon the trail camp of three men pushing a herd of cattle. One of the men has a shotgun, something usually not carried by men on a trail drive, but Jim asks for coffee anyway. Red Slagle, the ramrod of the outfit, is friendly enough - and even offers Jim a job riding herd. Jim can use the money, and the herd is moving the same direction as Jim, who is on his way to work for Mart Ray, an old saddlemate, now foreman for the Double A brand. It’s the same brand as that on this herd....

Narrated by the irreverent, angry, despairing yet determined Detective Minami of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, Tokyo Year Zero tells the riveting, complex story of the hunt for Kodaira Yoshio - known as the Japanese Bluebeard - a decorated former Imperial soldier who raped and murdered at least 10 women amidst the turmoil of Tokyo between May 1945 and August 1946. And it is the story of Detective Minami, chasing down, and haunted by, his own memories of atrocities that he can no longer explain or forgive.

The New York Times best-selling author of Ordinary People crafts a gripping, character-driven novel of suspense that explores the fragile dynamics of family in the aftermath of tragedy.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Diehl is happy toiling away as a criminal law associate at an old line New England firm where she very much appreciates that most of her clients are behind bars. Everyone at Traynor, Hand knows she abhors face-to-face contact, but one weekend, with all the big partners away, Sophie must handle the intake interview for the daughter of the firm's most important client....

During his extraordinary decades-long career as an attorney, J. W. Freiberg consulted on hundreds of cases involving clients affected by chronic and debilitating loneliness. Here, in four adapted stories from his practice, he reveals how loneliness can impact us in every season of our lives. A fascinating cast of characters emerges.

A chill inducing and masterful collection of vampire tales, culled from the dark recesses of the nefarious and world renowned Vampires Archives. Coffins, the third volume in the mass market series, contains some of the best of the best of vampire fiction. Including Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Edgar Allan Poe, and F. Paul Wilson, it takes its listeners deep inside the crypts of the living dead, in all their supernatural splendor.

Plucked from the Mark Twain archives at the University of California, Berkeley, Twain's notes now form the foundation of a fairy tale picked up over a century later. With only Twain's fragmentary script and a story that stops partway as his guide, author Philip Stead has written a tale that imagines what might have been if Twain had fully realized this work. This is a story that reaches through time and brings us the debut children's book of America's most legendary writer, envisioned by one of today's most important names in children's literature.

Even though he's got 3.5 million copies of books in print, Pastor Robert Morgan writes only one short fiction story each year - an original work he shares with his church on Christmas Eve. Now with a fresh new cover and six new stories, the entire collection of 12 is available in this beautiful volume. Beginning is a foreword by David Jeremiah, followed by adventures that evoke the splendor and love found at the manger over 2000 years ago.

There's a place beyond this world, beyond the land of the living, where ghosts go to write their unfinished stories - stories that ended too soon. It's a place for unexplained phenomena: mysteries that have never been solved, spirits that have never been laid to rest. And there's only one way in or out. It's called the Library, and you can get there with a special key. But beware! Don't start a story you can't finish. Because in this library, the stories you can't finish just might finish you.

Jerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice. Now, in Art Is Life, Jerry Saltz draws on two decades of work to offer a real-time survey of contemporary art as a barometer of our times. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture.

It’s 1975, and Shaltiel Feigenberg - professional storyteller, writer and beloved husband - has been taken hostage: abducted from his home in Brooklyn, blindfolded, and tied to a chair in a dark basement. His captors, an Arab and an Italian, don’t explain why the innocent Shaltiel has been chosen, just that his life will be bartered for the freedom of three Palestinian prisoners. As his days of waiting commence, Shaltiel resorts to what he does best, telling stories - to himself and to the men who hold his fate in their hands.

The world has changed forever. Across America, technology has been eclipsed by magic, and people are changing into the embodiments of their darkest desires and deepest fears. In this new time, former lawyer Cal Griffin has united a small group of outcasts to battle the chaos.

At the center of the tale is Silvio: in his younger years he fled the boredom of the village and made a life of travel and adventure. Now he's returned, living in a farmer's hovel in the middle of the woods, and, much to his family's chagrin, perfectly content with his solitude.

From the Nobel laureate and author of the masterly Night, a deeply felt, beautifully written novel of morality, guilt, and innocence. Despite personal success, Yedidyah - a theater critic in New York City, husband to a stage actress, father to two sons - finds himself increasingly drawn to the past. As he reflects on his life and the decisions he’s made, he longingly reminisces about the relationships he once had with the men in his family (his father, his uncle, his grandfather), and the questions that remain unanswered.

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens our sense of his achievements and disappointments - his success in seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural poor.

A novel of psychological suspense in which a private adoption's dark consequences play out years later, at an elite prep school in the Berkshires.

On a farm in Jutland, Fredrik Gregersen struggles to keep his children fed, supplementing his income by smuggling refugees through Denmark into Sweden. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, Polina, a young Polish Jew, has been forced into prostitution by the Nazis. When Fredrik steals an heirloom necklace from a helpless Jewish family, his fate becomes intertwined with Polina's, entrapping them both in a complex web that takes decades to unravel.