Alison Layland - translator has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is The Silver Music Box.
The Silver Music Box
Summary
A captivating cross-generational novel from German author Mina Baites about a Jewish family divided by World War II and an inheritance with the power to bring them back together. 1914. For Paul, with love. Jewish silversmith Johann Blumenthal engraved those words on his most exquisite creation, a singing filigree bird inside a tiny ornamented box. He crafted this treasure for his young son before leaving to fight in a terrible war to honor his beloved country - a country that would soon turn against his own family. A half century later, Londoner Lilian Morrison inherits the box after the death of her parents. Though the silver is tarnished and dented, this much-loved treasure is also a link to an astonishing past. With the keepsake is a letter from Lilian's mother, telling her daughter for the first time that she was adopted. Too young to remember, Lilian was rescued from a Germany in the grips of the Holocaust. Now only she can trace what happened to a family who scattered to the reaches of the world, a family forced to choose between their heritage and their dreams for the future.
©2017 Mina Baites (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2017 by Alison Layland.
Your Perfect Year
Summary
A man consumed by a meaningless life is going to do something he’s never considered doing before. He’s going to enjoy the day... For hyper-particular publishing heir Jonathan Grief, the day starts like any other - with a strict morning fitness regimen that’ll keep his divorced, easily irritated, cynical, forty-two-year-old self in absolutely flawless physical condition. But all it takes to put a crimp in his routine is one small annoyance. Someone has left a leather-bound day planner with the handwritten title Your Perfect Year in his spot on his mountain bike at his fitness course! Determined to discover its owner, Jonathan opens the calendar to find that someone known only as “H.” has filled it in with suggestions, tasks, and affirmative actions for each day. The more he devotes himself to locating the elusive H., the deeper Jonathan is drawn into someone else’s rich and generous narrative - and into an attitude adjustment he desperately needs. He may have ended up with a perfect year by accident, but it seems fate has set Jonathan on a path toward healing, feeling, and maybe even loving again...if only he can meet the stranger who’s changing his life one day at a time.
©2019 by Charlotte Lucas. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Dreams of Silver
Summary
A single treasured keepsake links one unforgettable family across continents in this enthralling saga by Mina Baites, the author of The Silver Music Box. London, 1963. I dream about my sister almost every night. Lilian Morrison has one memento of her beloved sister, Emma: a battered silver music box. A family heirloom that was passed down through two world wars, the box was the key to Lilian’s recent, joyous reunion with the surviving members of her birth family, whom she lost many years earlier when she and her sister fled Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport. Now Lilian is compelled to investigate Emma’s final days after the girls were shipped to separate foster families in Britain and the time before Emma was killed in the London Blitz. In London, as she searches for clues to retrace the past, Lilian finds that the anguish of war still reverberates after two decades. In Cape Town, her grandmother courageously protects innocent victims of violence, and in Dublin, a gifted woodworker creates a music box that is strangely similar to the one that Lilian owns. Separate lives will intertwine on a path of healing and hope as the hazy secrets of the past finally come to light.
©2018 Mina Baites. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © by Alison Layland.
Butterfly Island
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Moonlit Garden comes the sweeping, romantic tale of one woman's quest across two continents and one hundred years of history to unearth her family's deepest secret. Diana Wagenbach is the sole survivor in a withering family tree fraught with secrets. When the first in a trail of clues is handed down to Diana by her great-aunt on her deathbed, along with a plea to assuage their family's guilt by revealing all, Diana obliges. She follows the clues - a picture here, a letter there, a pressed frangipani flower in a book - that carry her away from her philandering husband in Berlin to a charming manor in England and all the way to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka. Diana unravels the dramatic tale of her great-great-grandmother, Grace Tremayne, with the aid of Jonathan Singh, a local historian and writer - and someone with whom she feels a deep bond that sparks into romance. As Grace's tragic past in exotic colonial Ceylon is revealed and the family's sins come to light, Diana finds inspiration in her ancestor's courage and begins to rethink what happiness - and love - is worth, and how the surest route to peace is in setting the truth free.
©2012 Corina Bomann & Ullstein Buchverlag GmbH. (P)2017 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Translation © 2017 Alison Layland.
Storm Rose
Summary
When newly single Annabel Hansen moves to the coastal town of Binz, all she wants is to leave her former life behind. Soon after settling into a beautiful home overlooking the Baltic Sea, she stumbles upon an old fishing boat in a nearby harbor and discovers another purpose: to convert the bullet-riddled Storm Rose into a floating café. Yet there's more to this project than peeling paint and a bad engine. When Annabel finds an old letter from an East German defector who was smuggled to safety aboard the vessel, she and Christian - her handsome new business partner - set out to find its author. Together they'll unravel the Storm Rose's hidden past - and a shocking mystery that will change Annabel's life forever.
©2015 Corina Bomann and Ullstein Buchverlag GmbH (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Translation © 2016 Alison Layland.
Moonlit Garden, The
Summary
Lilly Kaiser had come to terms with her solitary, uncomplicated life after becoming a young widow. So when a stranger delivers an old violin to her Berlin antiques shop and tells Lilly it belongs to her, she's completely bewildered. Why should she be the one to inherit such an exquisite instrument? Together with her best friend, Ellen, and handsome musicologist Gabriel Thornton, Lilly sets out to explore the violin's legacy. From England to Italy to Indonesia, she follows its winding trail. Along the way, she learns of Rose Gallway, a beautiful woman of English and Sumatran descent who lived among Sumatra's lush gardens more than a hundred years earlier. A celebrated and sought-after musician, Rose once owned Lilly's violin and regularly played concerts for Sumatra's colonial elite - until, one day, she simply disappeared. As Lilly unravels the mystery behind Rose's story - and uncovers other unexpected secrets - she'll come to see her own life in an entirely new light. And as each shared discovery brings her closer to Gabriel, her heart might finally break its long-held silence.
©2015 Alison Layland; 2013 Corina Bomann and Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, Inc.