Brando Skyhorse has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 9 narrators. The most-rated is The Madonnas of Echo Park.
Take This Man
Summary
From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brando Skyhorse comes this stunning, heartfelt memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle or TheTender Bar, the true story of a boy's turbulent childhood growing up with five stepfathers and the mother who was determined to give her son everything but the truth. When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of "Brando Skyhorse", the American Indian son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin. Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican American neighborhood of Echo Park,California. There Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be over 30 years before Brando begins to untangle the truth of his own past, when a surprise discovery onlineleads him to his biological father at last. From an acclaimed, prize-winning novelist celebrated for his"indelible storytelling" (O, The Oprah Magazine), this extraordinary literary memoir captures a son's single-minded search for a father wherever he can find one and is destined to become a classic.
©2014 Brando Skyhorse (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Madonnas of Echo Park
Summary
"We slipped into this country like thieves, onto the land that once was ours." With these words, spoken by an illegal Mexican day laborer, The Madonnas of Echo Park takes us into the unseen world of Los Angeles, following the men and women who cook the meals, clean the homes, and struggle to lose their ethnic identity in the pursuit of the American dream. When a dozen or so girls and mothers gather on an Echo Park street corner to act out a scene from a Madonna music video, they find themselves caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. In the aftermath, Aurora Esperanza grows distant from her mother, Felicia, who as a housekeeper in the Hollywood Hills establishes a unique relationship with a detached housewife. The Esperanzas’ shifting lives connect with those of various members of their neighborhood. A day laborer trolls the streets for work with men half his age and witnesses a murder that pits his morality against his illegal status; a religious hypocrite gets her comeuppance when she meets the Virgin Mary at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard; a typical bus route turns violent when cultures and egos collide in the night, with devastating results; and Aurora goes on a journey through her gentrified childhood neighborhood in a quest to discover her own history and her place in the land that all Mexican Americans dream of, "the land that belongs to us again." Like the Academy Award–winning film Crash, The Madonnas of Echo Park follows the intersections of its characters and cultures in Los Angeles. In the footsteps of Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie, Brando Skyhorse in his debut novel gives voice to one neighborhood in Los Angeles with an astonishing— and unforgettable—lyrical power.
©2010 Brando Skyhorse (P)2010 Simon & Schuster