Alma Cuervo has narrated 31 audiobooks on Listento.it by 25 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 619 ratings. The most-rated is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Summary
2018 Audie Award Finalist for Multi-Voiced Performance From Taylor Jenkins Reid, "a genius when it comes to stories about life and love" (Redbook), comes an unforgettable and sweeping novel about one classic film actress' relentless rise to the top - the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine. Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jump-start her career. Summoned to Evelyn's Upper East Side apartment, Monique listens as Evelyn unfurls her story: from making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the late '80s and, of course, the seven husbands along the way. As Evelyn's life unfolds - revealing a ruthless ambition, an unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love - Monique begins to feel a very a real connection to the actress. But as Evelyn's story catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique's own in tragic and irreversible ways. Written with Reid's signature talent for "creating complex, likable characters" (Real Simple), this is a fascinating journey through the splendor of Old Hollywood into the harsh realities of the present day as two women struggle with what it means - and what it takes - to face the truth.
©2017 Rabbit Reid, Inc. All rights reserved. (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Handle with Care
Summary
When Willow is born with severe osteogenesis imperfecta, her parents are devastated - she will suffer hundreds of broken bones as she grows, a lifetime of pain. In this provocative story from the number-one New York Times best-selling author, "Picoult writes with unassuming brilliance" (Stephen King). Every expectant parent will tell you that they don't want a perfect baby, just a healthy one. Charlotte and Sean O'Keefe would have asked for a healthy baby, too, if they'd been given the choice. Instead their lives are made up of sleepless nights, mounting bills, the pitying stares of "luckier" parents, and, maybe worst of all, the what-ifs. What if their child had been born healthy? But it's all worth it because Willow is, funny as it seems, perfect. She's smart as a whip, on her way to being as pretty as her mother, kind, brave, and, for a five-year-old, an unexpectedly deep source of wisdom. Willow is Willow, in sickness and in health. Everything changes, though, after a series of events forces Charlotte and her husband to confront the most serious what-ifs of all. What if Charlotte had known earlier of Willow's illness? What if things could have been different? What if their beloved Willow had never been born? To do Willow justice, Charlotte must ask herself these questions and one more: What constitutes a valuable life? Emotionally riveting and profoundly moving, Handle with Care is an unforgettable novel about the fragility of life and the lengths we will go to protect it.
©2016 Jodi Picoult (P)2016 Simon & Schuster
In the Midst of Winter
Summary
New York Times and worldwide best-selling author Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil that offers “a timely message about immigration and the meaning of home” (People). During the biggest Brooklyn snowstorm in living memory, Richard Bowmaster, a lonely university professor in his 60s, hits the car of Evelyn Ortega, a young undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, and what at first seems an inconvenience takes a more serious turn when Evelyn comes to his house, seeking help. At a loss, the professor asks his tenant, Lucia Maraz, a fellow academic from Chile, for her advice. As these three lives intertwine, each will discover truths about how they have been shaped by the tragedies they witnessed, and Richard and Lucia will find unexpected, long overdue love. Allende returns here to themes that have propelled some of her finest work: political injustice, the art of survival, and the essential nature of — and our need for — love.
©2017 Isabel Allende (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Center Cannot Hold
Summary
Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.
©2007 Elyn R. Saks (P)2007 Recorded Books, LLC
City of Miracles
Summary
"Where your shadow falls, there shall be night everlasting. And all shall dwell within the night, and the night shall swallow all." Sigrud je Harkvaldsson has nothing left to live for. He is a fugitive and an exile, wanted for murder throughout the empire of Saypur. His entire existence has seemed only to visit suffering and death upon those he wants most to protect - while he himself has emerged from each battle cruelly unscathed, inexplicably immune to forces both natural and divine. Then his closest friend and ally, former prime minister Shara Komayd, is assassinated. Suddenly Sigrud's life has a purpose: to find Shara's killers and make them suffer for what they've done. And Sigrud has much experience in matters of suffering. Yet as he pursues his quarry with his customary terrifying efficiency, Sigrud learns that far more than revenge is at stake. Because Shara's assassin is no mere mortal, and her murder was just the beginning. Using death after death to fuel his powers, the killer plans to bring down a night of eternal darkness and rule within it. Only Sigrud - and the strange curse that has destroyed his life - can stop him.
©2016 Robert Jackson Bennett (P)2017 Recorded Books
The Scarlet Thread
Summary
Two women, centuries apart, are joined through a tattered journal as they contend with God, husbands, and even themselves...until they fall into the arms of the One who loves them unconditionally. Sierra Madrid's life has just been turned upside down when she discovers the handcrafted quilt and journal of her ancestor Mary Kathryn McMurray, a young woman who was uprooted from her home only to endure harsh conditions on the Oregon Trail. Though the women are separated by time and circumstance, Sierra discovers that many of the issues they face are remarkably similar. By following Mary Kathryn's example, Sierra learns to surrender to God?s sovereignty and unconditional love.
©2004 Francine Rivers (P)2012 Recorded Books
City of Stairs
Summary
An atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city- - from one of America's most acclaimed young fantasy writers. The city of Bulikov once wielded the powers of the gods to conquer the world, enslaving and brutalizing millions - until its divine protectors were killed. Now Bulikov has become just another colonial outpost of the world's new geopolitical power, but the surreal landscape of the city itself - first shaped, now shattered, by the thousands of miracles its guardians once worked upon it - stands as a constant, haunting reminder of its former supremacy. Into this broken city steps Shara Thivani. Officially, the unassuming young woman is just another junior diplomat sent by Bulikov's oppressors. Unofficially, she is one of her country's most accomplished spies, dispatched to catch a murderer. But as Shara pursues the killer, she starts to suspect that the beings who ruled this terrible place may not be as dead as they seem - and that Bulikov's cruel reign may not yet be over.
©2014 Robert Jackson Bennett (P)2014 Recorded Books
City of Blades
Summary
The city of Voortyashtan was once the home of the goddess of death, war, and destruction, but now it's little more than a ruin. General Turyin Mulaghesh is called out of retirement and sent to this hellish place to find a Saypuri secret agent who's gone AWOL in the middle of a mission. But the ghosts of past wars have followed her there, and soon she begins to wonder what happened to the souls in the afterlife when the gods were defeated by her people, the Polis. Do the dead sleep soundly in the land of death? Or do they have plans of their own?
©2016 Robert Jackson Bennett (P)2016 Recorded Books
In the Time of the Butterflies
Summary
It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of General Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas: "The Butterflies". Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a daughter of the Dominican Republic and long haunted by these sisters, immerses us in a tangled and dangerous moment in Hispanic Caribbean history to tell their story in the only way it can truly be understood: through fiction. In this brilliantly characterized novel, the voices of all four sisters - Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and Dede - speak across the decades, to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons to gunrunning to prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule.
©1994 Julia Alvarez (P)2006 Recorded Books
Canary Island Song
Summary
When Carolyn’s grown daughter tells her she needs to “get a life,” Carolyn decides it’s time to step out of her familiar routine as a single woman in San Francisco and escape to her mother’s home in the Canary Islands. Since Carolyn’s mother is celebrating her seventieth birthday, the timing of Carolyn’s visit makes for a perfect surprise. The surprise, however, is on Carolyn when she sees Bryan Spencer, her high school summer love. It’s been seven years since Carolyn lost her husband, but ever since that tragic day, her life has grown smaller and closed in. The time has come for Carolyn to get her heart back. It takes the gentle affection of her mother and aunts, as well as the ministering beauty and song of the islands to draw Carolyn into the fullness of life. She is nudged along by a Flamenco dance lesson, a defining camel ride and the steady gaze of Bryan’s intense blue-gray eyes. Is it too late for Carolyn to trust Bryan? Can Carolyn believe that Bryan has turned into something more than the wild beach boy who stole her kisses so many years ago on a balmy Canary night? Carolyn is reminded that Christopher Columbus set sail from the Canary Islands in 1492 on his voyage to discover the New World. Is she ready to set sail from these same islands to discover her new life?
©2011 Robin Jones Gunn (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Overbooked
Summary
Tourism, fast becoming the largest global business, employs one out of 12 persons and produces $6.5 trillion of the world’s economy. In a groundbreaking book, Elizabeth Becker uncovers how what was once a hobby has become a colossal enterprise with profound impact on countries, the environment, and cultural heritage. This invisible industry exploded at the end of the Cold War. In 2012 the number of tourists traveling the world reached one billion. Now everything can be packaged as a tour: with the high cost of medical care in the U.S., Americans are booking a vacation and an operation in countries like Turkey for a fraction of the cost at home. Becker travels the world to take the measure of the business: France invented the travel business and is still its leader; Venice is expiring of over-tourism. In Cambodia, tourists crawl over the temples of Angkor, jeopardizing precious cultural sites. Costa Rica rejected raising cattle for American fast-food restaurants to protect their wilderness for the more lucrative field of eco-tourism. Dubai has transformed a patch of desert in the Arabian Gulf into a mammoth shopping mall. Africa’s safaris are thriving, even as its wildlife is threatened by foreign poachers. Large cruise ships are spoiling the oceans and ruining city ports as their American-based companies reap handsome profits through tax loopholes. China, the giant, is at last inviting tourists and sending its own out in droves. The United States, which invented some of the best of tourism, has lost its edge due to political battles. Becker reveals travel as product. Seeing the tourism industry from the inside out, through her eyes and ears, we experience a dizzying range of travel options though very few quiet getaways. Her investigation is a first examination of one of the largest and potentially most destructive enterprises in the world.
©2013 Elizabeth Becker (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Identical Strangers
Summary
This is the astonishing true story of Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein, who shared a personal history for more than three decades - and didn't know it. In her mid-30s, Schein finally decided to call an adoption agency to learn about her biological mother. Not expecting much, she instead got the surprise of her life. Her identical twin sister, Bernstein, lived just minutes away.
©2007 Paula Bernstein; 2007 Elyse Schein (P)2007 Recorded Books LLC
Ines of My Soul
Summary
“Powerfully evocative.... Allende is at her best here; spinning words like spells, enthralling the reader with surreal visions of the New World.” (Newsweek) A passionate epic of love, freedom, and conquest, based on historical events, from the New York Times best-selling author of The House of the Spirits and A Long Petal of the Sea. Though she was born into poverty, Inés Suárez, a seamstress in 16th-century Spain, embodies the same restless hope and opportunism that fuels her nation’s conquest of the Americas. Learning that her shiftless husband has vanished, Inés uses his disappearance to embark on her own adventure. It is a journey will lead her to Pedro de Valdivia - a conquistador who becomes the first royal governor of Chile - and to a love that not only changes her life but the course of history.
©2014 Isabel Allende (P)2019 HarperAudio
Collision of Lies
Summary
Three years ago, a collision between a fast-moving freight train and a school bus full of kids led to devastation and grief on an unimaginable scale. But a fresh clue leads San Antonio police detective Amara Alvarez to the unlikely conclusion that one of the children may still be alive. If she's correct, everything law enforcement believes about the accident is a lie. With time running out, Amara must convince others - and herself - that despite all evidence to the contrary, the boy lives. And she will do everything in her power to bring him home. A fresh voice in suspense, Tom Threadgill will have you questioning everything as you fly through the audio of this enthralling story.
©2020 Thomas D. Threadgill (P)2020 Recorded Books
Grail
Summary
Booklist calls the world of Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear’s spellbinding Jacob’s Ladder series “magnificently populated, well worth visiting.” Here the trilogy that began with Dust and Chill draws to its stunning conclusion. The passengers of the generation spaceship Jacob’s Ladder have found a new home at last. But the planet Grail is already inhabited - and its population of genetically engineered humans has no intention of sharing the world.
©2011 Elizabeth Bear (P)2012 Recorded Books, LLC
Dust
Summary
Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear has been called one of the best science fiction authors of her generation. In Dust she skillfully spins a classic science fiction trope - the lost generation ship - into a complex and compelling tale of fallen angels, secretive family politics, and sexual taboo.
©2007 Elizabeth Bear (P)2008 Recorded Books, LLC
Chill
Summary
Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear has won high praise for her thought-provoking science fiction. The second in Bear’s powerful Jacob’s Ladder series, Chill finds the generation starship Jacob’s Ladder with a new captain—Perceval. As Perceval struggles with the ship’s recent damage, remnants of the rebellion still linger and a threat to the crew grows.
©2010 Elizabeth Bear (P)2011 Recorded Books, LLC
Great House
Summary
From the internationally best-selling author of The History of Love comes this stunning novel. Great House follows the multiple owners of one writing desk and how the desk shapes their lives. A young novelist inherited the desk from a poet taken by Pinochet’s police. Then the desk is stolen from her by the poet’s supposed daughter. In its drawers, another man discovers a long-kept secret about his wife. And a Jerusalem antiques dealer uses the desk in his family’s study, which was devastated by the Nazis in 1944.
©2010 Nicole Krauss (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
Memory Weaver
Summary
Eliza Spalding Warren was just a child when she was taken hostage by the Cayuse Indians during a massacre in 1847. Now the young mother of two children, Eliza faces a different kind of dislocation; her impulsive husband wants them to make a new start in another territory, which will mean leaving her beloved home and her departed mother's grave - and returning to the land of her captivity. Eliza longs to know how her mother, an early missionary to the Nez Perce Indians, dealt with the challenges of life with a sometimes difficult husband and with her daughter's captivity. When Eliza is finally given her mother's diary, she is stunned to find that her own memories are not necessarily the whole story of what happened. Can she lay the dark past to rest and move on? Or will her childhood memories always hold her hostage?
©2015 Jane Kirkpatrick, Inc. (P)2015 Recorded Books
Evidence of Murder
Summary
Former forensic scientist Lisa Black taps her expertise for this tale of investigator Theresa MacLean and the perplexing case she tackles. A dead woman has been found in the woods, and the cause of death is unclear. The leading theory is that she wandered off and froze. But Theresa senses something far more sinister. Then a former boyfriend of the woman's tries to obtain custody of the woman's daughter. Obsessed with the little girl, he also suspects foul play in her mother's death, and now he and Theresa believe the daughter may be in danger of being killed, too. With the girl's life on the line, Theresa must search for evidence of murder - any evidence - before it's too late.
©2009 Lisa Black (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC