Christian Barillas has narrated 17 audiobooks on Listento.it by 18 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 97 ratings. The most-rated is World Departed.
World Departed
Summary
In the zombie apocalypse, your worst enemy may be yourself. Rose Winter has enough problems. With a marriage going down the tubes and a dreaded anniversary party on the horizon, the last thing she needs is the zombie apocalypse. She wanted to get drunk and sing karaoke, not murder her undead neighbors. It’s clear the party’s over, however, now Rose has more problems - a missing husband, an overbearing houseguest, and keeping her family alive. Tom Jensen has inflexible rules. Rule number one? Don’t deviate from the plan. But when his life is overturned in the space of minutes, his plans die along with everything else. The world is finished, the future is uncertain, and survival means living in the last place he’d planned to be. Maybe his rules weren’t meant to be broken, but if he can’t change his tune, he risks losing the one thing he has left - his daughter. Craig Matthews has a mission: get to Oregon. Doable, maybe, if he could bring himself to leave his apartment. With his food and water near gone and death closer than ever, a chance encounter may lead to finding his friends - if he can first find his courage. Unfortunately, the new world doesn’t always mean leaving old problems behind, and as the West Coast succumbs to the virus, the survivors face more than the undead - they face themselves. But in an existence where fences offer dubious safety and zombies certain danger, people may save you in more ways than one.
©2020 Sarah Lyons Fleming (P)2020 Podium Audio
The House of Impossible Beauties
Summary
A gritty and gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and '90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning It's 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city's glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ball scene, where 17-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning inside of her to help create family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone. As mother of the house, Angel recruits Venus, a whip-fast trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito, a quiet boy who loves fabrics and design; and Daniel, a butch queen who accidentally saves Venus's life. The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work, addiction, and persistent abuse, leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them. All are ambitious, resilient, and determined to control their own fates, even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.
©2018 Joseph Cassara (P)2009 HarperCollins Publishers
The Three Questions
Summary
The beloved spiritual teacher builds on the message of his enduring New York Times and international best seller, The Four Agreements, with this profound guide that takes us deeper into the tradition of Toltec wisdom, helping us find and use the hidden power within us to achieve our fullest lives. In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz introduced seekers on the path to enlightenment to the tenets of Mesoamerican spiritual culture - the ancient Toltec. Now, he takes us deeper into Native American practice, and asks us to consider essential questions that drive our lives and govern our spiritual power. Three eternal questions can help us into our power and use it judiciously: Who am I? What is real? How do I express love? At each stage in our lives, we must ask these simple yet deeply profound questions. Finding the answers will open the door to the next stage in our development, and eventually lead us to our complete, truest selves. But as Don Miguel Ruiz makes clear, we suffer if we do not ask these questions - or if we fail to pay attention to their answers - because we either never act on our power or use it destructively. Only when power is anchored in our identity and in reality will it be able to be in synch with the universe - and be of true benefit to ourselves and to others. The three questions provide a practical framework that allows listeners to engage with Ruiz’s transformative message and act as a vehicle for overcoming fear and anxiety and discovering peace of mind. An essential guide for all travelers pursuing self-knowledge, understanding, and acceptance, The Three Questions is the next step in our unique spiritual metamorphosis.
©2018 Miguel Ruiz and Barbara Emrys (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Hideaway
Summary
2020 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
"Authentic, disturbing and unbearably tense, Hideaway will leave you reeling." (Shari Lapena, number-one internationally best-selling author of The Couple Next Door)
Gloria Janes appears to be a doting suburban mother and loving wife. But beyond her canary-yellow door, Gloria controls her husband, Telly, as well as seven-year-old Maisy and her older brother Rowan, through a disorienting cycle of adoration and banishment.
When Telly leaves, Gloria turns on Rowan. He runs away, finding unlikely refuge with a homeless man named Carl, with whom he forms the kind of bond he has never found with his parents. After they are menaced by strangers, Rowan follows Carl to an isolated cottage, where he accidentally sets off a burst of heightened paranoia in Carl, and their adventure takes a dark turn.
Gloria is publicly desperate for the safe return of her son while privately plotting ever wilder ways to lure Telly home for good. Her behaviour grows more erratic and her manipulation of Maisy begins to seem dedicated toward an outcome that only she can see. The two storylines drive relentlessly toward a climax that is both shocking and emotionally riveting.
Suspenseful, unsettling, and masterful, Hideaway explores the secrets of a troubled family and illuminates an unlikely hero and a source of unexpected strength.
©2019 Nicole Lundrigan (P)2019 Viking
All Out
Summary
Take a journey through time and genres to discover stories where queer teens live, love, and shape the world around them. Seventeen young adult authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens. From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in war-torn 1870s Mexico featuring a transgender soldier, to two girls falling in love while mourning the death of Kurt Cobain, forbidden love in a 16th-century Spanish convent, or an asexual girl discovering her identity amid the 1970s roller-disco scene, All Out tells a diverse range of stories across cultures, time periods and identities, shedding light on an area of history often ignored or forgotten. Featuring original stories from: Malinda Lo Mackenzi Lee Robin Talley Kody Keplinger Elliot Wake Anna-Marie McLemore Shaun David Hutchinson Dahlia Adler Tess Sharpe Kate Scelsa Natalie C. Parker Sara Farizan Nilah Magruder Tessa Gratton Tehlor Kay Mejia Alex Sanchez Scott Tracey
©2018 Saundra Mitchell (P)2018 Audible, Inc.
The Sound of Stars
Summary
Can a girl who risks her life for books and an alien who loves forbidden pop music work together to save humanity? A beautiful and thrilling debut novel for fans of Marie Lu and Veronica Roth. Two years ago, a misunderstanding between the leaders of Earth and the invading Ilori resulted in the deaths of one-third of the world’s population. Today, 17-year-old Ellie Baker survives in an Ilori-controlled center in New York City. With humans deemed dangerously volatile because of their initial reaction to the invasion, emotional expression can be grounds for execution. Music, art, and books are illegal, but Ellie still keeps a secret library. When young Ilori commander M0Rr1S finds Ellie’s library, he’s duty-bound to deliver her for execution. The trouble is, he finds himself drawn to human music and in desperate need of more. Humanity’s fate rests in the hands of an alien Ellie should fear, but M0Rr1S has a potential solution - thousands of miles away. The two embark on a wild and dangerous journey with a bag of books and their favorite albums, all the while creating a story and a song of their own that just might save them both.
©2020 Alechia Dow (P)2020 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited
The Traitor Prince
Summary
A dark epic fantasy inspired by The Prince and the Pauper and the fairy tale The False Prince, from best-selling author C. J. Redwine. Perfect for fans of the Court of Thorns and Roses series and the Wrath and the Dawn duology, The Traitor Prince is a thrilling new standalone novel in the Ravenspire series. Javan Najafai, crown prince of Akram, has spent the last 10 years at an elite boarding school, far away from his kingdom. But his eagerly awaited return home is cut short when a mysterious impostor takes his place - and no one believes Javan is the true prince. After barely escaping the impostor’s assassins, Javan is thrown into Maqbara, the kingdom’s most dangerous prison. The only way to gain an audience with the king - and reveal Javan’s identity - is to fight in Maqbara’s yearly tournament. But winning is much harder than acing competitions at school, and soon Javan finds himself beset not just by the terrifying creatures in the arena but also by a band of prisoners allied against him, and even by the warden herself. The only person who can help him is Sajda, who has been enslaved by Maqbara’s warden since she was a child, and whose guarded demeanor and powerful right hook keep the prisoners in check. Working with Sajda might be the only way Javan can escape alive - but she has dangerous secrets. Together, Javan and Sajda have to outwit the vicious warden, outfight deadly creatures, and outlast the murderous prisoners intent on killing Javan. If they fail, they’ll be trapped in Maqbara for good - and the secret Sajda’s been hiding will bury them both.
©2018 C. J. Redwine (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers
Hades, Argentina
Summary
“A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” (Seattle Times) “An astonishingly powerful novel about the complex nature of guilt.” (Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster) A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love. In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.
©2021 Daniel Loedel (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Disappeared
Summary
You've never listened to a Francisco X. Stork novel like this before! A missing girl, a determined reporter, and a young man on the brink combine for a powerful story of choices, suspense, and survival. Four months ago... Sara Zapata's best friend disappeared, kidnapped by the web of criminals who terrorize Juarez. Four hours ago... Sara received a death threat - and, with it, a clue to the place where her friend is locked away. Four weeks ago... Emiliano Zapata fell in love with Perla Rubi, who will never be his so long as he's poor. Four minutes ago... Emiliano got the chance to make more money than he ever dreamed - just by joining the web. In the next four days, Sara and Emiliano will each face impossible choices, between life and justice, friends and family, truth and love. But when the web closes in on Sara, only one path remains for the siblings: the way across the desert to the United States.
©2017 Francisco X. Stork (P)2017 Scholastic, Inc.
The Liars of Mariposa Island
Summary
From the author of Moxie comes a stunning novel told in three voices about the lies families tell to survive. Every year, summer begins when the Callahans arrive on Mariposa Island. That's when Elena Finney gets to escape her unstable, controlling mother by babysitting for their two children. And the summer of 1986 promises to be extra special when she meets J.C., the new boy in town, whose kisses make Elena feel like she's been transported to a new world. Joaquin Finney can't imagine why anyone would want to come to Mariposa Island. He just graduated from high school and dreams about going to California to find his father and escape his mother's manipulation. The Liars of Mariposa Island follows siblings Elena and Joaquin, with flashbacks to their mother's experience as a teenage refugee fleeing the Cuban revolution. Jennifer Mathieu's multilayered novel explores the nature of secrets, lies, and fierce, destructive love.
©2019 Jennifer Mathieu (P)2019 Recorded Books
Twenty After Midnight
Summary
A dark and masterful portrait of a generation in crisis, from one of the most exciting young voices in international literature. The world had been theirs in the late '90s: They were the young provocateurs behind a countercultural scene, digital bohemians creating a new future. But 15 years later, Duke, the leader and undisputed genius of their group, has been murdered, and the three remaining members of their circle reunite to piece together what became of their lives and how they fell so short of their expectations. Now in their 30s, Aurora, Antero, and Emiliano have succumbed to the pressures of adulthood, the exigencies of carving out a life in a country that is fraying at the seams. Reunited after years of long-held grudges and painful crushes, the three try to resurrect the spirit of the all-night parties and early morning trysts, the protests and pornography of their youths. Lurking over them, as they puzzle out their fates, is the question of whether or not there is a future for them to believe in or if the end has already arrived. Twenty After Midnight is a portrait of the first generation of the digital age, a group that was promised everything but handed a fractured world. Daniel Galera has written a pre-apocalyptic tale of millennial longings.
©2020 Daniel Galera (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Illegal
Summary
Emiliano and Sara made it across the border. Now, they need to survive in America. Emiliano and his sister Sara have successfully fled organized crime in Mexico, illegally crossing into the United States. But now, Sara is in jail, and Emiliano's reunion with their father in Chicago is more awkward than celebratory. When Emiliano is falsely accused of a crime against a missing local girl, it sets off a tense and dangerous race to find her, before he can even "find himself" in this new place he must call home.
©2020 Scholastic (P)2020 Scholastic Inc
Safe
Summary
Ryan Gattis' gritty, fast-paced thriller, Safe, hurtles listeners toward a shocking conclusion that asks the toughest question of all: How far would you go to protect the ones you love? Ricky 'Ghost' Mendoza Jr. is trying to be good. In recovery and working as a freelance safecracker for the DEA, the FBI, and any other government agency willing to pay him, Ghost is determined to live clean for the rest of his days. And maybe he could, if the most important person in his life hadn't gotten into serious financial trouble. To fix it, all Ghost has to do is crack a safe and steal drug money from under the noses of the gangs and the feds without getting caught. Or killed. Rudy 'Glasses' Reyes runs drugs and cleans up messes for the baddest of bad men. When Ghost hits one of his safes, Glasses must hunt him down or be held accountable. But Glasses is worried about more than just money. The heist puts everything in his life at risk - his livelihood, his freedom, even his family.
©2017 Ryan Gattis (P)2017 Macmilan Audio
Where We Go from Here
Summary
An absorbing debut novel about three gay young adults in Brazil whose lives become intertwined in the face of HIV. Ian has just been diagnosed with HIV. Victor, to his great relief, has tested negative. Henrique has been living with HIV for the past three years. When Victor finds himself getting tested for HIV for the first time, he can’t help but question his entire relationship with Henrique, the guy he has - had - been dating. See, Henrique didn’t disclose his positive HIV status to Victor until after they had sex, and even though Henrique insisted on using every possible precaution, Victor is livid. That’s when Victor meets Ian, a guy who’s also getting tested for HIV. But Ian’s test comes back positive, and his world is about to change forever. Though Victor is loath to think about Henrique, he offers to put the two of them in touch, hoping that perhaps Henrique can help Ian navigate his new life. In the process, the lives of Ian, Victor, and Henrique will become intertwined in a story of friendship, love, and stigma - a story about hitting what you think is rock bottom, but finding the courage and support to keep moving forward.
©2020 Scholastic (P)2020 Scholastic Inc
The City of Palaces
Summary
In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic. Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student 10 years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair - he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian - will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, listeners follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath. The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite”. A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead. This book was originally published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2014.
©2020 Amble Press (P)2020 Audible, Inc.
Caminar
Summary
Set in 1981 Guatemala, a lyrical debut novel tells the powerful tale of a boy who must decide what it means to be a man during a time of war. Carlos knows that when the soldiers arrive with warnings about the Communist rebels, it is time to be a man and defend the village, keep everyone safe. But Mama tells him not yet - he’s still her quiet moonfaced boy. The soldiers laugh at the villagers, and before they move on, a neighbor is found dangling from a tree, a sign on his neck: Communist. Mama tells Carlos to run and hide, then try to find her.... Numb and alone, he must join a band of guerillas as they trek to the top of the mountain where Carlos’s abuela lives. Will he be in time, and brave enough, to warn them about the soldiers? What will he do then? A novel in verse inspired by actual events during Guatemala’s civil war, Caminar is the moving story of a boy who loses nearly everything before discovering who he is.
©2014 Skila Brown, original book published by Candlewick Press. (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
MS-13
Summary
“A remarkable feat of reporting.” (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises) Winner of the Lukas Prize The definitive account of the most notorious street gang in America - the MS-13 - as seen through the lives of gang members and their families caught in its malicious web. The MS-13 was born from war. In the 1980s, El Salvador was enmeshed in a bloody civil conflict. To escape the guerrilla assaults and death squads, many fled to the US and settled in Los Angeles. Among them were Alex and his brother. There, as a survival instinct, Alex and a small number of Salvadoran immigrants formed a group called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a relatively harmless social network bound by heavy metal music and their Salvadoran identity. But later, as they brushed against established local gangs, the group took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars, and killing rivals who threatened their territories. As authorities cracked down, gang members like Alex were incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew stronger, and in Central America, the gang multiplied, eventually spreading to a half-dozen nations in two continents. Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, with an estimated 10,000 members operating in dozens of states and linked to thousands of grisly murders each year in the US and abroad. But it is also misunderstood - less a drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing. Journalist and longtime organized crime investigator Steven Dudley brings listeners inside the nefarious group to tell a larger story of how a flawed US and Central American policy and the exploitative and unequal economic systems helped foster the gang and sustain it. Ultimately, MS-13 is the story of the modern immigrant and the perennial battle to escape a vortex of poverty and crime, as well as the repressive, unequal systems that feed these problems. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Steven Dudley (P)2020 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited