Cynthia Farrell has narrated 67 audiobooks on Listento.it by 66 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.2★ across 1,298 ratings. The most-rated is The Unhoneymooners.
Under Almond Blossoms
Summary
Love and loss are in the air as the almond blossom falls. Milla has always felt alone in the world. The only child of a distant mother, she has no other family, and even her forthcoming marriage to Paul feels more like settling than true romance. But then a letter arrives, announcing that a Spanish grandmother she knew nothing about has recently died and left her a small shop in Mallorca. Milla is confused and hurt, but determined to uncover the truth. She travels to Palma, where she is enchanted by the beauty of the old town in springtime. At the shop she now owns, she meets Leandro, a handsome local who helps her piece together the story of her grandmother, Abbi. But it’s a story full of unexpected secrets, of hidden love and bitter betrayal, and it challenges everything Milla thought she knew about her family - and herself. Faced with these new truths, Milla has a difficult choice to make. Will she go back to Paul and be the person she was before, or follow her heart on a blossom-strewn island?
©2020 Anja Saskia Beyer (P)2020 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
Within Our Grasp
Summary
An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world’s children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of food or nutrients. These children do not die but endure a lifetime of diminished potential. During the past 30 years, says Sharman Russell, we have seen a revolution in how we treat these sick children and in how - with a new understanding of the human body and approach to nutrition, and new ways to reach out to hungry mothers and babies - we have gone from unwittingly killing severely malnourished children to bringing them back to health through the “miracle” of ready-to-eat therapeutic food. Intertwined with stories of scientists and nutrition experts on the front lines of finding ways to end malnutrition for good, Russell describes her travels to Malawi, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world and also the site of pathbreaking, cutting-edge research into childhood malnutrition. (Eighty percent of Malawians are farmers subsisting on less than an acre of land and coping with erratic weather patterns due to global warming; 50 percent live below the poverty line; and 42 percent of Malawi’s children are affected by a lack of food or nutrients.) As she writes of her personal exploration of new friendships and insights in a country known as “the warm heart of Africa”, Russell describes the programs that are working best to reduce childhood stunting and explores how malnutrition in children is connected to climate change, how vitamins and minerals are preventing these harmful effects, why the empowerment of women is the single most effective factor in eliminating childhood malnutrition, and what the costs of ending childhood malnutrition are. Sharman Russell, much-admired writer of luminous prose and humane heart, whose writing has been called, “elegant” (The Economist) and “extraordinarily well-crafted, far-reaching, and heart-wrenching” (Booklist), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, has crafted an illuminating, inspiring book that makes clear the promise of what is today, gratefully, within our grasp.
©2021 Sharman Apt Russell (P)2021 Random House Audio
Memory and Oblivion
Summary
Paloma Sánchez-Garnica’s first novel to be translated into English is a beautiful, harrowing, and illuminating story of family betrayals and a last chance for forgiveness. Carlota Molina has a brilliant career as a judge in Madrid, the respect of her peers, and an independent life. But it’s a life still haunted by the specter of a father she’s been estranged from for decades. Then one day Carlota gets a phone call from a familial stranger - her half sister, Julia - with an impassioned request. After years of pain and distance, Carlota’s father, Clemente, wants to see her before he dies...and to settle the past. Seizing on the opportunity to confront all her disillusions, Carlota begins to unravel the lies and deception in her family history. Some secrets she knows, and some secrets she has yet to discover. It is up to Carlota to decide how much of a mark she will let those secrets leave.
©2018 Paloma Sánchez-Garnica. Translation © 2018 by Achy Obejas. Lyrics “Lo que ardió no volverá....” translated into English by Achy Obejas from the song “Hasta Mañana” in the album Album 1966–67 by Luis Eduardo Aute, © 1967, reprinted by permission of Luis Eduardo Aute and Dos Passos Agency. Lyrics “Tarde, muy tarde, no me digas....” and “Tarde, muy tarde, tarde para remediarlo....” translated into English by Achy Obejas from the song “Tarde, muy tarde” in the album Alma by Luis Eduardo Aute, © 1984, reprinted by permission of Luis Eduardo Aute and Dos Passos Agency. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Price of Paradise
Summary
In a city as corrupt as it was luxurious, those who dared to dream were bound to pay the price.
Havana, Cuba, 1947. Young Patricio flees impoverished Spain and steps into the sultry island paradise of Havana with only the clothes on his back and half-baked dreams of a better life. Blessed with good looks and natural charm, he lands a job as a runner at El Encanto - one of the most luxurious department stores in the world.
Famous for its exquisite offerings from French haute couture to Arabian silks, El Encanto indulges the senses in opulent extravagance. It caters to visiting Hollywood stars, rising politicos, and prerevolutionary Cuba’s wealthiest power players, including the notorious mobster César Valdés.
Falling in love with the mobster’s young wife, Gloria, is suicide. But Patricio is irresistibly drawn to the beautiful girl with sad eyes, a razor-sharp intellect, and a penchant for both Christian Dior’s clothes and Einstein’s theories. Within the walls of El Encanto, anything seems possible, even a love that promises to heal them and a desire that thrums with the mambo beat of the city itself.
In a reckless love affair that spans half a century, Patricio’s and Gloria’s lives entwine time and again, challenged by every twist of fate - for in a world of murder, betrayal, and revolution, those who dare to reach for paradise seldom survive unscathed.
©2017 by Susana Lopez Rubio. Translation © 2019 by Achy Obejas. (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.
The Fall of Innocence
Summary
For the past eight years, 16-year-old Emilia DeJesus has done her best to move on from the traumatic attack she suffered in the woods behind her elementary school. She's forced down the memories - the feeling of the twigs cracking beneath her, choking on her own blood, unable to scream.
Most of all, she's tried to forget about Jeremy Lance, the boy responsible, the boy who caused her such pain. Emilia believes that the crows who watched over her that day, who helped her survive, are still on her side, encouraging her to live fully. And with the love and support of her mother, brother, and her caring boyfriend, Emilia is doing just that.
But when a startling discovery about her attacker's identity comes to light, and the memories of that day break through the mental box in which she'd shut them away, Emilia is forced to confront her new reality and make sense of shifting truths about her past, her family, and herself.
©2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC
Mirette on the High Wire
Summary
One day, a mysterious stranger arrives at a boardinghouse of the widow Gateau - a sad-faced stranger, who keeps to himself. When the widow’s daughter, Mirette, discovers him crossing the courtyard on air, she begs him to teach her how he does it. But Mirette doesn’t know that the stranger was once the Great Bellini - master wire-walker. Or that Bellini has been stopped by a terrible fear. And it is she who must teach him courage once again. Emily Arnold McCully’s prose and own narration carries the listener over the rooftops of 19th-century Paris and into an elegant, beautiful world of acrobats, jugglers, mimes, actors, and one gallant, resourceful little girl.
©1992 Emily Arnold McCully (P)2018 Listening Library
Black Magnet
Summary
The city is heating up.... Ash doesn't know who he is or how he ended up in an old coal mine outside the city. Even more terrifying, he discovers that he can throw fire from the palms of his hands when he saves Rachel from being mugged. She's a researcher who develops a curiosity for his powers. With the help of Rachel and her coworker Perry, Ash tries to piece together what happened to him. They soon encounter another super they call the Gatekeeper, who knows Ash's history and holds a grudge against him for it that he expects Ash to pay for. But the Gatekeeper seems to be more powerful than Ash's own moniker: Heat. With the Gatekeeper's apprentice Black Magnet terrorizing the city, Heat will have to fight his way to uncover answers about his past. However, those answers won't set him free.
©2019 David Neth (P)2021 David Neth