Farah Bala has narrated 8 audiobooks on Listento.it by 6 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 9 ratings. The most-rated is The Toss of a Lemon.
The Toss of a Lemon
Summary
Sivakami was married at 10, widowed at 18, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste's rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the 20th century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.
©2008 Padma Viswanathan (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Stuck
Summary
Peter Pan meets Groundhog Day when 11-year-old Jackson makes a birthday wish about never growing up that mysteriously comes true. On his 11th birthday, Jackson is nervous about moving up to middle school where he knows he'll be bullied by older kids, so he makes his wish, "I don't want to grow up!" When his 12th birthday rolls around, he discovers his wish came true: he's still 11, and he’s starting fifth grade (again). At first, this is the perfect life. Jackson is the smartest kid in his class, the best on his baseball team, and the star of the school band. But after a few years of being 11, he realizes his life is passing him by. His little sister is suddenly his big sister, his former friends are driving, everyone else is growing older but he's still living the same fifth grade life. Will Jackson ever figure out how to grow up or will he remain Stuck?
©2019 Chris Grabenstein (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.
Jasmine
Summary
When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at 17, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her - our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.
©1989 Bharati Mukherjee (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
The PCOD Thyroid Book
Summary
Don't blame it on the hormones. As women, it has always been up to us to leave behind the heritage of health, just like your grandmother did for your mother and everyone in the family. But it's not easy to leave behind a legacy of health and harmony - we must first create that in our lives. That requires making time for ourselves, be it for exercise, to eat right, or simply to nap. This book is about taking charge of ourselves, thanking our bodies and making peace with the fact that it's not the hormones, it's us. What can we do about our food, sleep, exercise and relationships that will make us feel good, help us overcome the conditions of PCOD and hypothyroid, and, most importantly, get off drugs and stay off them for good?
©2016 Rujuta Diwekar (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Dont Lose Out, Work Out!
Summary
With more and more people realizing the need to exercise, gyms are cropping up at every nook and corner, roads are occupied by recreational runners and yoga schools have an enviable waiting list. But along with this has grown the number of injuries and disillusionment at not getting 'results'. This leads to fads. It's the exact same place 'diet' was five years ago when Rujuta wrote her first book, Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight. The basic problem is the complete lack of understanding about exercise, how it works and how to make it work for you. Through this book Rujuta tackles pretty much every myth and fad to do with exercise, demystifies exercise for everyone and presents it as not a brainless activity but a science which has the potential to combat all lifestyle disorders, including diabetes and obesity, way better than any drug. Strength training, cardio and yoga get a detailed chapter each along with their pre- and postworkout meals, an often neglected but crucial aspect. So whether you are a beginner or want to take your workouts to the next level, the sample training schedules and real-life workout examples with analysis and modifications will bridge the gap between knowing and doing and ensure that you are in a position to start and/or progress with a sensible, doable and wholesome exercise plan. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©2014 Rujuta Diwekar (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Seattle Noir
Summary
Launched by the summer '04 award-winning best-seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. Brand-new stories by: G. M. Ford, Skye Moody, R. Barri Flowers, Thomas P. Hopp, Patricia Harrington, Bharti Kirchner, Kathleen Alcalá, Simon Wood, Brian Thornton, Lou Kemp, Curt Colbert, Robert Lopresti, Paul S. Piper, and Stephan Magcosta. Early Seattle was a hardscrabble seaport filled with merchant sailors, longshoremen, lumberjacks, rowdy saloons, and a rough-and-tumble police force not immune to corruption and graft. By the mid-50s, the town had added Boeing to its claim to fame, but was still a mostly blue-collar burg that was infamously described as "a cultural dustbin" by the Seattle Symphony’s first conductor. Present-day Seattle has become a pricey, cosmopolitan center, home to Microsoft and Starbucks. The city is famous as the birthplace of grunge music, and possesses a flourishing art, theater, and club scene that many would have thought improbable just a few decades ago. But some things never change - crime being one of them. Seattle's evolution to high-finance and high-tech has simply provided even greater opportunity and reward to those who might be ethically, morally, or economically challenged (crooks, in other words). But most crooks are just ordinary people, not professional thieves or crime bosses - they might be your pleasant neighbor, your wife or lover, your grocer or hairdresser, your minister or banker or lifelong friend - yet even the most upright and honest of them sometimes fall to temptation. Within the stories of Seattle Noir, you will find: a wealthy couple whose marriage is filled with not-so-quiet desperation; a credit card scam that goes over-limit; femmes fatales and hommes fatales; a delicatessen owner whose case is less than kosher; a famous midget actor whose movie roles begin to shrink when he starts growing taller; an ex-cop who learns too much; a group of mystery writers whose fiction causes friction; a Native American shaman caught in a web of secrets and tribal allegiances; sex, lies, and slippery slopes.... and a cast of characters that always want more, not less.... unless.... The complete list of narrators includes Joe Barrett, Bronson Pinchot, Farah Bala, Carol Monda, Kevin T. Collins, Jonathan Davis, Scott Brick, Johnny Heller, David Ledoux, Kevin Free, William Dufris, and Ralph Lister.
©2009 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Mumbai Noir
Summary
Featuring brand-new stories by: Annie Zaidi, R. Raj Rao, Abbas Tyrewala, Avtar Singh, Ahmed Bunglowala, Smita Harish Jain, Sonia Faleiro, Altaf Tyrewala, Namita Devidayal, Jerry Pinto, Kalpish Ratna, Riaz Mulla, Paromita Vohra, and Devashish Makhija. Bombay's communal riots of 1992 - in which Hindus were alleged to be the primary perpetrators - were followed by retaliatory bomb blasts in 1993, masterminded by the Muslim-dominated underworld. Over a thousand citizens lost their lives in these internecine bouts of violence and thousands more became refugees in their own city. In a matter of months, Bombay ceased to be the cosmopolitan, wholesome, and middle-class bastion it had been for decades. When the city was renamed Mumbai in 1995, it merely formalized the widespread perception that the Bombay everyone knew and remembered had been lost forever. Today Mumbai is like any other Asian city on the rise, with gigantic construction cranes winding atop upcoming skyscrapers and malls. It continues to have the highest GDP among Indian cities and one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. Mukesh Ambani, the world's fourth-richest man, calls Mumbai home. As do seventeen million other people, for a majority of whom life remains a fine balance, to borrow Rohinton Mistry's description, between survival and penury, between lawfulness and maverick restlessness, and often between life and death. Right-wing violence, failing electricity and water supplies, overcrowding, and the ever-looming threat of terrorist attacks - these are some of the gruesome ground realities that Mumbai’s middle and working classes must deal with every day, while the city's super-rich, like the aforementioned Ambani, zip from roof to roof in their private choppers. Abandoned by its wealthy, mistreated by its politicians and administrators, Mumbai continues to thrive primarily because of the helpless resilience of its hardworking, upright citizens.
©2012 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Miss New India
Summary
Anjali Bose is Miss New India. Born into a traditional lower-middle-class family and living in a backwater town with an arranged marriage on the horizon, Anjali's prospects don't look great. But her ambition and fluency in language do not go unnoticed by her expat teacher, Peter Champion. And champion her he does, both to other powerful people who can help her along the way and to Anjali herself, stirring in her a desire to take charge of her own destiny. So she sets off to Bangalore, India's fastest-growing major metropolis, and quickly falls in with an audacious and ambitious crowd of young people who have learned how to sound American by watching shows like Seinfeld in order to get jobs as call-center service agents, where they are quickly able to out-earn their parents. And it is in this high-tech city where Anjali, suddenly free from the traditional confines of class, caste, gender, and mores, able to confront her past and reinvent herself. Of course, the seductive pull of modernity does not come without a dark side....
©2011 Bharati Mukherjee (P)2011 Audible, Inc.