Laura Raynor Sauriat has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 5 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is Gaddafi's Harem.
Gaddafi's Harem
Summary
Soraya was just 15, a schoolgirl in the coastal town of Sirte, when she was given the honor of presenting a bouquet of flowers to Colonel Gaddafi, the "Guide", on a visit he was making to her school the following week. This one meeting, a presentation of flowers, a pat on the head from Gaddafi, changed Soraya’s life forever. Soon afterwards, she was summoned to Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi’s palatial compound near Tripoli, where she joined a number of young women who were violently abused, raped and degraded by Gaddafi. Heartwrenchingly tragic but ultimately redemptive, Soraya’s story is the first one of many that are just now beginning to be heard. But sex and rape remain the highest taboo in Libya, and women like Soraya (whose identity is protected by a pseudonym here) risk being disowned or even killed by their dishonored family members. In Gaddafi’s Harem, an instant best seller on publication in France, where it has already sold more than 100,000 copies in hardcover, Le Monde special correspondent Annick Cojean gives a voice to Soraya’s story, and supplements her investigation into Gaddafi’s abuses of power through interviews with people who knew Soraya, as well as with other women who were abused by Gaddafi.
©2012 Editions Grasset & Fasquelle. Translation © 2013 Marjolijn de Jager. Recorded by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Nothing Holds Back the Night
Summary
Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic, in control of the Paris metro system; she gave away all her money; she was hospitalized, medicated, and released in a kind of trance. Young Delphine was left to wonder: What changed her, or what shaped her all along? In this brilliant investigation into her own family history, Delphine de Vigan attempts to "write her mother," seeking out something essential as she interviews aging relatives, listens to recordings, and reads Lucile's own writings. It is a history of luminous beauty and rambunctious joy, of dark secrets and silences. There are untimely deaths and failures of memory. There are revelations and there is the ultimately unknowable. And in the face of the unknowable, personal history becomes fiction: De Vigan must choose from differing accounts and fill in important gaps, using her writer's imagination to reconstruct a life. De Vigan writes her most expansive novel yet with acute self-awareness and marvelous sympathy. Nothing Holds Back the Night is a remarkable work, universally recognizable and singularly heartbreaking.
©2013 First published in Great Britain 2013. Originally published in France in 2011 as "Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit", Copyright © JC Lattès 2011. English translation copyright © George Miller 2013. (P)2014 Audible Inc.
God Speed the Night
Summary
Hailed by the New York Times as "a book you will not readily forget", this World War II adventure tale of a nun who risks her life to help a Jewish couple escape Nazi-occupied France is the collaborative creative effort of Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis and award-winning television writer Jerome Ross. It is harvest season in St. Hilaire, and for those who take their living from the land, it should be a joyous time. But in the fall of 1943, there is no joy in France. Paris has fallen, the Vichy government is collaborating with the Germans, and the Gestapo roam the countryside, conscripting French men to toil in faraway German factories. For Sister Gabrielle, a novice in the local convent, the occupation tries her faith as nothing has before. But she is about to get an opportunity to stand up to evil in a way that few of her countrymen have dared. Marc and Rachel Daridan arrive in St. Hilaire just a few steps ahead of the secret police and throw themselves on the mercy of Sister Gabrielle and the other nuns at the Convent of Ste. Genevive. In a time when doing right can mean death, this devout young woman takes on a risky, seemingly impossible challenge.
©1968 Dorothy Salisbury Davis and Jerome Ross (P)2014 Audible, Inc.