Leila Buck has narrated 10 audiobooks on Listento.it by 11 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 8 ratings. The most-rated is Jerusalem's Queen.
Jerusalem's Queen
Summary
When her father and sister are killed, a distant relative invites Salome and her mother to live with his family in Jerusalem. Quickly betrothed to a pagan prince half her age, Salome questions God's plan. But when she suddenly finds herself being crowned queen of Judea, she learns that a woman committed to God can change the world. Born in the small village of Modein, a town made famous by the warrior Maccabees, Salome Alexandra knows better than to harbor grand dreams for her future. She pales in comparison to her beautiful older sister, and though she learns to read at an early age, girls are not valued for their intellectual ability. But when her father and sister are killed, John Hyrcanus, a distant relative, invites Salome and her mother to live with his family in Jerusalem, where her thirst for knowledge is noticed and indulged. When her guardian betroths her to a pagan prince, she questions HaShem's plan. When Hyrcanus finally marries her to a boy half her age, she questions her guardian's sanity. But though Salome spends much of her life as a pawn ordered about by powerful men, she learns that a woman committed to HaShem can change the world.
©2018 Angela Hunt (P)2018 Recorded Books
Salt Houses
Summary
From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut novel about a Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home. On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia's brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can't escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia's children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand - one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again.
© 2017 Hala Alyan (P)2017 Recorded Books
A Land of Permanent Goodbyes
Summary
Narrated by Destiny, this heartbreaking - and timely - story of refugees escaping from war-torn Syria is masterfully told by a foreign news correspondent who experienced the crisis firsthand. In a country ripped apart by war, Tareq lives with his big and loving family...until the bombs strike. His city is in ruins. His life is destroyed. And those who have survived are left to figure out their uncertain future. In the wake of destruction, he's threatened by Daesh fighters and witnesses a public beheading. Tareq's family knows that to continue to stay alive, they must leave. As they travel as refugees from Syria to Turkey to Greece, facing danger at every turn, Tareq must find the resilience and courage to complete his harrowing journey. But while this is one family's story, it is also the timeless tale of all wars, of all tragedy, and of all strife. When you are a refugee, success is outliving your loss. Destiny narrates this heartbreaking story of the consequences of war, showing the Syrian conflict as part of a long chain of struggles spanning through time. An award-winning author and journalist - and a refugee herself - Atia Abawi captures the hope that spurs people forward against all odds and the love that makes that hope grow.
©2018 Atia Abawi (P)2018 Recorded Books
Call Me Zebra
Summary
From an award-winning young author, a novel following a feisty heroine's idiosyncratic quest to reclaim her past by mining the wisdom of her literary icons - even as she navigates the murkier mysteries of love. Zebra is the last in a line of anarchists, atheists, and autodidacts. When war came, her family didn't fight; they took refuge in books. Now alone and in exile, Zebra leaves New York for Barcelona, retracing the journey she and her father made from Iran to the United States years ago. Books are Zebra's only companions - until she meets Ludo. Their connection is magnetic; their time together fraught. Zebra overwhelms him with her complex literary theories, her concern with death, and her obsession with history. He thinks she's unhinged; she thinks he's pedantic. Neither are wrong; neither can let the other go. They push and pull their way across the Mediterranean, wondering with each turn if their love, or lust, can free Zebra from her past? An adventure tale, a love story, and a paean to the power of language and literature starring a heroine as quirky as Don Quixote, as introspective as Virginia Woolf, as whip-smart as Miranda July, and as spirited as Frances Ha, Call Me Zebra will establish Van der Vliet Oloomi as an author "on the verge of developing a whole new literature movement" (Bustle).
©2018 Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi (P)2018 Recorded Books
Come On In
Summary
This exceptional and powerful anthology explores the joys, heartbreaks and triumphs of immigration, with stories by critically acclaimed and best-selling YA authors who are shaped by the journeys they and their families have taken from home - and to find home. Welcome From some of the most exciting best-selling and up-and-coming YA authors writing today...journey from Ecuador to New York City and Argentina to Utah...from Australia to Harlem and India to New Jersey...from Fiji, America, Mexico and more.... Come On In. With characters who face random traffic stops, TSA detention, customs anxiety, and the daunting and inspiring journey to new lands...who camp with their extended families, dance at weddings, keep diaries, teach ESL...who give up their rooms for displaced family, decide their own answer to the question “where are you from?” and so much more...Come On In illuminates 15 of the myriad facets of the immigrant experience, from authors who have been shaped by the journeys they and their families have taken from home - and to find home.
©2020 Adi Alsaid (P)2020 Recorded Books
Color Outside the Lines
Summary
This modern, groundbreaking YA anthology explores the complexity and beauty of interracial and LGBTQ+ relationships where differences are front and center. When people ask me what this anthology is about, I'm often tempted to give them the complicated answer: It's about race and about how being different from the person you love can matter but how it can also not matter, and it's about Chinese pirate ghosts, black girl vigilantes, colonial India, a flower festival, a garden of poisons, and so, so much else. Honestly, though? I think the answer's much simpler than that. Color Outside the Lines is a collection of stories about young, fierce, brilliantly hopeful people in love. - Sangu Mandanna, editor of Color outside the Lines
©2019 Soho Press, Inc. (P)2019 Recorded Books
Hungry Hearts
Summary
From some of your favorite best-selling and critically acclaimed authors - including Sandhya Menon, Anna-Marie McLemore, and Rin Chupeco - comes a collection of interconnected short stories that explore the intersection of family, culture, and food in the lives of 13 teens. A shy teenager attempts to express how she really feels through the confections she makes at her family’s pasteleria. A tourist from Montenegro desperately seeks a magic soup dumpling that could cure his fear of death. An aspiring chef realizes that butter and soul are the key ingredients to win a cooking competition that could win him the money to save his mother’s life. Welcome to Hungry Hearts Row, where the answers to most of life’s hard questions are kneaded, rolled, baked. Where a typical greeting is, “Have you had anything to eat?” Where magic and food and love are sometimes one and the same. Told in interconnected short stories, Hungry Hearts explores the many meanings food can take on beyond mere nourishment. It can symbolize love and despair, family and culture, belonging and home.
©2019 Compilation Elsie Chapman and Caroline Tung Richmond (P)2019 Recorded Books
The Arsonists' City
Summary
“The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation - Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.” (Rumaan Alam) A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe - Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut - a constant touchstone - and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets - lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame - that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).
©2021 Hala Alyan (P)2021 Recorded Books
The Cat I Never Named
Summary
It is 1992, and Bihac, Amra's hometown, is a multicultural city with Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. But when tensions escalate, the Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors. The Serbs control the army, and now they have peaceful Bihac surrounded. Soon Amra and her family are dealing with starvation and the threat of brutal violence; school, friendships, and the attentions from a new boy have to take a back seat to finding food and the tragic fallout from rising bigotry and ethnic hatred. Through it all, a stray cat, Maci, serves as a guardian spirit to the entire family.
©2020 Amra Sabic-El-Rayess and Laura L. Sullivan (P)2021 Recorded Books
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know
Summary
Told in alternating narratives that bridge centuries, the latest novel from New York Times best-selling author Samira Ahmed traces the lives of two young women fighting to write their own stories and escape the pressure of familial burdens and cultural expectations in worlds too long defined by men. It's August in Paris, and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet - American, French, Indian, Muslim - is at a crossroads. This holiday with her professor parents should be a dream trip for the budding art historian. But her maybe-ex-boyfriend is probably ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be back home in Chicago figuring out her messy life instead of brooding in the City of Light. Two hundred years before Khayyam's summer of discontent, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has "gifted" her with favored status in his harem. In the present day - and with the company of a descendant of Alexandre Dumas - Khayyam begins to connect allusions to an enigmatic 19th-century Muslim woman whose path may have intersected with Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Delacroix, and Lord Byron. Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam's lives intertwine, and as one woman's long-forgotten life is uncovered, another's is transformed.
©2020 Samira Ahmed (P)2020 Recorded Books