Sanjiv Jhaveri has narrated 18 audiobooks on Listento.it by 24 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 26 ratings. The most-rated is A Fearless Heart.
A Fearless Heart
Summary
The Buddhist practice of mindfulness caught on in the west when we began to understand the everyday, personal benefits it brought us. Now, in this extraordinary audiobook, the highly acclaimed thought leader and longtime English translator of His Holiness the Dalai Lama shows us that compassion can bring us even more. Based on the landmark course in compassion training Jinpa helped create at Stanford Medical School, A Fearless Heart shows us that we actually fear compassion. We worry that if we are too compassionate with others we will be taken advantage of, and if we are too compassionate with ourselves we will turn into slackers. Using science, insights from both classical Buddhist and western psychology, and stories both from others and from his own extraordinary life, Jinpa shows us how to train our compassion muscle to relieve stress, fight depression, improve our health, achieve our goals, and change our world. Practical, spiritual, and immediately relevant, A Fearless Heart will speak to listeners of The Art of Happiness and Wherever You Go, There You Are.
©2015 Thupten Jinpa Langri (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Recorded by arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.
Last Train to Istanbul
Summary
Born into privilege to one of the last Ottoman pashas, beautiful, spirited Selva is the brightest jewel in her father’s household - until she falls in love with Rafael Alfandari. Though Turkey has long been a safe haven for Jews, marriage between a high-ranking Muslim girl and a Jewish boy is strictly forbidden. Yet young love will not be denied, and Selva and Rafael defy their parents and marry, fleeing to Paris in hopes of a better life - only to find themselves trapped in the path of the invading Nazis. But in the midst of darkness shines a beacon of hope: A handful of courageous Turkish diplomats, protected only by the tenuous neutrality of their homeland, hatch a daring plot to spirit the exiled lovers and hundreds of innocent Jews to safety. Together, they will traverse a war-torn continent, crossing enemy lines and risking everything in one last, desperate bid for freedom.
©2002 Ayse Kulin (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
River of Smoke
Summary
The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel, the pampered raja who has been convicted of embezzlement; Paulette, the French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, the widowed poppy grower fleeing her homeland with her lover, Kalua. The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries Frederick “Fitcher” Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down the priceless treasures of China that are hidden in plain sight: its plants that have the power to heal, or beautify, or intoxicate. All will converge in Canton’s Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave: a tumultuous world unto itself where civilizations clash and sometimes fuse. It is a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars. Spectacular coincidences, startling reversals of fortune, and tender love stories abound. But this is much more than an irresistible page-turner. The blind quest for money, the primacy of the drug trade, the concealment of base impulses behind the rhetoric of freedom: in River of Smoke the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries converge, and the result is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance. Critics praised Sea of Poppies for its vibrant storytelling, antic humor, and rich narrative scope; now Amitav Ghosh continues the epic that has charmed and compelled readers all over the globe.
©2011 Amitav Ghosh (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Alif the Unseen
Summary
In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients — dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups — from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif — the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind.
The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God”, as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground.
When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.
©2012 G. Willow Wilson (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Buddhist Animal Wisdom Stories
Summary
Around the beginning of the common era, Indian Buddhists began to collect fables, or jataka tales, illuminating various human virtues and foibles - from kindness, cooperation, loyalty and self-discipline on the one hand to greed, pride, foolishness, and treachery on the other. Instead of populating these stories with people, they cast the animals of their immediate environment in the leading roles - which may have given the tales a universal appeal that helped them travel around the world, surfacing in the Middle East as Aesop's fables and in various other guises throughout East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Russia, and Europe. Author and painter Mark McGinnis has collected over 40 of these hallowed popular tales and retold them in vividly poetic yet accessible language, their original Buddhist messages firmly intact.
©2004 Mark W. McGinnis (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Alif the Unseen
Summary
In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients - dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups - from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif - the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God”, as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised - and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.
©2012 G. Willow Wilson (P)2012 Audible Ltd
Harvard Square
Summary
André Aciman has been hailed as "the most exciting new fiction writer of the 21st century" (New York magazine), a "brilliant chronicler of the disconnect...between who we are and who we wish we might have been" (Wall Street Journal), and a writer of "fiction at its most supremely interesting" (Colm Tóibín). Now, with his third and most ambitious novel, Aciman delivers an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation - a moving story of an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American. It’s the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of 17th-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square café, everything changes. Nicknamed Kalashnikov - Kalaj for short - for his machine-gun vitriol, the cab driver roars into the student’s life with his denunciations of the American obsession with "all things jumbo and ersatz" - Twinkies, monster television sets, all-you-can-eat buffets - and his outrageous declarations on love and the art of seduction. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend’s magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarefied world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and cafés around Harvard Square, trade intimate accounts of their love affairs, argue about the American dream, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. But as final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New-World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old-World friend. Harvard Square is a sexually charged and deeply American novel of identity and aspiration at odds. It is also an unforgettable, moving portrait of an unlikely friendship from one of the finest stylists of our time.
©2013 Andre Aciman (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
After Disasters
Summary
Beautifully and hauntingly written, After Disasters is told through the eyes of four people in the wake of a life-shattering earthquake in India. An intricate story of love and loss weaves together the emotional and intimate narratives of Ted, a pharmaceutical salesman turned member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team; his colleague Piotr, who still carries with him the scars of the Bosnia conflict; Andy, a young firefighter eager to prove his worth; and Dev, a doctor on the ground racing against time and dwindling resources. Through time and place, hope and tragedy, love and lust, these four men put their lives at risk in a country where danger lurks everywhere. O. Henry Prize-winning author Viet Dinh takes us on a moving and evocative journey through an India set with smoky funeral pyres, winding rivers that hold prayers and the deceased, and the rubble of Gujarat, a crumbling place wavering between life and death. As the four men fight to impose order on an increasingly chaotic city, where looting and threats of violence become more severe, they realize the first lives they save might be their own.
©2016 Viet Dinh (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Helium
Summary
On November 1, 1984, a day after the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a nineteen-year-old student travels back from a class trip with his mentor and chemistry teacher, Professor Singh. As the group disembarks at Delhi station a mob surrounds the professor, throwing a tire over him, dousing him in gasoline, and setting him alight. Years later the student, Raj, is compelled to find his professor's widow, the beautiful Nelly. As the two walk through the misty mountains of Shimla, Nelly comes up against a nation in denial and Raj faces the truth about his father's role in the Sikh massacre - and they both find the path leads back to the train station. Jaspreet Singh crafts an affecting and important story of a largely untouched moment in Indian memory.
©2013 Jaspreet Singh (P)2013 Audible Inc.
Delhi 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: Irwin Allan Sealy, Omair Ahmad, Radhika Jha, Ruchir Joshi, Nalinaksha Bhattacharya, Meera Nair, Siddharth Chowdhury, Mohan Sikka, Palash K. Mehrotra, Hartosh Singh Bal, Hirsh Sawhney, Tabish Khair, Uday Prakash, and Manjula Padmanabhan. The eyes of the world are gazing at India - the world's largest democracy. But the books you read about this Asian giant only show part of the picture. Delhi Noir offers bone-chilling, mesmerizing takes on the country's chaotic capital, a city where opulence and poverty are constantly clashing, where old-world values and the information age wage a constant battle. Delhi Noir's 15 original stories are written by the best Indian writers alive today - the ones you haven't yet heard of but should have. They are veteran authors who have appeared on the Booker Prize short list and budding geniuses who your grandchildren will read about in English class. Delhi Noir is a world of sex in parks, male prostitution, and vigilante rickshaw drivers. It is one plagued by religious riots, soulless corporate dons, and murderous servants. This is India uncut, the one you're missing out on because mainstream publishing houses and glossy magazines can't stomach it.
©2009 Akashic Books (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Final Vinyl Days
Summary
When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves. In "Life Prerecorded," perhaps McCorkle's finest short piece to date, the pregnant narrator finds the real meaning of new life by visiting with a very old neighbor who's waiting, too, for his own new life. In these and the rest of the nine stories, Jill McCorkle acts on her penchant for taming the outrageous, humanizing the forbidden, and grounding the hilarious.
©1998 Jill McCorkle (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
The Rozabal Line
Summary
A cardboard box is found on a shelf of a London library. When the mystified librarian opens it, she screams before she falls unconscious to the floor. Within the labyrinthine recesses of the Vatican, a beautiful assassin swears she will eliminate all who do not believe in her twisted credo. An elite army of thirteen calling itself the Lashkare Talatashar has scattered around the globe. The fate of its members curiously resembles that of Christ and his Apostles. Their agenda is Armageddon. A Hindu astrologer spots a conjunction of the stars and nods to himself in grim realization of the end of the world. In Tibet a group of Buddhist monks searches for a reincarnation, much in the way their ancestors searched Judea for the Son of God. In strife-torn Kashmir, a tomb called Rozabal holds the key to a riddle that arises in Jerusalem and gets answered at Vaishno Devi. In The Rozabal Line, a thriller swirling between continents and centuries, Ashwin Sanghi traces a pattern that curls backward to the violent birth of religion itself.
©2008 Ashwin Sanghi (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
The Invitation
Summary
A moving story that redefines the meaning of family, friendship, and success among a group of first-generation Indian immigrants. When Vikram invites three of his college friends to his son’s graduation from MIT, they accept out of obligation and curiosity, viewing the party as a 25th reunion of sorts. Village genius Vikram, now the founder of a lucrative computer company, is having the party against his son’s wishes. Frances and Jay regret accepting: Frances, a real estate agent, hasn't sold a house in a year; Jay’s middle-management job isn't bragworthy; and their daughter is failing the eleventh grade. Lali plans to hide the fact that her once-happy marriage is crumbling because her American husband is discovering his Jewish roots. Each had left UCLA expecting to be successful and have even more successful children. At Vikram’s Newport Beach mansion, the showmanship they anticipate dissolves as each is forced to deal with his or her own problems. The follow-up to A Good Indian Wife, Anne Cherian’s novel resonates with the poignancy of real life colliding with expectations unmet.
©2012 Anne Cherian (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
METAtropolis: Green Space
Summary
Audie Award Finalist, Original Work, 2014 Audible’s Audie Award-winning and Hugo Award-nominated vision of the not-too-distant future returns! As METAtropolis: Green Space moves into the 22nd Century, human social evolution is heading in new directions after the Green Crash and the subsequent Green Renaissance. Nearly everyone who cares to participate in the wired world has become part of the "Internet of things", a virtual environment mapped across all aspects of the natural experience. At the same time, the serious back-to-the-land types have embraced a full-on paleo lifestyle, including genetically engineering themselves and their offspring. At the same time, a back-to-space movement is seeking the moon, a green Mars, and even the stars, with the eventual goal of leaving a pristine and undisturbed Earth behind. METAtropolis: Green Space is the creation of Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee Jay Lake; Hugo Award winning writers Seanan McGuire, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Elizabeth Bear; New York Times best-selling author Tobias S. Buckell; Aurora Award winner Karl Schroeder; and critically-acclaimed author Ken Scholes.
©2013 Joseph E. Lake, Jr., Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder, Seanan McGuire, Tobias S. Buckell, Mary Robinette Kowal, Ken Scholes (P)2013 Audible Inc.
The Mind Tree
Summary
Eloquent. Philosophical. Introspective. These are not the words usually associated with an autistic child. But in a remarkable display of courage and creativity, a boy named Tito has shattered stereotypes, and in The Mind Tree makes us question all of our previous assumptions about autism. For Tito is severely autistic and nearly nonverbal, and this is his story.
©2011 National Autistic Society (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Gold of the Sunbeams
Summary
Diagnosed as severely autistic at the age of three, Tito, nearly nonverbal, was brought up by his loving mother Soma, who taught him to read English and challenged him to write his own stories. The initial result was The Mind Tree, published in 2003, which Tito wrote between the ages of eight and 11. The Gold of the Sunbeams is an equally impressive, beautiful collection of stories, each prefaced by a charming note from Tito explaining how the story came into being. Above all, this is the work of a true poet.
©2005, 2011 Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Leaving of Things
Summary
Vikram is not your model Indian-American teenager. Growing up in late 1980s Wisconsin, he is rebellious, adrift, and resentful of his Indian roots. But a disastrously drunken weekend becomes a one-way ticket back to the homeland for Vikram after his outraged parents decide to pack up the family and return to India. So begins a profound journey of culture shock, loneliness, and self-discovery as Vikram - navigating the chaos of daily Indian life and the antiquated social rules of his college - finds the confidence to explore his own creativity, reconnect with his family, and meet unforgettable new friends. Most of all, he discovers that India is his soul…. but America is his heart, the land of his destiny, leading to a once-in-a-lifetime test of courage as he sets out to chart a bold new course for his future.
©2014 Jay Antani (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
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.