Showing results by narrator "Dion Graham" in All Categories

Lucas goes to the perfect school in the perfect neighborhood. But life at home is not so perfect. His dad’s old work truck stalls in front of the school. The electricity is out when he gets home, and he doesn’t even have time to show his mom his report (on which he received a perfect score) before she rushes off to her night job. That night, Lucas dreams of a strange light, which he follows down the fire escape, into the alleyway, clear out of his neighborhood, all the way to the place where the perfect people live.

Ten-year-old Anthony Joplin has made it to double digits! Which means he's finally old enough to play in the spades tournament every Joplin Man before him seems to have won. So while Ant's friends are stressing about fifth grade homework and girls, Ant only has one thing on his mind: how he'll measure up to his father's expectations at the card table. Then Ant's best friend gets grounded, and he's forced to find another spades partner. And Shirley, the new girl in his class, isn't exactly what he has in mind.

In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz.

A partially decomposed body of a young woman is discovered in a park in Pasadena, California. The woman was strangled but not sexually assaulted. The police suspect she might be a missing heiress who disappeared over a year ago, but dental records prove them wrong. But who is she? And is there a link between the heiress and this corpse? The celebrated detective Virgil Tibbs reshapes the known facts regarding these two women and discovers astonishing connections.

In this intimate biography of the Prince of Soul, David Ritz provides a candid look at a star and a friend. Ritz had been collaborating with Marvin Gaye on his story for several years before the singer's tragic death and had conducted a series of extraordinary interviews in which Gaye discussed his deepest secrets. What emerges is a full-scale portrait of a charming but tortured artist, a brilliant singer with a divided soul.

Part The Art of the Deal and part Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun, The Peebles Principles distills the lessons Mr. Peebles has learned on his journey from congressional page to CEO of the largest black-owned real-estate development firm in the nation. These crisp, straightforward principles can help any motivated entrepreneur go from dirt poor to filthy rich in a hurry.

When best friends Dak Smyth and Sera Froste stumble upon the secret of time travel - a hand-held device known as the Infinity Ring - they're swept up in a centuries-long secret war for the fate of mankind. Recruited by the Hystorians, a secret society that dates back to Aristotle, the kids learn that history has gone disastrously off course. Now it's up to Dak, Sera, and teenage Hystorian-in-training Riq to travel back in time to fix the Great Breaks . . . and to save Dak's missing parents while they're at it.

This national best-seller chronicles the true story of two brothers coming of age in the Henry Horner public housing complex in Chicago. Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers are 11 and nine years old when the story begins in the summer of 1987. Living with their mother and six siblings, they struggle against grinding poverty, gun violence, gang influences, overzealous police officers, and overburdened and neglectful bureaucracies. Immersed in their lives for two years, Kotlowitz brings us this classic rendering of growing up poor in America’s cities.

No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls," best-selling novelist Walter Mosley advises. Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom, Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Mosley tells how to: create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's needs - and how to stick to it, determine the narrative voice that's right for every writer's style, and get past those first challenging sentences and into the heart of a story.

In this story, a nine-year-old boy, lonely after a family move, shoots an older child who stole something from him, thus igniting the militant blacks and racist whites of 1960s Pasadena into a black-white conflict involving riots, brutalities, a chase through Disneyland, and a heart-warming as well as heart-breaking scene toward the end of the book that takes place in a baseball park of the California Angels.

After a heated encounter inside a London hotel room - where he was pursued by three very different women - Gideon finds himself living in a world where there's no one to trust.

When Madame Motamboru, widow of the assassinated president of Bakara, is framed for murder in Singapore, she requests that her old friend Virgil Tibbs take part in the investigation. Because of US interests in the area, Tibbs is cleared for passage. Upon arrival, Tibbs finds that the police there are convinced of Madame Motamboru's guilt. All the evidence says that only she could have shot the man who visited her hotel suite.

Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the '80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon.

Langston Hughes was only twenty-four when he published his debut collection of poetry, The Weary Blues. The poems included here blend vernacular speech and musical rhythms to offer a bracing perspective on the African American experience. Traversing a wide range of settings—including the jazz clubs of Harlem, expansive natural landscapes, and seaside taverns—Hughes’s voice as a poet ties these various places together.

Audible Originals presents After the Fall, the incredible true story of the FBI’s groundbreaking investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The series also marks the 20th anniversary of the deadliest crime in modern US history.

International hit man Gideon never misses his target, but when a job in Detroit goes bad, he should have killed his client - a cold-blooded woman who hired him to kill her husband - when he had the chance. Now the city's mayor and with money and power to spare, this woman will stop at nothing to see that Gideon gets what he deserves.

After nearly losing his life in Antigua during a mission that went terribly wrong, Gideon trusts no one. But when a former lover and grifter, Arizona, resurfaces in need of his skills, she reminds him he was indebted to a man who had once saved his life: the son of the legendary con-man Scamz. Gideon is forced to take on an assignment which will lead him to Argentina in pursuit of a briefcase containing one part of a larger puzzle.

Courtney Cooper and Jupiter Sanchez (Coop & Jupe!) have been next-door neighbors and best friends since they were seven years old. She's his partner in crime and other half. But lately, Cooper can't ignore he might want something more than friendship from Jupiter. When Rae Chin moves to town she can't believe how lucky she is to find Coop and Jupe. Being the new kid is usually synonymous with pariah, but around these two, she finally feels like she belongs. She's so grateful she wants to kiss him...and her.

Virgil Tibbs, the cool, highly competent black detective of the Pasadena Police Department, returns one day to his bachelor apartment to find that it has been expertly stripped to the bare walls - not a thing remains to show that he has ever lived there. At headquarters he is given a cryptic note from Police Chief McGowan, sending him to a certain address in the better section of Pasadena. When he arrives he finds his possessions carefully installed in a fine new home. But that's not all. The door is opened by a very attractive young woman.

For Ben Boyce and Adhi Chaudry, the answer is unequivocally yes. And they’re betting everything that you’ll say yes, too. Welcome to The Future: a computer that connects to the internet one year from now, so you can see who you’ll be dating, where you’ll be working, even whether or not you’ll be alive in the year to come. By forming a startup to deliver this revolutionary technology to the world, Ben and Adhi have made their wildest, most impossible dream a reality. Once Silicon Valley outsiders, they’re now its hottest commodity.