Narrator

Neil Shah

Neil Shah
  • Based on a remarkable true story

    Seven-year-old Chellamuthu’s life—and his destiny—is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in Southern India and sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. His family is desperate to find him, and Chellamuthu anxiously tells the Indian orphanage that he is not an orphan, he has a mother who loves him. But he is told not to worry, he will soon be adopted by a loving family in America.

    Chellamuthu is suddenly surrounded by a foreign land and a foreign language. He can’t tell people that he already has a family and becomes consumed by a single, impossible question: “How do I get home? But after more than a decade, home becomes a much more complicated idea as the Indian boy eventually sheds his past and receives a new name: Taj Khyber Rowland.

    It isn’t until Taj meets an Indian family who helps him rediscover his roots, as well as marrying Priya, his wife, who helps him unveil the secrets of his past, that he begins to discover the truth he has all but forgotten. Taj is determined to return to India and begin the quest to find his birth family. But is it too late? Is it possible that his birth mother is still looking for him? And which family does he belong to now?

    From the best-selling author The Rent Collector, this is a deeply moving and gripping journey about discovering one’s self and the unbreakable family bonds that connect us forever.

  • The highly anticipated final book in the internationally bestselling the Art of Hearing Heartbeats trilogy, a moving story about love’s power to transcend distances and heal seemingly irreparable wounds

    Twelve-year-old Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son.

    Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness. Convinced that he can heal her and reunite their family, Bo Bo decides to set out in search of his parents.

    A gripping, heartwarming tale that takes the listener from Burma to New York and back, The Heart Remembers is a worthy conclusion to Jan-Philipp Sendker’s beloved series.

  • This groundbreaking multicultural anthology shares moving personal stories about the impacts of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

    An estimated 5.7 million Americans are afflicted by Alzheimer’s disease, including ten percent of those over sixty-five, and it is the sixth leading cause of death. But its effects are more pervasive: For the nearly six million sufferers, there are more than sixteen million family caregivers and many more family members. Alzheimer’s wreaks havoc not only on brain cells—it is a disease of the spirit and heart for not only those who suffer from it, but also for their families.

    This groundbreaking anthology presents forty narratives, both nonfiction and fiction, that together capture the impact and complexity of Alzheimer’s and other dementias on patients, as well as their caregivers and family. Deeply personal, recounting the wrenching course of a disease that kills a loved one twice—first they forget who they are, and then the body succumbs—these stories also show how witnessing the disease and caring for someone with it can be powerfully transformative, calling forth amazing strength and grace.

  • Multilayered, subtle, insightful short stories from the inimitable Booker Prize–winning author

    Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures―European, post-Independence Indian, and American―is never more acute.

    In “A Course of English Studies,” a young woman arrives at Oxford from India and struggles to adapt, not only to the sad, stoic object of her infatuation but also to a country that seems so resistant to passion and color. In the wrenching “Expiation,” the blind, unconditional love of a cloth-shop owner for his wastrel younger brother exposes the tragic beauty and foolishness of human compassion and faith. The wry and triumphant “Pagans” brings us middle-aged sisters Brigitte and Frankie in Los Angeles, who discover a youthful sexuality in the company of the languid and handsome young Indian, Shoki. This collection also includes Jhabvala’s last story, “The Judge’s Will,” which appeared in the New Yorker in 2013 after her death.

    The profound inner experience of both men and women is at the center of Jhabvala’s writing: she rivals Jane Austen with her impeccable powers of observation. With an introduction by her friend, the writer Anita Desai, At the End of the Century celebrates a writer’s astonishing lifetime gift for language and leaves us with no doubt of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s unique place in modern literature.

  • Award-winning author Sylvain Neuvel explores an immigration dystopia in The Test

    Britain, the not-too-distant future.
    Idir is sitting the British Citizenship Test.
    He wants his family to belong.

    Twenty-five questions to determine their fate. Twenty-five chances to impress.
    When the test takes an unexpected and tragic turn, Idir is handed the power of life and death.

    How do you value a life when all you have is multiple choice?

  • In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.

    The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father’s self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul’s career.

  • No writer has rendered our boundaryless, postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. A perfect case in point is this riveting novel, a masterful and stylishly rendered narrative of emigration, dislocation, and dread, accompanied by four supporting narratives.

    On a road trip through Africa, two English people—Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious “compound wife”—are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin’s Uganda. And the farther Naipaul’s protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims. Alongside this Conradian tour de force are four incisive portraits of men seeking liberation far from home.

    By turns funny and terrifying, sorrowful and unsparing, In a Free State is Naipaul at his best.

  • Brand-new stories by: Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller.

    In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller, the “Czar of Noir,” this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.

    From the introduction:

    Jerry Thompson: “Discovering the wang-dang-doodle jams of the Pointer Sisters shifted my entire focus. Stunning black women were scatting and bebopping all the way into my soul. I think what we’ve put together in Oakland Noir is a volume where this city is a character in every story. He’s a slick brother strutting over a bacon-grease bass line and tambourine duet. She’s a white chick with a bucket of hot muffins heading to farmer and flea markets, to sell crafts and get hooked up with some fine kat with dreadlocks and a criminal record. And it’s in the faces of young fearless muthafuckers pounding keyboards and snapping fingers, lips, Snapchats, and Facebook timelines. It’s the core of not only Black Lives Matter but all lives matter. We are the children of fantasy and of the funk.”

    Eddie Muller: “These days, writers and readers aren’t denying the darker parts of our existence as much as they used to, especially in crime fiction. Some writers just do it for fun because it’s become the fashionable way to get published. You know, ‘gritty violence’ and all that bullshit. The genuine darkness in noir stories comes from two places—the cruelty of the world’s innate indifference and the cruelty that people foster within themselves. If you’re not seriously dealing with one, the other, or both, then you’re not really writing noir.”

  • When Cora Holman's mother dies, she assumes the inevitable: that her mother overdosed on the painkillers she'd been taking for years. So she's shocked to learn that her mother and a neighbor both died of a brain aneurysm the same night. When Cora and other neighborhood teens become ill with a mysterious flu, and government-type strangers arrive in her small town, they all fear the unthinkable—a terrorist attack. With each glass of water they drink, the people of Trinity Falls are poisoning themselves.

    Meanwhile, a world away in Pakistan, a sixteen-year-old computer genius named Shahzad is working as a virtual spy. He's alarmed to see an influx of chatter about a substance called Red Vinegar that will, as he reads, "lead to many deaths in Colony One."

    Can Shahzad sift through the babble of the chat room, find the location of the attack, and warn the victims in time? And if so, at what cost to him?

    A Printz Honor Award winner and two-time Edgar Allan Poe Award finalist, Carol Plum-Ucci explores disturbing new terrain in this riveting novel that examines the heroes and victims involved in a terrifying act of bioterrorism.

  • Bioterrorists watch and wait, ready to fuel another nightmare.

    ShadowStrike poisoned the water of Trinity Falls two months ago. Now the Trinity Four, the teens most affected by the poison, have been isolated in a remote mansion under twenty-four-hour medical care while scientists on four continents rush to discover a cure.

    For Scott, Cora, Owen, and Rain, life is anything but peaceful at the old Kellerton mansion. Boredom and resentment build as they struggle with annoying—and possibly fatal—symptoms, while dueling with their own personal demons.

    Meanwhile, US operatives scour the world for the bioterrorists responsible for this heinous crime as two teen virtual spies, also infected, hunt for the criminals on the Internet. The danger remains real—for ShadowStrike has every reason to pursue the Trinity Four, and their evil plan will unleash a new designer virus that's even deadlier than the first.