“A sprawling tale of love, family, duty, war, and displacement. It is above all a stinging indictment of the ill-fated war in Iraq and the heavy tolls it continues to exact on its people.” —Khaled Hosseini, #1 New York Times bestselling author
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- Correspondents
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By Tim Murphy
Read by Necar Zadegan and Assaf Cohen
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
The world is Rita Khoury’s oyster. The bright and driven daughter of a Boston-area Irish Arab family that has risen over the generations from poor immigrants to part of the coastal elite, Rita grows up in a 1980s cultural mishmash. Corned beef and cabbage sit on the dinner table alongside stuffed grape leaves and tabouleh, all cooked by Rita’s mother, an Irish nurse who met her Lebanese surgeon husband while working at a hospital together. The unconventional yet close-knit family bonds over summers at the beach, wedding line dances, and a shared obsession with the Red Sox.
Rita charts herself an ambitious path through Harvard to one of the best newspapers in the country. She is posted in cosmopolitan Beirut and dates a handsome Palestinian would-be activist. But when she is assigned to cover the America-led invasion of Baghdad in 2003, she finds herself unprepared for the war zone. Her lifeline is her interpreter and fixer Nabil al-Jumaili, an equally restless young man whose dreams have been restricted by life in a deteriorating dictatorship, not to mention his own seemingly impossible desires. As the war tears Iraq apart, personal betrayal and the horrors of conflict force Rita and Nabil out of the country and into twisting, uncertain fates. What lies in wait will upend their lives forever, shattering their own notions of what they are entitled to in a grossly unjust world.
Epic in scope, by turns satirical and heartbreaking, and speaking sharply to America’s current moment, Correspondents is a whirlwind story about displacement from one’s own roots, the violence America promotes both abroad and at home, and the resilience that allows families to remake themselves and endure even the most shocking upheavals.
- Correspondents
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By Tim Murphy
Read by Necar Zadegan and Assaf Cohen
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Trapped in Iran
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By Samieh Hezari, with Kaylene Petersen
Read by Necar Zadegan
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Release Date: 10/31/16
Formats: Digital Audy
In 2009, Samieh Hezari made a terrible mistake. She flew from her adopted home of Ireland to her birthplace in Iran so her fourteen-month-old daughter, Rojha, could be introduced to the child’s father. When the violent and unstable father refused to allow his daughter to leave and demanded that Samieh renew their relationship, a two-week holiday became a desperate five-year battle to get her daughter out of Iran. If Samieh could not do so before Rojha turned seven, the father could take sole custody―forever.
The father’s harassment and threats intensified, eventually resulting in an allegation of adultery that was punishable by stoning, but Samieh―a single mother trapped in a country she saw as restricting the freedom and future of her daughter―never gave up, gaining inspiration from other Iranian women facing similar situations. As both the trial for adultery and her daughter’s seventh birthday loomed, the Irish government was unable to help, leaving Samieh to attempt multiple illegal escapes in an unforgettable, epic journey to freedom.
Trapped in Iran is the harrowing and emotionally gripping story of how a mother defied a man and a country to win freedom for her daughter.
- Trapped in Iran
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By Samieh Hezari, with Kaylene Petersen
Read by Necar Zadegan
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Release Date: 10/31/16
Formats: Digital Audy