The Girl Who Played with Fire ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Read by Simon Vance
18:38
The Girl Who Played with Fire, shifts focus from journalist, Mikhail Blomkvist, onto the socially awkward computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth becomes entangled in an investigation into sex trafficking, murder, and establishment corruption. An expert hacker and mathematics-obsessive she is difficult, psychologically traumatised, and capable of extreme violence as she confronts her former attacker and guardian, the police and her father.
In 1905, Stefan Blau, recently emigrated from Burgdorf, has a vision of a girl dancing in a courtyard (foreshadowing identifies her as his eventual granddaughter, Emma) and resolves to give substance to his dream in a building that he will call the Wasserburg. Stefan’s passion for the Wasserburg is also a curse, manifested when both his first wife and his second die in childbirth. Determined not to risk another child, he returns to Burgdorf and marries Helene Montag (sister of Leo, the dwarf Trudi’s father in Stones). Helene tricks him and has a child of her own–and survives–but the sibling rivalry among Stefan’s offspring, combined with the personality defects they acquire when he reserves all his love for the Wasserburg, will threaten to destroy the family.
The time is the turn of the last century, the setting a rocky New Hampshire coastline resort area nicknamed “Fortune’s Rocks.” Olympia Biddeford, age 15, is walking the beach, feeling the first stirrings of her womanhood. The strong-willed daughter of an upstanding Boston couple, she soon “learns of desire” as she begins a passionate affair with a married writer, John Haskell, three times her age. From the moment they meet (he is a visiting friend of her father’s), they experience a sexual spark–Olympia feels “liquid” in his presence. Soon, they fall into sinful trysting.
A breathtaking account of one man’s voyage home from the front at the end of the Civil War. Epic in sweep and heartbreakingly told, this is the rarest of audiobooks, combining superior literary quality with a tremendous story.
This is the story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Brooklyn. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness capturing a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experiences.
The Waverleys are a curious family, even their garden has a reputation, famous for its feisty apple tree that bears prophetic fruit, and its edible flowers, imbued with special powers. When Sydney returns home with a daughter of her own, she and her sister Claire must deal with their legacy.
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