Audiobooks narrated by Armando Duran

A psychologically twisting novel about a politically charged act of violence that echoes through a small Spanish town; a dazzling debut in the tradition of Daniel Alarcón and Mohsin Hamid It’s 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain’s northern Basque Country, a place with more secrets than inhabitants. Five years have passed since the kidnapping and murder of a young local politician—a family man and father—and the town’s rhythms have almost returned to normal. But in the aftermath of the Atocha train bombings in Madrid, an act of terrorism that rocked the nation and the world, the townspeople want a reckoning of Muriga’s own troubled past: everyone knows who pulled the trigger five years ago, but is the young man now behind bars the only one to blame? All That Followed peels away the layers of a crime complicated by history, love, and betrayal. The accounts of three townspeople in particular—the councilman’s beautiful young widow, the teenage radical now in jail for the crime, and an aging American teacher hiding a traumatic past of his own—hold the key to what really happened. And for these three, it’s finally time to confront what they can find of the truth. Inspired by a true story, All That Followed is a powerful, multifaceted novel about a nefarious kind of violence that can take hold when we least expect. Urgent, elegant, and gorgeously atmospheric, Urza’s debut is a book for the world we live in now, and it marks the arrival of a brilliant new writer to watch. “Set in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Urza’s debut novel is as subtle and enveloping as the txirimiri, a Basque word for ‘rain so fine that an umbrella is useless against it.’”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Gabriel Urza (Author), Armando Duran, Kyla Garcia, Thom Rivera (Narrator)

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Apache Ransom

All Ben Allison wants in El Paso is to buy a horse. But after the sale falls through, he runs into an old acquaintance and agrees to escort her son home to his father. But Ben is late and misses the stagecoach, and when it's attacked by Apaches, the boy is kidnapped because Ben wasn't there to protect him. Will he be able to fix the mess he never intended to be a part of in the first place?

Clay Fisher, Henry Wilson Allen (Author), Armando Duran, Armando Durán (Narrator)

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At Night We Walk in Circles

The breakout book from a prizewinning young writer: a breathtaking, suspenseful story of one man’s obsessive search to find the truth of another man’s downfall Nelson’s life is not turning out the way he hoped. His girlfriend is sleeping with another man; his brother has left their South American country and moved to the United States, leaving Nelson to care for their widowed mother; and his acting career can’t seem to get off the ground. That is, until he lands a starring role in a touring revival of The Idiot President, a legendary play by Nelson’s hero, Henry Nunez, leader of the storied guerrilla theater troupe Diciembre. And that’s when the real trouble begins. The tour takes Nelson out of the shelter of the city and across a landscape he’s never seen, which still bears the scars of the civil war. With each performance Nelson grows closer to his fellow actors, becoming hopelessly entangled in their complicated lives until, during one memorable performance, a long-buried betrayal surfaces to force the troupe into chaos. Nelson’s fate is slowly revealed through the investigation of the narrator, a young man obsessed with Nelson’s story—and perhaps closer to it than he lets on. In sharp, vivid, and beautiful prose, Alarcón delivers a compulsively readable narrative and provocative meditation on fate, identity, and the large consequences that can result from even our smallest choices. “As in Lost City Radio, this novel is concerned with the aftereffects of revolution and the surprising ways revolutionary rhetoric endures…Mind who you pretend to be, Alarcón suggests; the story you tell can be a surprisingly potent one. That’s true with this book too…Alarcón successfully merges themes of art, love and politics.”—Kirkus Reviews

Daniel Alarcon (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Avenue of Mysteries

As we grow older—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream—we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. “An aura of fate had marked him,” John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. “The chain of events, the links in our lives—what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do—all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.” Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future.

John Irving (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Avenue of Mysteries

As we grow older - most of all, in what we remember and what we dream - we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but his dreams and memories will travel with him; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. 'An aura of fate had marked him,' John Irving writes. 'The chain of events, the links in our lives - what leads us where we're going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don't see coming, and what we do - all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.' Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past - in Mexico - collides with his future.

John Irving (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Beautiful Maria of My Soul

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a contemporary American classic, a book that still captivates and inspires readers twenty years after its first publication. Now, in Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to this indelible story, to tell it from the point of view of its beloved heroine, Maria. She's the great Cuban beauty who stole musician Nestor Castillo's heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings' biggest hit, "Beautiful Maria of My Soul." Now in her sixties and living in Miami with her pediatrician daughter, Teresa, Maria remains a beauty, still capable of turning heads. But she has never forgotten Nestor, and as she thinks back to her days—and nights—in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the Mambo Kings story unfolds. "I fell instantly in love with the glorious soul of Beautiful Maria of My Soul. Hijuelos has created and brought to life two beloved characters, a heart-stealing heroine and Havana during an epoch of changing fate."—Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club

Oscar Hijuelos (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Black Apache

A gripping story of action in the old west from Clay Fisher, a five-time Spur Award-winning author and recipient of the Levi Strauss Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was a legend with a blood price on his head both north and south of the border; a renegade, black West Point man now living among the hostile bronco Apaches, and waging a war of vengeance against two governments. But when a courageous Mestizo priest with a desperate dream needed a man of strength to fulfill his vision, there was only one warrior fierce enough to turn to. It was the one they called the Black Apache.

Clay Fisher, Henry Wilson Allen (Author), Armando Duran, Armando Durán (Narrator)

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Border Child: A Novel

Young lovers Héctor and Lilia dreamed of a brighter future for their family in the United States. Héctor left Mexico first to secure work and housing. But when Lilia crossed the border with their infant daughter, Alejandra, mother and child were separated, and Alejandra disappeared. Now, four years later, back in their sleepy hometown of Oaxaca, the couple enjoys a semblance of normal life, with a toddler son and another baby on the way. Then they receive an unexpected tip that might lead them to Alejandra, and both agree they must seize this chance, whatever the cost. Working increasingly illegal jobs to earn money for his journey north, Héctor seeks more information about his long-absent daughter. Meanwhile, a bedridden Lilia awaits the birth of their third child, but cannot keep herself from reliving the worst mistakes of her past. In luminous, compassionate prose, Michel Stone drops readers into the whirlwind of the contemporary immigrant experience, where a marriage is strained to the breaking point by the consequences of wanting more for the next generation.

Michel Stone (Author), Armando Duran, Kyla Garcia (Narrator)

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Che Guevara

Brought to you by Penguin. He became a myth in his own lifetime and an international martyr-figure upon his death; he was a revolutionary fighter, a military strategist, a social philosopher, an economist, a medical doctor, and a friend and confidant of Fidel Castro. Che Guevara's dream was an epic one - to unite Latin America and the rest of the developing world through armed revolution, and to end once and for all the poverty, injustice and petty nationalisms that had bled it for centuries. In the end Che failed in his quest but he is recognized as that one-in-a-million personality who just might have pulled it off. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life shuttles between the revolutionary capitals of Havana and Algiers to the battlegrounds of Bolivia and the Congo; from the halls of power in Moscow and Washington to the exile havens of Miami, Mexico and Guatemala, in a gripping tale of revolution, international intrigue and covert operations. It has an epic sweep as it evokes an era of tumultuous change, describing major events like the Bay of Pigs invasion, the October Missile crisis and Kennedy's assassination. Among its cast of characters are scores of historic personalities including Castro, Kennedy, Kruschev, Mao Tse-tung, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, to name but a few. Jon Lee Anderson has been given unprecedented access to the Cuban Government's archives and has had total co-operation from Che's widow, Aleida March, who has never previously spoken for publication about her late husband. He has obtained hitherto unpublished documents, including several of Che's personal diaries and, in the course of his research, broke open a twenty-eight-year-old mystery - the whereabouts of Che's body in Bolivia. There is no doubt that this monumental work will stand as the definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating, yet largely unexplored, historical figures. © Jon Lee Anderson 1997 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Jon Lee Anderson (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

This acclaimed national best-seller is the definitive work on Che Guevara, the dashing rebel whose epic dream was to end poverty and injustice in Latin America and the developing world through armed revolution. Anderson traces Che's extraordinary life from his comfortable Argentine upbringing to the battlefields of the Cuban revolution, from the halls of power in Castro's government to his failed campaign in the Congo and his assassination in the Bolivian jungle. With unprecedented access to personal archives, government documents, and rare interviews, Anderson reveals many details of Che's life that have long been cloaked in secrecy and intrigue. Meticulously researched and full of exclusive information, Che Guevara illuminates as never before this mythic figure who embodied the high-water mark of revolutionary Communism as a force in history. "Superb...Anderson does a masterly job in evoking Che's complex character, in separating the man from the myth...[The book] is especially interesting for being written from a largely Cuban perspective."-New York Times Book Review

Jon Lee Anderson (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Faces in the Crowd

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city’s subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before; his friendships with Nella Larsen and Federico García Lorca; and the young woman in a red coat he saw in the windows of passing trains. As the voices of the narrators overlap and merge, they drift into one single stream, an elegiac evocation of love and loss. Valeria Luiselli’s debut signals the arrival of a major international writer and an unexpected and necessary voice in contemporary fiction. “In part a portrait of the artist as a young woman, this deceptively modest-seeming, astonishingly inventive novel creates an extraordinary intimacy, a sensibility so alive it quietly takes over all your senses, quivering through your nerve endings, opening your eyes and heart. Youth, from unruly student years to early motherhood and a loving marriage—and then, in the book’s second half, wilder and something else altogether, the fearless, half-mad imagination of youth, I might as well call it—has rarely been so freshly, charmingly, and unforgettably portrayed. Valeria Luiselli is a masterful, entirely original writer.”—Francisco Goldman, award-winning author of Say Her Name

Valeria Luiselli (Author), Armando Duran, Roxanne Hernandez (Narrator)

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Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the dead Calaveras

Funny Bones tells the story of how the amusing calaveras-skeletons performing various everyday or festive activities-came to be. They are the creation of Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe (Lupe) Posada (1852-1913). In a country that was not known for freedom of speech, he first drew political cartoons, much to the amusement of the local population but not the politicians. He continued to draw cartoons throughout much of his life, but he is best known today for his calavera drawings. They have become synonymous with Mexico's Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) festival. Juxtaposing his own art with that of Lupe's, author Duncan Tonatiuh brings to light the remarkable life and work of a man whose art is beloved by many but whose name has remained in obscurity.

Duncan Tonatiuh (Author), Armando Duran (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Armando Duran