Audiobooks narrated by Brian Nishii

2054: A Novel

Brought to you by Penguin. From the acclaimed authors of the runaway New York Times bestseller 2034 comes another explosive work of speculative fiction set twenty years further in the future, at a moment when a radical leap forward in artificial intelligence combines with America’s violent partisan divide to create an existential threat to the country – and the world It is twenty years after the catastrophic war between the US and China that brought down the old American political order. A new party has emerged in the US, one that’s held power for over a decade. Efforts to tighten its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media, but he is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he’ll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war. A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence and business have a fairly good idea what happened. All signs point to a profound breakthrough in AI, of which the remote assassination of an American president is hardly the most game-changing ramification. The trail leads to an outpost in the Amazon rainforest, the last known whereabouts of the tech visionary who predicted this breakthrough. As some of the world’s great powers, old and new, state and non-state alike, struggle to outmanoeuvre one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of democracy. Combining a deep understanding of AI, biotech and the possibility of a coming Singularity, along with their signature geopolitical sophistication, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis have once again written a visionary work. 2054 is a novel that reads like a thriller even as it demands that we consider the trajectory of our society and its potentially calamitous destination. ©2024 Elliot Ackerman (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Elliot Ackerman, James Stavridis (Author), Brian Nishii, Emily Woo Zeller, Eunice Wong, Junior Nyong'o, Vikas Adam (Narrator)

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A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

The harrowing true story of one man's life in-and subsequent escape from-North Korea, one of the world's most brutal totalitarian regimes. Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian. In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing and the brutal thirty-six years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced repatriating to Japan after barely escaping North Korea with his life. A River in Darkness is not only a shocking portrait of life inside the country but a testament to the dignity-and indomitable nature-of the human spirit.

Masaji Ishikawa (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Alita: Battle Angel-Iron City: The Official Movie Prequel

The official prequel novel to the highly anticipated film A long time ago there was the Great War. The reasons for the war have been lost to time. On the shattered surface of the Earth, there is a metropolis that lives amidst the garbage thrown down from the inhabitants of a sky city floating above it. Welcome to Iron City. A lonely doctor specializing in cyborg repair, Ido, is doing his best to help the citizens of Iron City. But Ido has a double life, another persona born from the pieces of his broken heart. Hugo, a young man surviving on a life of crime, spots the ultimate steal: an object that will unearth secrets from his own past. And Vector, the most powerful businessman in the city, has his sights set on a new technology that will change the future of Iron City forever ...

Pat Cadigan (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Alita: Battle Angel: The Official Movie Novelization

The official novelization of the highly anticipated film From visionary filmmakers James Cameron (Avatar) and Robert Rodriguez (Sin City), comes Alita: Battle Angel, an epic adventure of hope and empowerment. When Alita (Rosa Salazar) awakens with no memory of who she is in a future world she does not recognize, she is taken in by Ido (Christoph Waltz), a compassionate doctor who realizes that somewhere in this abandoned cyborg shell is the heart and soul of a young woman with an extraordinary past. As Alita learns to navigate her new life and the treacherous streets of Iron City, Ido tries to shield her from her mysterious history while her street-smart new friend Hugo (Keean Johnson) offers instead to help trigger her memories. But it is only when the deadly and corrupt forces that run the city come after Alita that she discovers a clue to her past-she has unique fighting abilities that those in power will stop at nothing to control. If she can stay out of their grasp, she could be the key to saving her friends, her family, and the world she's grown to love.

Pat Cadigan (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling

Two dozen tales of future shock and twisted history from an undisputed king of cyberpunk science fiction, including Nebula Award finalists “Sunken Garden” and “Dori Bangs.” Time magazine describes Bruce Sterling as “one of America’s best-known science fiction writers and perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre.” Sterling’s abilities are on full display in Ascendancies, a collection of speculative fiction from a world-class world-building futurist, alternate historian, and mad prophet operating at the peak of his extraordinary powers. Here are twenty-four stories that span the illustrious career of the author who, along with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, injected the word cyberpunk into the science fiction lexicon. These tales not only traverse galaxies and employ mind-boggling technologies, they also cut back across the centuries into a richly imagined past with style and a sharp satiric edge. Sterling’s unparalleled imagination and courageous originality carry the reader into the future universe of the warring Shapers and Mechanists, rival sects of exiled humanity with radically opposed views of human augmentation. Several stories feature the questionable adventures of the footloose con man Leggy Starlitz in a somewhat-skewed and still-dangerous post–Cold War world. Sterling explores the cyberpunk trope of technology gone wild and the resultant decline of civilization with appropriate gravity, while presenting parables of strangers stuck in very strange lands in a more whimsical vein. Whether chronicling an alien’s encounter with Crusaders in disputed Palestine, depicting the discovery of the key to immortality in a nineteenth-century Times Square magic shop, or portraying bicycles and bad guys in a near-future Tennessee, Sterling’s stories are smart, surprising, genre bending, bold, and outstanding, one and all.

Bruce Sterling (Author), Brian Holden, Brian Nishii, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Mikael Naramore, Pavi Proczko (Narrator)

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Barbed Wire Baseball

Barbed Wire Baseball tells the awe-inspiring tale of Kenichi “Zeni” Zenimura, who never gave up hope or let go of a dream. As a young boy in Hawaii, Zeni knew that he wanted to be a baseball player, even though most people thought he was too small to play. As he grew older, his parents suggested other careers for him, like medicine or law. But Zeni kept playing baseball and grew up to be a successful player and manager, eventually playing in games with baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. But after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Zeni, his wife, and their two sons, along with more than 100,000 other American citizens of Japanese descent, were sent to internment camps in the American Midwest and West. They were imprisoned not for any wrongdoing but simply because of their ancestry. At the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona, Zeni did not allow his situation to overcome him. Instead, with his sons and friends, he built a baseball field that gave all the imprisoned a sense of pride and hope for the future. The life of Kenichi Zenimura, who was later named the father of Japanese American baseball, offers an inspiring true story from a little discussed segment of American history.

Marissa Moss (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Black Wind: A Novel

F. Paul Wilson’s powerful World War II novel is an unforgettable historical saga of passion and terror, the ravages of war, the pain of betrayal, and the glory of love. At the heart of the story are four people torn between love and honor: Matsuo Okumo, born in Japan, raised in America, and hated in both lands; Hiroki Okumo, his brother, a modern samurai sworn to serve a secret cult and the almighty Emperor; Meiko Satsuma, the woman they both love; and Frank Slater, the American who turned away when Matsuo needed him, and who now struggles to repay his debt of honor.

F. Paul Wilson (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War

One of the last, great untold stories of World War II-kept hidden for decades-even after most of the World War II records were declassified in 1972, many of the files remained untouched in various archives-a gripping true tale of courage and adventure from Bruce Henderson, master storyteller, historian, and New York Times best-selling author of Sons and Soldiers-the saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater, in Burma, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, with their families back home in America, under U.S. Executive Order 9066, held behind barbed wire in government internment camps. After Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was desperate to find Americans who spoke Japanese to serve in the Pacific war. They soon turned to the Nisei-first-generation U.S. citizens whose parents were immigrants from Japan. Eager to prove their loyalty to America, several thousand Nisei-many of them volunteering from the internment camps where they were being held behind barbed wire-were selected by the Army for top-secret training, then were rushed to the Pacific theater. Highly valued as expert translators and interrogators, these Japanese American soldiers operated in elite intelligence teams alongside Army infantrymen and Marines on the front lines of the Pacific war, from Iwo Jima to Burma, from the Solomons to Okinawa. Henderson reveals, in riveting detail, the harrowing untold story of the Nisei and their major contributions in the war of the Pacific, through six Japanese American soldiers. After the war, these soldiers became translators and interrogators for war crime trials, and later helped to rebuild Japan as a modern democracy and a pivotal U.S. ally.

Bruce Henderson (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Catch Me if You Can

Ex-FBI sniper Shane Quincy is just trying to survive one day to the next since his wife's death two years ago - a death he blames himself for. The last thing he needs is to have the daughter of America's most infamous mob boss move into the apartment across the hall. Rachel Valentine is on the run from the only 'family' she's ever known. When Shane Quincy saves her life, she has no choice but to tell him who she's running from, even though she knows it'll make him the mob's next target.

Liliana Hart (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Cult X

The magnum opus by Akutagawa Prize-winner Fuminori Nakamura, Cult X is a story that dives into the psychology of fringe religion, obsession, and social disaffection. When Toru Narazaki's girlfriend, Ryoko, disappears, he tries to track her down, despite the warnings of a private detective he's hired to find her. Ryoko's past is shrouded in mystery, but the one concrete clue to her whereabouts is a previous address where she lived: in a compound in the heart of Tokyo, with a group that seems to be a cult led by a charismatic guru with a revisionist Buddhist scheme of life, death, and society. Narazaki plunges into the secretive world of the cult, ready to expose himself to any of the guru's brainwashing tactics if it means he can learn the truth about Ryoko. But the cult isn't what he expected, and he has no idea of the bubbling violence beneath its surface. Inspired by the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Cult X is an exploration of what draws individuals into extremism. This multi-faceted novel is nothing less than a tour de force, capturing the connections between astrophysics, neuroscience, and religion. It is an invective against predatory corporate consumerism and exploitative geopolitics, and it is a love story about compassion in the face of nihilism.

Fuminori Nakamura, Kalau Almony (Author), Brian Nishii (Narrator)

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Dead Sea Conspiracy: A Novel

In this thrilling adventure, archaeologist Nicole Berman is about to discover the key to unifying three major religions-if a dangerous enemy doesn't stop her first. Archaeologist Nicole Berman is the first woman to be awarded a permit to lead a dig in Saudi Arabia. Nicole believes what she hopes to discover has the power to to rewrite world history. She assembles a team that will ultimately surprise - and in some cases - betray her. In a parallel storyline, readers are launched back to ancient Ur where young Abram is sent to learn from his forebears, who tell him firsthand stories of being on the ark during the Great Flood.

Jerry B. Jenkins (Author), Brian Nishii, Stacey Glemboski (Narrator)

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Discerning Ethics: Diverse Christian Responses to Divisive Moral Issues

Racism. Immigration. Gun violence. Sexuality. Health care. The number of ethical issues that demand a response from Christians today is almost dizzying. How can Christians navigate such matters? What are faithful responses to these questions? Edited by two theologians with pastoral experience, this volume invites engagement with these issues and more by drawing on real-life experiences, and offering a range of responses to some of the most challenging moral questions confronting the church today. With an unflinching yet irenic approach, this resource can help Christians as they seek to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

Hak Joon Lee, Timothy Dearborn (Author), Ann Richardson, Bob Souer, Brian Nishii, Chris Abell, Eileen Stevens, Emily Pike Stewart, Eric G. Dove, Feodor Chin, Jennifer Jill Araya, Kate Mulligan, Kevin Kenerly, Kyle Tait, Matthew Mcauliffe, Ralph Lister, Richard Powers, Robertson Dean (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Brian Nishii