If you are looking for a good read to gift to a friend or a loved one and would like to purchase a signed copy of any novel written by Marina Raydun, please e-mail marina@marinaraydun.com. As our gift to you, we'll cover the cost of domestic shipping.
One Year in Berlin
Foreign Bride
One Year in Berlin: Trying to outrun her family’s history with the Holocaust, Rachael finds herself having to live in Berlin for at least a year. Once there, she is tortured by visions and nightmares as she allows herself to try to connect the dots between her family’s past and her own present.
Foreign Bride: Bobby was hesitant to settle for a mail-order bride from Russia and Sofiya felt like a welcome compromise. But, young, beautiful and English-speaking, she comes with her own baggage. Can the two overcome their mutual mistrust and damaging insecurities before they destroy each other trying to make their marriage work?
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“This is a haunting, sensual work.”
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“The book is packed with vivid scenery and culture, along with history.”
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“Each story in this beautifully crafted collection of novellas pays testament to the resilience of women, even in the face of the most heart-wrenching and difficult circumstances.”
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“In a short span of pages, Ms. Raydun manages to give her characters in both novellas depth and personality that make them come alive for the reader. Her writing shows maturity and elegance…”
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“Raydun’s collection of short stories employs the use of foreign lands as metaphors for the terra incognita that typically accompanies the journey of marriage. This is a clever way of having united these two stories together, because each of the two are quite different in other ways.
Joe After Maya
Joe is lost.
A sudden widower, he is alone in the trendy apartment he had earned at a great cost to himself. He has nowhere to look but back.
His wife Maya violently murdered, the next week of Joe’s life is a dizzying whirl of revelations and cigarette smoke as he reflects on their time together in the effort to uncover who killed her and why.
On his journey, Joe reluctantly finds and faces himself.
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“…one of the most interesting books I have read in some time. As the story progresses, the author feeds in one twist after another. Each was unexpected…”
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“Sort of like that one movie that you can watch over and over again because of its tremendous substance and beauty.”
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“It is a thoughtful book where the dead woman is a fully fleshed out sarcastic mouthy and realistic character who lives on in the mind of her grieving husband, pushing him to see the truth that he has hidden from himself and to use it to break free of the bondage of class expectations and solve her murder.”
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“The sense of exhaustion, dread, and angry anxiety is balanced well with a pitch black sense of humor and a well-observed absurdity in the way media, family, and friends influence you…Twists abound and for the first time ever we get an unreliable narrator who is as flawed as the times we live in.”
Effortless
At 28, Helen longs to be effortless. Jamie looks it. Breaking a long-standing engagement, Helen at once knows what she has to do. She follows this enchanting stranger across the Atlantic, hoping to find more than temporary shelter and a distraction from her seemingly crumbling life when she gets there. Inevitably, the road for the two proves to be bumpier than Helen had ever imagined it could be. Along the way, she stumbles across unexpected discoveries about herself, as well as those in her life she's always thought she knew best.
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“It's impossible to put down and such a treat to read.”
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“The plot is original, the story moves at a nice even pace. I found myself saying "just one more chapter" and I was up way past my bedtime, needing to read more.”
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“The writing is perfect...The dialogue is spot on...”
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“ENTHRALLING!”
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“The cover frames the story perfectly.”
Inevitable
Just as Helen finally begins to let herself believe that she’s reached that elusive effortlessness with Jamie, her former fiancé follows through on his threat and her world is torn apart. Confronted with herself like never before, Helen must, once and for all, decide what it is she expects of herself and desires out of life. This challenge proves almost unattainable as Helen takes most unexpected routes to try to find her happiness.
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“…a very thoughtful, sincere, and thoroughly-developed work about the complexities of our identities and our relationships.”
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“The writing is perfect…everything fits. I am quite pleased that I [found] these books.”
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“The common link between all of Marina's novels is the feeling that the main characters are telling stories of the reader's own life.”
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“A well written story, (with) an original plot, [filled] with drama, secrets and truths discovered.”
Good Morning, Bellingham
When Peta goes missing, a two-decade old secret threatens to rip at the seams and come out in the open. Relationships are tested as one dysfunctional family comes together in search of their daughter, sister, and wife. What they find instead will change each one of them forever.
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--The novel begins rather slow and generally weaves between the characters, working through some deeply held convictions that formed the lives, personalities, and emotional relationship to each other. The connections gradually become revealed as the book progresses through to the obvious conclusion. Each has become intellectual and psychological toys manipulated by the author to create an intense domestic noir. A harsh study into the impact we impart on each other's lives.
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--The author does a great job at creating characters that evoke the desired feelings. There are characters you'll love, those you'll hate, and those that will remain a bit mysterious until the very end. All and all, it's an enjoyable read.
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--Dysfunctional families might make you think of a funny sitcom or perhaps your own overbearing in-laws. However, Marina Raydun sheds new light on the dark depths in which a family can plunge. As the connections unfold, each revelation more shocking than the last, the intrigue crests with zeal...Good Morning, Bellingham starts off at a slow simmer but reaches and maintains a full boil. For a twisted tale that will make you feel better about your own family, give Marina Raydun a read!"
-Indies Today
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--Mixing top-notch suspenseful storytelling with the kind of razor-edged observation we come to expect from genre bestsellers she certainly gets us thinking with plot twists derived from its moral conundrums as opposed to narrative sleight of hand as Raydun explores malcontent and long buried secrets. On this level, Raydun's novel is stylish, twisted, daring, smart and dark. This isn't the first time she's forced us to question what we're reading and it soon becomes clear that the central mystery of Peta's disappearance hinges less on what happened to her and more on who she was beneath the veneer of her celebrity status...Superbly written nail biting Psychological Fiction and highly enjoyable Good Morning, Bellingham is recommended without reservation.
-Book Viral
Marina is off to a rough start in the country of her dreams.
Fresh off the plane from Belarus, this eleven year old cannot seem to catch a break. Her family is split in two, she doesn’t speak a lick of English, and there is a rusty fire escape outside her grandmother’s bathroom window that terrifies her. The adults around her are convinced that, by virtue of her age, she’s immune to true hardships. After all, they have bigger things to worry about than her overwhelm. But the complicated family dynamics and the complexity of becoming a middle schooler in Brooklyn, NY in 1994 prove that nothing is as easy as it is prophesied. Marina is in for a lonely and testing ride, seeking solace in the bright colors of American television and finding company in the music played on her second-hand stereo.
What awaits Marina on this journey that is her Year One?
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The confusion upon landing in NY, not being able to pinpoint the moment where the plane ended and the airport terminal started, sets the tone for this wonderfully humorous adventure from the viewpoint of a naive eleven year old Russian immigrant trying to decipher her new world. When Marina and her family finally stepped off the endless aircraft, it wasn't only the language barrier that isolated them. Marina Raydun seamlessly manages to insert us into the head of her younger self, thus offering us a front seat in the crazy ride that was her first year on American soil. -Mira Awad, Multidisciplinary artist and storytelling consultant