Award-winning novel Cooper’s Promise by Timothy Jay Smith, available now as audiobook
Hello again, dear audiobooks friends! In today’s article I want to tell you a few things about Cooper’s Promise, an award-winning novel by author Timothy Jay Smith.
Although this thriller was released originally almost 10 years ago, in 2012, the audiobook version made its way to listeners this April. The audio production is narrated by actor Ryan Brophy and has a duration of a little over 7 hours.
To wet your appetite for this story, I can tell you that back in 2012, Cooper’s Promise received a rave review from Kirkus, who called it “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012. Also, I highly recommend that you read below the Publisher’s Summary to find out more about Timothy Jay Smith‘s life, which could also do for a very interesting novel.
Publisher’s Summary:
Army sharpshooter and deserter Cooper Chance is trapped. Recruited from Iraq to fight in an African country ravaged by a chronic civil war, Cooper wants nothing more than to go home. Unfortunately, the only thing awaiting him in America is jail, and Cooper is acutely claustrophobic.
Whether he likes it or not, he now leads the life of a mercenary in a gritty world filled with thugs, prostitutes, and corrupt cops. To survive his desperate circumstances, Cooper trades diamonds. One day, he wanders into a diamond shop, where he meets Sadiq, a young merchant as lost in the world as he is. As they fall in love, Cooper has no idea Sadiq has ulterior motives.
Meanwhile, huge oil reserves are discovered nearby, and the CIA offers Cooper a way home without jail time if he agrees to carry out a risky, high-stakes mission. Cooper will do anything to get home – except sell his soul to the devil. But when a teenage prostitute he has promised to save suddenly disappears, Cooper finally relents. Unfortunately, he has no idea that unexpected consequences await.
Raised crisscrossing America, pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he’s hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.
Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island (to be released by Arcade Publishing in July 2020) won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies.
Another novel, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland, published in 2019 also by Arcade Publishing, received tremendous reviews and is currently competing in many competitions. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the Paris Literary Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels.
Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012. Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize. He’s an avid theater-goer and playwright himself. His stage play, How High the Moon, a gay love story set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award. He is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater.
Narrator Ryan Brophy hails from Sugar Land, Texas, where he got his start (as many do in the South) performing in church musicals all throughout grade school. He began his professional development in high school, training at Northwestern University’s renowned Cherubs theatre program and winning a YoungArts foundation scholarship. (There’s a video of him at age 17 performing a monologue as Roy Cohn in Angels in America somewhere on the Internet if you’re interested. But no worries if you skip it….)
College took him to Los Angeles, where he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in theatre from the University of Southern California. One semester shy of graduating, he made his professional stage debut in Skylight Theatre’s production of Rotterdam, for which he went on to receive an LA Stage Alliance Ovation award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play. The production was subsequently remounted at the Kirk Douglas Theatre as part of Center Theatre Group’s annual Block Party; since then, Ryan has been a proud member of Actor’s Equity Association.
Ryan has expertise in other areas of the entertainment industry, having interned for Voltage Pictures, Showtime Networks, and Telsey + Company. A novice writer, he has composed a piece for the Rant & Rave salon at Rogue Machine Theatre, where he is also a company member. In addition, he has begun the core track at the Groundlings School for Improv.
Hope you enjoyed this article for Cooper’s Promise by Timothy Jay Smith and I promise to return with the review in the following weeks, but until then take care, stay safe and don’t forget, always listen with your heart!
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Victor Dima
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