Art Genre

To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than 20 years, she was host to and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the 20th century.

Over the course of 14 novels, millions have fallen in love with the faith, encouragement, and wisdom that are at the very heart of Jan Karon's Mitford series. Now, for the first time, listeners will have the chance to walk with Father Tim through a collection of prayers, sermons, and inspirational passages that incorporates material from each of the novels. In addition, fans will get to hear directly from author Jan Karon, in a brand-new essay about her own personal journey in faith and the ways that the Mitford novels have impacted her.

An all-time best seller, this timeless classic, written at the turn of the century, has blessed millions of people who have asked the vital question, "What does it really mean to be a Christian?" As a young minister, and before becoming editor of the Christian Herald, Sheldon disguised himself as an unemployed printer and tramped the city streets with others in that same plight. He was shocked by the indifference of the Christian community. From that experience he wrote this novel.

Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo - until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight.

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.

This narrative charts Annie Ernaux's teenage awakening and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, a mother of two infant sons.

Lillian and her restaurant have a way of drawing people together. There’s Al, the accountant who finds meaning in numbers and ritual; Chloe, a budding chef who hasn’t learned to trust after heartbreak; Finnegan, quiet and steady as a tree, who can disappear into the background despite his massive height; Louise, Al’s wife, whose anger simmers just below the boiling point; and Isabelle, whose memories are slowly slipping from her grasp. And there’s Lillian herself, whose life has taken a turn she didn’t expect....

Naïma knows Algeria only by the artifacts she encounters in her grandparents' tiny apartment in Normandy: the language her grandmother speaks but Naïma can't understand, the food her grandmother cooks, and the precious things her grandmother carried when they fled. But now Naïma will travel to Algeria to see for herself what was left behind—including their secrets. Alice Zeniter's The Art of Losing is a powerful, moving family novel that spans three generations across seventy years and two shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a story of how we carry on in the face of loss.

The Chinese dragon is flexing its muscles. As its military begins to prey on neighbors in the South China Sea, attacking fishing vessels and scheming to seize natural resources, the US goes on high alert. But a far more ominous danger lurks closer to home: a Chinese sleeper cell has planted a nuclear weapon in the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia, the biggest naval base on the planet. The target: a secret rendezvous of the Atlantic Fleet aircraft carriers and their battle groups.

Since a solo plane crash killed her husband two years ago, Annabelle Murphy has found solace in raising her two children. Just when she thinks the grief is behind her, she receives news that the wreckage of the plane has been discovered - and that her husband did not die alone. He was with another woman. Suddenly Annabelle is forced to question everything she once held true.

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor, and even cheaper entertainment.

In a first-class lounge at JFK airport, our narrator listens as Jeff Cook, a former classmate he only vaguely remembers, shares the uncanny story of his adult life—a life that changed course years before, the moment he resuscitated a drowning man. Jeff reveals that after that traumatic, galvanizing morning on the beach, he was compelled to learn more about the man whose life he had saved, convinced that their fates were now entwined.

Diana Donovan was raised aboard a naval ship on a steady diet of war strategy, so when her orphaned friend, Lucy, is denied a perfectly respectable love match by her controlling guardian, Diana sees an opportunity to put her battle knowledge to use in service of a deserving friend. But Marmaduke Russell is not the middle-aged curmudgeon Diana is expecting. He is a maddeningly cool unmarried gentleman who seems uniquely able to parry her tactics—and infuse her with even more determination to win.

If you could repeat one year of your life, what would you do differently? This heartwarming and hilarious novel features three best friends who get the chance to return to the year they turned 40, the year that altered all of their lives in ways big and small - and get the opportunity to change their future. But it doesn't take long for all three women to learn that reliving a life and making different decisions leads only to new problems and consequences and that the mistakes they made may in fact have been the best choices.

Master Forger David Henty has a problem: a forgery he painted is rejected and suddenly he owes a murderous, blind, female Japanese gangster £5 million.

At a time when nothing seems real, it takes something truly unusual to put your life into focus. When her beloved husband, Jackson, disappeared without a trace, popular novelist Sia Dane stopped writing, closed down her house, stuffed her heart into a cage, and started floating. It wasn’t the normal response to heartache, but Sia rarely did things the normal way. Exactly one year, one month, and six days after Jackson’s disappearance, Sia discovers a mysterious man on the beach. He’s mute, unresponsive, and looks as if he has just walked out of the sea.

Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. Set in the varied landscapes of Spain, Africa, and the American Midwest, this definitive audio collection traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style - from the plain bold language of this first story to his mastery of seamless prose that contained a spare, eloquent pathos, as well as a sense of expansive solitude.

1846. Glasgow is a city on the cusp of great social change, but behind the curtains, neighbours are watching, and rumours of improper behaviour spread like wildfire on the respectable Blythswood Square. When Charlotte Nicholl discovers that the fortune she has been bequeathed by her father is tied up in a secret collection of erotic art, she is faced with a terrible dilemma: sell it and risk shaming her family's good name or lose her home.

Abandoned as an infant on the local veterinarian’s front porch, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two loving mothers, and now, at thirty-six is married to the stable, supportive Ike. She’s never told anyone that at fifteen she discovered the identity of her biological mother. That’s because her birth mother is Ula Frost, a reclusive painter famous for the outrageous claims that her portraits summon their subjects’ doppelgängers from parallel universes.