Showing results by narrator "Aven Shore" in All Categories

Librarian Chloe Sampson has been struggling: to take care of her three younger siblings, to find herself, to make ends meet. She’s just about at the end of her rope when she stumbles across a rare edition of a book from the 1960s at the local flea market. Deciding it’s a sign of her luck turning, she takes it home with her—only to be shocked when her cranky hermit of a neighbor swoops in and offers to buy it for an exorbitant price. Intrigued, Chloe takes a closer look at the book only to find notes scribbled in the margins between two young lovers back when the book was new.

Grace has never been good at anything except magic—not that anyone believes her. While other children are adopted from the orphanage, nobody wants Grace. So she decides to make a home for herself by running away and offering herself as an apprentice to the witch in the nearby woods. After all, who better to teach Grace to use her magic? Surely the witch can’t be that bad.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat.

Upon awakening in an abandoned lab, Evelyn is empowered by a system that grants her bloody magical powers in exchange for finishing missions and consuming her enemies. She knows one truth: no matter the cost, she will advance. She'll manipulate allies and spread demonic corruption with a smile if that's what it takes to level up. Her first mission is to escape the lab's other newly born creations. But once she steps foot into the world outside of the lab, she must contend with people who forbid her existence and who will work to eradicate those with her powers from the face of the planet.

Cults prey on the very attributes that make us human: our desire to belong, to find a deeper meaning in life, to live everyday with divine purpose. Their existence creates a sense that any one of us, at any time, could step off the cliff’s edge and fall into that daunting abyss of manipulation and unhinged dedication to a misplaced cause. Perhaps it’s this mindset that keeps us so utterly obsessed and desperate to learn more, or it’s that the stories are so bizarre and unsettling that we are simply in awe of the mechanics that make these infamous groups tick.

When a sharp cry wakes Jean in the middle of the night during a terrible tempest, she’s convinced it must have been a dream. But when the cry comes again, Jean ventures outside and is shocked by what she discovers—a young woman in labor, drenched to the bone in the bitter cold and able to speak barely a word of English.

Cassie Simmons, a museum curator, is enthusiastic about solving mysteries from the past, and she has a personal interest in the history of the rumrunners who ferried illegal booze across the Detroit River during Prohibition. So when a cache of whisky labeled Bailey Brothers’ Best is unearthed during a local home renovation, Cassie hopes to find the answers she’s been searching for about the legendary family of bootleggers....

Originally published in 1852, Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie, with contributions from her husband John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, is a vibrant, humorous, and wry description of their arrival and life in the young country of Canada after their immigration in 1832 and settlement in the rugged backwoods of what is now Ontario - unimaginably difficult but also breathtakingly beautiful by turns.

The 100 most substantive solutions to reverse global warming, based on meticulous research by leading scientists and policymakers around the world.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. It Came from the Closet features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body, Jude Ellison S. Doyle on In My Skin, Addie Tsai on Dead Ringers, and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

Tully Makker is a tough young woman from the wrong side of the tracks and she is not always easy to like. But if Tully gives friendship and loyalty, she gives them for good, and she forms an enduring bond with Jennifer and Julie, schoolfriends from very different backgrounds. As they grow into the world of the seventies and eighties, the lives of the three best friends are changed forever by two young men, Robin and Jack, and a tragedy which engulfs them all.

Evelyn has advanced leaps and bounds beyond anyone in the Crowned Islands, but in the world outside, she's still near the bottom of the food chain-a mere Category 0 in a world where the monstrous Titans outclass her ten-thousandfold. And unfortunately for her, it seems as if there are even more people out here who want her dead.

From best-selling author James Raffan comes an enlightening and original story about a polar bear’s precarious existence in the changing Arctic, reminiscent of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce.

Death is not the end. But the hells might just end Evelyn's story. They're a strange, dangerous place, and as it turns out, the hells have connections to the Titans...and the system itself. Sapphire wants something out of them. The worlds are falling apart at the seams. In the madness, all Evelyn knows is a handful of truths. She will advance. She will survive. She will kill. And she will DEVOUR.

Never question a mother’s intuition. My water isn’t supposed to break while there’s a storm raging, when my husband isn’t on the island, and as the power flickers out. Darkness covers the cabin as I cling to my belly. I never imagined it happening like this. Trained as a midwife, I know I can deliver my daughter.

Gertrude Stein held a unique position at the center of the modernist movement. She was a novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in America, she moved with her family to Paris where she ran a Paris salon frequented by many famous historical figures, such as Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis.

Ellinor, a thirty-five-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognize the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.

When Owen Galloway, the track star son of a prominent US senator, is found dead of an overdose in his bedroom, LAPD Detective Cari Garcia suspects that he’s just another teenager who hid a drug addiction. In Vancouver, Dr. Julie Rees, an experienced toxicologist, notices a growing number of overdoses among the eating disordered and body builders, and mentions it to her boyfriend, Detective Anson Chen.

The life of a sword-for-hire was often uncertain, but for beautiful, sensual Corson Brenn Torisk it was the only one worth living. When Corson was hired by the Lady Nyctasia, it seemed that fortune was smiling at last. The Lady was pretty, amusing, and rich, and her reputation for sorcery, she assured her new bodyguard, was greatly exaggerated. For Corson had little liking for magic, and less for magicians. But she had a high regard for her own skin, and when her employer's enemies proved both numerous and determined, she soon decided a sword was not enough.

For 20 years Daniel Paquette's murder in New Hampshire went unsolved. It remained a secret between two high school friends until Eric Windhurst's arrest in 2005. What was revealed was a crime born of adolescent passion between Eric and Daniel's stepdaughter, Melanie - redefining the meaning of loyalty, justice, and revenge.