Showing results by narrator "Cassandra Cassandra" in All Categories

In The Plant Hunter, Dr. Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell us the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida, the rolling hills of central Italy, isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo, and volcanic isles arising out of the Mediterranean - all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs.

Ever since Sutton Mercer's murderer tricked her long-lost twin, Emma, into coming to Tucson, Emma has been trying to solve the mystery of Sutton's death. And now someone else is back in town - Becky, Sutton and Emma's birth mother. As Emma gets closer to discovering what exactly happened the night Sutton was killed, she learns that Becky isn't all that she seems. Turns out Sutton wasn't the only Mercer girl with dark secrets....

In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas.

They say first loves are oftentimes the end of one’s innocence. Those words couldn’t ring truer for Everlynne Lawson, whose first brush with romance came with a heartbreak…and the thing that seems to follow her everywhere she goes. Death. After a great tragedy, Everlynne loses all she cares about—her dreams, her family, and her soulmate, Joe. Guilt-ridden, Everlynne decides to isolate herself in Salem, Massachusetts.

In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the characters we meet. These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one lasting element in our lives.

In a world where the slightest edge can mean the difference between success and failure, Leisha Camden is beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent, and one of a growing number of human beings who have been genetically modified to never require sleep. Once considered interesting anomalies, now Leisha and the other "Sleepless" are outcasts, victims of blind hatred, political repression, and shocking mob violence meant to drive them from human society and, ultimately, from Earth itself.

BERLIN, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the south of France, where the widow of an old friend of her husband’s has agreed to take her in. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape and there, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

Our favorite books keep us company, give us hope, and help us find meaning in a chaotic world. In this fresh and relatable work, atheist chaplain Vanessa Zoltan blends memoir and personal growth as she grapples with the notions of family legacy and identity through the lens of her favorite novel, Jane Eyre.

Not far in the future, the seas have risen, and the central latitudes are emptying. But it's still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor.

In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments. Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists.

The young street urchin Hissune gets his due for helping Lord Valentine regain his throne. As a reward, he is sent into the depths of the Labyrinth, a massive library of memory cubes in which the entire history of Majipoor is preserved. As Hissune prepares for a summons to return to Castle Mount, he relives the lives of Majipoor's most famous and notorious inhabitants.

Foster child Emma Paxton is finally starting to get the hang of walking in her dead twin sister's fabulous shoes, even as she tries to track down Sutton's murderer. But Sutton was no angel, and the pranks she and her friends pulled leave Emma with a long list of suspects. The most mysterious of them is Thayer Vega, who's currently missing - a fact which many of Sutton's friends blame on her.

When Wynter Roth is turned out of New Earth, a self-contained doomsday cult on the American prairie, she emerges into a world poised on the brink of madness as a mysterious outbreak of rapid early onset dementia spreads across the nation. As Wynter struggles to start over in a world she’s been taught to regard as evil, she finds herself face-to-face with the apocalypse she’s feared all her life - until the night her sister shows up at her doorstep with a set of medical samples.

The world fell, the invaders won, and demons now ruled what had once been man's domain. The great works of a once powerful civilization lie in ruins, its people having forgotten the wonders of their forefathers as they now live in the yoke. Not everyone is willing to go quietly into the endless night, however. Human pests still infest occasional parts of the conquered world. In one nearly uninhabitable part of that world, a very young such pest has come of age and, without understanding what it means, she walks in the shadow of destiny.

David Haskell's award-winning The Forest Unseen won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world. Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees' connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants.

Asserting that you can live wholeheartedly after loss and that your feline friend would want nothing less for you, Soul Comfort for Cat Lovers is a compassionate handbook for your grief-healing journey.

Heidi Wood has always been a charitable woman: she works for a nonprofit, takes in stray cats. Still, her husband and daughter are horrified when Heidi returns home one day with a young woman named Willow and her four-month-old baby in tow. Disheveled and apparently homeless, this girl could be a criminal—or worse. But despite her family's objections, Heidi invites Willow and the baby to take refuge in their home. Heidi spends the next few days helping Willow, but as clues into Willow's past begin to surface, Heidi is forced to decide how far she's willing to go to help a stranger.

The next step in Ellie Baker’s marriage: divorce. She and her husband, Jonah, are heading to Florida to break it to the family. No great drama to share. After twenty years of marriage, they’ve just fallen out of love. Simple. Not to their college-age daughter, Maggie, who is devastated. Or to Ellie’s father, Frank, who grows as cold as a retiree can get in Orlando. As for Ellie’s mother, Bunny: no, no, no. She doesn’t want to hear it. After a dreadful weekend, Ellie and Jonah return home to New Jersey with hearts and minds still set on a split.

Lidia Yuknavitch has an unmatched gift for capturing stories of people on the margins—vulnerable humans leading lives of challenge and transcendence. Now, Yuknavitch offers an imaginative masterpiece: the story of Laisvė, a motherless girl from the late 21st century who is learning her power as a carrier, a person who can harness the power of meaningful objects to carry her through time. Sifting through the detritus of a fallen city known as the Brook, she discovers a talisman that will mysteriously connect her with a series of characters from the past two centuries.

Amber Alton knows that the hours pass differently at Black Rabbit Hall, her London family's country estate, where no two clocks read the same. Summers there are perfect, timeless. Not much ever happens. Until, of course, it does. More than three decades later, Lorna is determined to be married within the grand, ivy-covered walls of Pencraw Hall, known as Black Rabbit Hall among the locals.