Showing results by narrator "Madeleine Maby" in All Categories

Nan Lewis - a creative writing professor at a state university in upstate New York - is driving home from a faculty holiday party after finding out she's been denied tenure. On her way, she hits a deer, but when she gets out of her car to look for it, the deer is nowhere to be found. Eager to get home and out of the oncoming snowstorm, Nan is forced to leave her car at the bottom of her snowy driveway to wait out the longest night of the year - and the lowest point of her life....

It isn't safe. That's what Joe tells her when he ends their affair - moments before their car skids off an icy road in a blinding snowstorm and hits a tree. Desperate to keep her life intact - her job, her husband, and her precious daughter, Lily - Dorrie will do everything she can to protect herself, even if it means walking away from the wreckage. Dorrie has always been a good actress, pretending to be someone else: the dutiful daughter, the satisfied wife, the woman who can handle anything.

Rising literary star and Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Sarah Gerard uses her experiences growing up along Florida's Gulf Coast to illuminate the struggles of modern human survival - physical, emotional, environmental - through a collection of essays exploring intimacy, addiction, obsession, religion, homelessness, and incarceration.

Lana used to know what was real. That was before, when her life was small and quiet. Her golden stepbrother, Ben, was alive. She could only dream about bonfiring with the populars. Their wooded island home was idyllic, she could tell truth from lies, and Ben's childhood stories were firmly in her imagination. Then came after. After has Lana boldly kissing her crush, jumping into the water from too high up, living with nerve and mischief. But after also has horrors.

Sisterhood, motherhood, marriage, baking, and books - these are a few of the things that make this delightful novel a recipe for getting through the tough stuff of life. Filled with love, humor, and the scent of delectable puff pastry, Three Good Things tells the tale of two sisters who find their bond invaluable as they navigate marriage, heartache, poor grammar, and the surprising challenges that ultimately become the most fulfilling blessings.

Maggie Kincaid left the FBI two years ago and didn't look back, until now. A senator's daughter has been abducted, and the nightmare set in motion isn't just familiar to Maggie, it's personal. She'll need all the help she can get to bring Kayla Thebes home alive - even if that help comes from a hot-as-hell ex-soldier who plays by his own rules. For Jake O'Connor, negotiation equals weakness. But he's immediately drawn to the sexy former agent who epitomizes strength.

Nicki Daniels owns a home appraisal business, but real estate is her true passion: She lives for open houses and really knows her way around a floor plan. And especially at this juncture of her life, real estate has come to signify the stability she is trying to build with her teenage son, Cody, and her much younger boyfriend, Jake. She's finally ready to find the perfect house for the three of them and work on a new business venture with Jake that she thinks will jump-start their lives together.

In the best-selling tradition of A Man Called Ove and the beloved film Love Actually, a quirky, socially awkward man goes on a quest to find his wife a last-minute Christmas gift and encounters several distractions - including bumping into his ex-girlfriend who was the one who got away.

Bolivar Randy Heart (a.k.a. Brady) knows exactly what he wants next in life: the perfect wife. Raised in a strict traditional family household, he seeks a woman who is sweet, conservative, and eager to settle down. With his well-known protective and dominant streak, he needs a woman to offer him balance in a world where he relishes control.

When Amanda Cooper steps foot out of jail, she's determined to never go back. Two years behind bars means she's missed her daughter, Taylor, turning into a teenager, and she doesn't want to lose another moment with her. But as a convicted con artist, Amanda has few options for getting out of Los Angeles and securing her dream life: predictable, boring, and bordered by a white picket fence. The trouble is Amanda's not the only one with a con. At every step of the way, someone is trying to pull her back into the game.

Connor Dunkle knows what he wants in a woman, and it's the three B's. Beauty. Body. Boobs. Other women need not apply. With his good looks and easygoing charm, he's used to getting what he wants - and who. Until he comes face to face with the one woman who's slowly making his life hell...and enjoying every moment.

Blythe Hallowell is 16 when she is abducted by a survivalist and locked away in an aban­doned missile silo in Eudora, Kansas. At first, she focuses frantically on finding a way out, until the harrowing truth of her new existence settles in - the crushing loneliness, the terrifying madness of a captor who believes he is saving her from the end of the world, and the persistent temptation to give up. But nothing prepares Blythe for the burden of raising a child in confinement.

She's an expert in helping others de-stress, but Arilyn Meadows is running on fumes. Along with her job counseling singles seeking soul mates at the Kinnections agency in Verily, New York, she's a yoga teacher, animal shelter volunteer, anger management therapist, and helping hand to her beloved grandfather. And when police officer Stone Petty - radiating masculinity and bad-boy attitude - is sent to her for mandatory lessons in cooling off when the job gets too hot, Arilyn vows to ignore his seductive glances and sexy grin.

A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver suddenly finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she cowers face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow, the most popular girl in her eighth-grade class. The minutes tick inexorably by, and Meredith lurches between comforting the sobbing Lisa and imagining her own impending death. Then the man orders Lisa Bellow to stand and come with him, leaving Meredith the girl left behind.

Sidney and her friends might have survived the storm that came to the small island of Benediction, but now the storm has reached Boston, and the city isn't prepared for what's coming in this sequel to Savage from New York Times best-selling author Thomas E. Sniegoski. The horrors that began in Savage continue in Boston as Sydney and her friends work to protect the city from the newly crazed rampage of animals and try to figure out the origin of the storm and its power.

Originally published in 1969, The Inland Island is Josephine W. Johnson’s startling and brilliant chronicle of nature and the seasons at her rambling 37-acre farm in Ohio, which she and her husband reverted to wilderness with the help of a state forester. Over the course of 12 months, she observes the changing landscape with a naturalist’s precision and a poet’s evocative language. Listeners will marvel at the way she brings to life flashes of beauty, the inexorable cycle of growth and decay, and the creatures who live alongside her, great and small.

Laura hails from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, born into old money, drifting aimlessly into her early 30s. One weekend in 1981 she meets Jefferson. The two sleep together. He vanishes. And Laura realizes she's pregnant. Enter: Emma.

June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband, a quiet life, and act accordingly. But the world is changing, and as they explore the City of Light, the larger threats of fascism and occupation are looming.

For forty years in the mid-nineteenth century, “Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth-control medication, attended women during their pregnancies, delivered their children, and performed abortions in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. It was the abortions that made her famous. “Restellism” became the term her detractors used to indict her. A story that is all too relevant, The Trials of Madame Restell paints an unforgettable picture of the changing society of nineteenth-century New York.

Everybody knows Hazard Stokes has mad football skills. A defensive back, he’s never played dirty (no need for that when you’re as good as he is) so it’s a shock when he makes a bad hit the first game of the season and gets thrown off the field. Now Coach won’t let him back on the team until a therapist gives the thumbs up. At first, Haz denies there’s a problem, but over time he starts to get it.