Showing results by narrator "Emily Smith" in All Categories

It has been 15 months since Eva and Angela lost their thrill-seeking husbands in a scuba-diving accident. Both women are trying to navigate their way through the grief, but neither one is making much progress. But then Eva gets a life-changing phone call. Before Brent and Wes died, they had signed up for a race of a lifetime - an ultra-marathon in beautiful New Zealand. Eva begs Angela to run the race with her in their husbands’ place, and Angela finally agrees, hoping to finally understand her husband's choices.

It's March 2020 in Birmingham, Alabama, but Maggie Baxter and her cousin Francis Pinkston are facing problems even bigger than the quarantine. While navigating her home health job, along with shutdowns, face masks, and toilet paper shortages, Maggie stumbles upon a dead man-snipped in the bud with his own set of monogrammed scissors!

Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma, where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first.

The year is 1978, and the first boardwalk casino has just opened its doors, drawing lowlifes and high rollers alike to the Jersey Shore. An old colleague has asked Mickey Cleary to help investigate a puzzling death at Atlantic City’s famous Steel Pier. After a decade in law enforcement, she has a new job, a fragile family, and a list of staunch friends and patient enemies. Will Mickey be able to see past her grief and her loneliness as the mystery unfolds? Or will she be drawn into the swirling depths by someone she trusts?

A heartbroken and humiliated Ricky Graves took the life of a classmate and himself. Five months later, the sleepy community is still in shock and mourning. Ricky's sister, Alyssa, returns to confront her shattered, withdrawn mother and her guilt over the brother she left adrift. Mark McVitry, the lone survivor of the deadly outburst sparked by his own cruelty, is tormented by visions of Ricky's vengeful spirit. Ricky's surrogate older brother, Corky Meeks, grapples with doubts about the fragile boy he tried to protect but may have doomed instead.

George Sand was a 19th century French novelist known not only for her novels but even more for her scandalous behavior. After leaving her estranged husband, Sand moved to Paris where she wrote, wore men's clothing, smoked cigars, and had love affairs with famous men and an actress named Marie. In an era of incredible artistic talent, Sand was the most famous female writer of her time.

We want to raise well-rounded human beings—we're just not quite sure how best to do it. Confounded by rapidly changing gender norms, today's parents are attempting to raise kind, compassionate, emotionally sensitive boys in a society that simultaneously rewards stereotypical masculinity and is increasingly hostile to boys. Written by an in-the-trenches #boymom who intimately understands male development and the challenges currently facing boys and their families, Building Boys offers ten rules that parents can use to guide their parenting choices throughout their sons' lives.

Cancer stole everything from Ceelie - her peace of mind, her self-image, perhaps even her 23-year marriage to her college sweetheart, Nate. Without the support of Darlene, her quirky elderly friend, she may not have been able to endure so much loss. So when Darlene’s own prognosis turns dire, Ceelie can’t refuse her seemingly impossible request - to find a WWII paratrooper named Cal, the father who disappeared when Darlene was an infant, leaving a lifetime of desolation in his wake.

A brilliant reporter, haunted by her husband's death....A disgraced cop, tangled in a web of lies....Two unlikely heroes, brought together by one unthinkable crime....

How to Trust Your Inner Voice doesn't offer routines to add to your already busy schedule. Instead, it offers a simple and accessible explanation for how our mind blocks us from accessing our own personal GPS system, the soul. The soul knows what to do, always. But the events and conditioning from our childhood, the dominant values of our culture, and our habitual thought patterns pull us away, creating depression and anxiety and making it hard for us to hear our inner guidance. You don't have to live this way!

A wet Arizona monsoon throws a white-knuckling, single father into a tailspin after falling into his Father's grave. What emerges is a complicated journey that confronts polarizing internal voices, superhuman responsibilities, and an insatiable desire to end human suffering while overcoming one's own mental heath issues, addictions, and suicidal ideations.

Vampire bounty hunter Morgan Bailey needs a break. A girl can handle only so much drama - and her latest assignments have definitely brought the drama. So when her boss mentions an assignment in London, Morgan jumps at the chance to get back to her roots and do what she does best: a good old-fashioned vamp hunt. She should have known better.

For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a listener as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success.

Clifford Odets’ masterpiece, starring Mark Ruffalo, Jane Kaczmarek, Richard Kind, and Ben Gazzara, brings to life the struggles of a working-class family aspiring to the promise of the American Dream. Even as they endure the country’s worst economic nightmare, three generations of an immigrant family are crowded into a Bronx tenement, fiercely determined to stay afloat, no matter what the cost.

Ella Cleary has always had an eye for the truth. She has synesthesia, which means she is able to read people via the waves of colors that surround them. Her unique gift has led her to trust very few people outside her family since her parents died in a fire. So when a handsome young journalist appears with no colors surrounding him at all, her senses go on high alert. But while Alec is a mystery, Ella feels a connection to him she can’t ignore. Then, just as feelings develop between them, Alec drops a bombshell: He believes her parents’ deaths were no accident.

Through the fascinating discoveries made by ethologists, anthropologists, and archeologists, Serra deciphers our behaviors in light of their animal roots and demystifies ideas about how different animals are from humans. She compares human behaviors with those exhibited by other species in chapters spanning topics as varied as sex, morality, emotions, intelligence, and family.

When Eve Carrington is chosen to participate in an exclusive writers' workshop, she knows it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. For one month, she will live, write, and share her work with nine other aspiring authors. The top three will get a chance to be published. But when the building they're staying in isn't ready and Eve sees the old mansion they'll be moved into, she starts having second thoughts. Not only is the mansion isolated but the deadlines are tight, the pressure intense, and the competition incredibly fierce.

In this candid oral history of a presidential tenure, author Brian Abrams reveals the behind-the-scenes stories that illuminate the eight years of the Obama White House through more than one hundred exclusive interviews. Among those given a voice in this extraordinary account are Obama’s cabinet secretaries; his teams of speechwriters, legal advisers, and campaign strategists; as well as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who fought for or against his agenda. They recall the early struggles of an idealistic outsider candidate and speak openly about the exacting work that led to cornerstone legislation.

At the rooftop bar of the famed Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, a former vice president is assassinated. Across the Potomac River, a mysterious sniper leaves a .50 caliber rifle on the bed of his hotel room, then disappears. Crime reporter Jane Cole and NYPD cop Robert Warren have clues no one else has. But as they arrive in DC to investigate, they're hit with a series of cover-ups and misdirections. And as they close in on the killer, they realize that they, too, are being tracked.

On an island in Maine, four siblings arrive at their sprawling, old summer place for the Fourth of July. It's the Willoughbys' first summer without their parents, and their beloved house is falling apart. When a substantial offer is made on the estate, the two brothers and two sisters are forced to confront issues they had hoped to keep hidden. An homage to the layers and limits of the family bond, North Haven explores the shifting allegiances between siblings as they contend with their inheritance.