Showing results by narrator "Xe Sands" in All Categories

Kiki MacInnes has burned more than a few bridges in her time. Now, as a recovering alcoholic, she’s dedicated to helping others avoid addiction. She can only hope her temporary role as the new châtelaine for Castle MacInnes will help her stay on the straight and narrow, too. But even if she’s somehow able to redeem herself for the mistakes of the past, could all the people she’s hurt ever forgive her? Could the handsome small-town pastor, who has her longing for a Christmas miracle?

Famed Broadway producer Milo Short steps out of his Upper West Side brownstone on one exceptionally hot morning, he's not expecting to see the impossible: a woman from his life 60 years ago, winking at him on a New York sidewalk. The sight causes him to suffer a stroke. And when he comes to, the renowned lyricist discovers he has lost the ability to communicate. Milo believes he must unravel his complicated history with Vivian Adair in order to win back his words

At 16 Annabelle Morgan hoped her crush on Jake Wilder was just a passing phase. Now she's 29, and nothing has changed - except Jake. The once-carefree marine has come home with a giant chip on his shoulder. He insists a single mom like Annie deserves more than he can offer.

To save her world, one woman's fierce quest will put her up against an ancient evil - and a desire too dangerous to deny. She is betrothed to Seattle's most feared shifter clan leader. Still, the Lady Lucia can never be the dainty aristocratic wife Emory Corbette thinks he needs. And as a malevolent, all-consuming monster plots to take hold of their shattered world, Lucia will risk her untapped powers to defeat it - and challenge the Raven King's seductive rule.

In his second collection of short stories, James Leo Herlihy explores a landscape of people living on the fringes of normal society as the pleasures of daily life fade. Men and women search for the missing fragment of meaning from their existence with Herlihy’s signature humor and deft dialogue. In the titular story, Mary Ellen McClure is trapped in a dull, unfulfilled life in a trailer park, suspecting her husband of having an affair. Together with her neighbor Ivy, she dabbles with a Ouija board which spells out the name Ezra and implies that Mary Ellen will have an affair.

The Speed of Mercy captures the unbearable cost of childhood betrayal and what happens when history is suppressed, our past is forgotten - yet finding the truth can change the future. Christy Ann Conlin rips into the myths and stereotypes about older women and those on the edge of conventional society to reveal the timeless gift of mercy in this feminist tour de force.

This stunning novel introduces Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle's Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans - including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women - joins her in residence.

Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the west, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of 15-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated - living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer.

For her previous novels (Things We Didn’t Say, The Life You’ve Imagined, Real Life & Liars), author Kristina Riggle has garnered fabulous reviews and established herself as a rapidly rising star of contemporary women’s fiction. In Keepsake, she explores that most complicated of relationships, as two sisters raised by a hoarder deal with old hurts and resentments, and the very different paths their lives have taken. As always, Riggle approaches important topics poignantly and honestly—including hoarding and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) in her remarkable Keepsake—while writing with real emotional power and compassion about families and their baggage. For readers of Katrina Kittle and Elin Hildenbrand, Kristina Riggle’s Keepsake is a treasure.

Until recently, scientists could only guess at what lay past the edge of spacetime. But as pioneering theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton explains, today new scientific tools are giving us the ability to peer beyond the limits of our universe and test our theories about what is there. Her groundbreaking research suggests that we sit in a quantum landscape whose peaks and valleys hide a multitude of other universes, and whose topography holds the secret to the origins of existence itself.

After a life that rubbed up against the century’s great events in New York City, Mexico, and Montreal, 96-year-old Cassandra MacCallum is surviving well enough, alone on her island, when a young Burmese woman contacts her, claiming to be kin. Curiosity, loneliness, and a slender filament of hope prompt the old woman to accept a visit. But Nang’s story of torture and flight provokes memories in Cass that peel back, layer by layer, the events that brought her to this moment - and forces her, against her will, to confront the tragedy she has refused for half a century.

'Come home.' Vera's mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories—she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he'd built for his family. Coming home is hard enough for Vera, and to make things worse, she and her mother aren't alone. A parasitic artist has moved into the guest house out back and is slowly stripping Vera's childhood for spare parts.

Want to know all the secrets to handling your daydreamy Gemini child? Gemini children are easily bored and are always daydreaming. Their minds are incredibly active. As soon as they have a thought, they are on to the next one. That is why it appears that they never listen to you. So how do you get them to pay attention? By understanding how their minds work, by respecting that they are driven more by logic than emotion, by not endlessly lecturing them, and by giving them the freedom to pursue their own interests. This audiobook will show you how to do just that.

The Marvel of Martyrdom takes a broad perspective on self-sacrifice and martyrdom, bringing together religion, popular culture, history, psychology, and mythology. Stories of individuals both famous (Gandhi) and obscure (Rodrigo Rosenberg) intertwine with research on altruism, happiness, and radicalization to terrorism. The changing landscape of the book's setting - from The Roman Empire to 19th-century Russia to Nazi Germany to post-World War II India to present day Ukraine - makes the power of self-sacrifice and martyrdom come alive.

Vix Leonard is twelve when she meets dazzling, reckless Caitlin Somers. Invited to spend holidays on Martha's Vineyard with Caitlin and her eccentric, mysterious family, Vix is welcomed into a life totally unlike her own. As days of bold adventure give way to nights of shy discovery, she and Caitlin come together in the complications of growing up; the refuge of belonging; the pact to Never Be Ordinary . . . Until one devastating summer when a local boy changes everything.

A Russian Sister offers a clever commentary on the role of women as prey for male needs and inspiration, a role they continue to play today. At the same time the novel is a plea for sisterhood, both familial and friendly. Chekhov’s The Seagull changed the theater. A Russian Sister gives the listener a glimpse behind the curtain to the fascinating real-life people who inspired it and the tragedy that followed its premiere.

When a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. These spinster sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health. But back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told.

At sixteen, Eva meets Jamie by chance. She lives in middle-class South Brooklyn; he comes from the super-rich of upper Manhattan. She’s observant, cautious, eager to seem normal; he’s curious, bold, full of mysteries. She keeps a keen intelligence under wraps; his eccentric brilliance is all but impossible to repress. While Eva welcomes Jamie into her family’s embrace, he avoids going home; with little in common, they are drawn together in a deep friendship. As Eva goes off to an elite college and falls in and out of love, Jamie drops out of school and joins the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Lexi Stewart’s lineage extends to the founders of the MacInnes legacy in faraway America. A year has passed since she was widowed much too young, but she’s floundering, so she accepts an invitation to escape her beloved Scotland for a needed respite. Surely a visit with her Texas relatives and a stay at Castle MacInnes will put her back to rights. There’s just one problem: Logan Jameson. The handsome personal trainer is getting everyone in Magnolia Bloom on a fitness kick, and he's determined to make her believe she’s not too old or too heavy to find love again.

Even before Lawrence Block could rest on his laurels from "In Sunlight or In Shadow", a question arose. What would he do for an encore Suppose each author was invited to select a painting from the whole panoply of visual art - from the cave drawings at Lascaux to a contemporary abstract canvas on which the paint has barely dried. And what a dazzling response!