A misfit kid at the best of times, Mishka Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a 24-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his school's campus then learned that his parents were getting divorced. His father, a prominent rocket scientist, abandoned the family, and their home was lost to foreclosure. Shubaly swore to avenge the wrongs against his mother but instead plunged into a magnificently toxic love affair with alcohol.

This Naked Life offers 48 raw and real stories of people, who have found freedom from alcohol. In this audio, discover how Bryan went from hopeless certainty that drinking would eventually kill him, to absolute peace over the course of a single day. See how listening one book gave Jennifer total freedom after 20 years of binge drinking. Watch Becca thrive in ways she had never thought possible, all because she learned it was okay to question her relationship with alcohol before she hit rock bottom.

Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born - a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.

In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three. A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time. A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory. And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible. An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.

Duchess Day Radley is a 13-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Rules are for other people. She is the fierce protector of her five-year-old brother, Robin, and the parent to her mother, Star, a single mom incapable of taking care of herself, let alone her two kids. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he and Star grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. And he's in overdrive protecting Duchess and her brother.

We meet 16-year-old Vali on the eve of a raid of her small Vermont town that sends her, her mother, and her younger brother on the run from the Deportation Forces. In this near-future America, all citizens are chipped at birth and this chip is used to track their movements from bus stops to schools to grocery stores. Vali and her mother are undocumented, but at least Vali has a counterfeit chip—until it starts malfunctioning. Now on the run, Vali and her family are desperately trying to make it to California, a sanctuary state that is being walled off from the rest of the country.

When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations.

American Book Award-winning author Tananarive Due's second collection of stories ranges from horror to science fiction to suspense. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic to the reaches of the far future, Due's stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope. In some of these stories, the monster is racism itself; others address the monster within, or other universal struggles set against the supernatural or surreal. All of them are written with Due's trademark attention to detail and deep characterization.

Susannah, a young widow and single mother, has remarried well: to Max, a charismatic artist and popular speaker whose career took her and her 15-year-old son out of New York City and to a quiet Vermont university town. Strong-willed and attractive, Susannah expects her life is perfectly in place again. Then one quiet morning, she finds a note on her door: "I Know Who You Are." Max dismisses the note as a prank. But days after a neighborhood couple comes to dinner, the husband mysteriously dies in a tragic accident while on a run with Max. Soon, a second note appears on their door....

It’s 1979. Olivia Murray, a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, is determined to become a photojournalist and make a difference with her work. When opportunity arrives, she seizes it, accompanying her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, to northern Iraq for a family wedding, hoping to capture an image that lands her a job in the photo department. More important, though, the trip is a chance to understand Delan’s childhood and bridge the differences of their pasts. Yet when the return home proves less safe than Delan believed, Olivia is confronted with a reality she had not expected.

On the night of February 18, 1952, during one of the worst winter storms that New England has ever seen, two oil tankers just off the shore of Cape Cod were torn in half by the force of the storm. This middle-grade adaptation of an adult nonfiction book tells the story of the shipwreck and a harrowing Coast Guard rescue when four men in a tiny lifeboat overcame insurmountable odds and saved more than thirty stranded sailors.

Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man.... But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plover is the story of their adventures and misadventures in the immense blue country one of their company calls Pacifica.

Search-and-rescue pilot Kacey Fairing is home on leave in Mercy Falls, Montana, 12 years after she joined the military to escape the mistakes of her past. With a job waiting for her as the new lead pilot of Peak Rescue in Glacier National Park, Kacey hopes to reconnect with the now-teenage daughter she sees only between deployments. What she doesn't realize is that someone else is also back in town.

Just why do humpback whales sing? That's the question that has marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and his crew poking, charting, recording, and photographing very big, wet, gray marine mammals - until the extraordinary day when a whale lifts its tail into the air to display a cryptic message spelled out in foot-high letters: Bite Me.

Stuck in a corporate job rut and faced with an unraveling marriage at the age of thirty-six, Roz Savage sat down one night and wrote two versions of her own obituary - the one that she wanted and the one she was heading for. They were very different. She realized that if she carried on as she was, she wasn't going to end up with the life she wanted. So she turned her back on an eleven-year career as a management consultant to reinvent herself as a woman of adventure.

Six days in hell define every SEAL that moves past the point of no return in their minds. Robert Adams, MD, brings the experiences of his classmates into view with real, difficult to believe experiences, described in frightening detail by the men that lived through the frigid cold, filthy muddy days, and body-destroying events of a winter Hell Week. Eleven of 70 men went on to graduate and serve over 40 years in almost every SEAL or UDT team with honor. Listen to their real-time story, and learn why these 11 men succeeded when so many others failed.

Best-selling science fiction superstars Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle combine their talents with those of Steven Barnes in an extraordinary adventure of humankind’s first outpost in the farthest reaches of space. Light years from Earth, colonists land on a planet they name Avalon. It seems like a paradise—until native creatures savagely attack. It will take every bit of intelligence, courage, and military-style discipline to survive.

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed in the South Pacific by a Japanese submarine. An estimated 300 men were killed upon impact; close to 900 sailors were cast into the Pacific Ocean, where they remained undetected by the navy for nearly four days and nights. Battered by a savage sea, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia, and dementia. By the time rescue arrived, all but 317 men had died. The captain's subsequent court-martial left many questions unanswered

New York Times best-selling author Paul Kemprecos' first mystery novel, Cool Blue Tomb, introduces Aristotle "Soc" Socarides - part-time fisherman, part-time private eye, full-time philosopher. In his inaugural outing, Soc is swimming with the sharks - only problem is, he's the bait.

During the height of the blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat, but was soon in as much trouble as the tanker. Then pilot boat captain Frank Quirk, hearing of the Coast Guard's troubles on his radio, decided to act.