Showing results by narrator "Amy Landon" in All Categories

From New York to Paris, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald reigned as king and queen of the Jazz Age, seeming to float on champagne bubbles above the mundane cares of the world. But to those who truly knew them, the endless parties were only a distraction from their inner turmoil and from a love that united them with a scorching intensity.

Anna Goodrich is a 28-year-old artist in New York City, out on a Friday night in the city when she gets the call that her uncle has suddenly died. When she returns home to mid-coast Maine for his funeral, she faces all that she left behind when she left seven years earlier. The pain of her own mother's death, the fractured relationships with her father, and her first love. The life she had built for herself in New York - the art world, her boyfriend, her roommate who is also her best friend - allowed her to forget the grief and hurt she had left behind in Maine.

Palm Beach, 1961. Socialite, irresistible rascal, and devoted father Jack Morgan stages his suicide to shield his beloved daughters from scandal and disgrace. His daughter, Charlotte (Charlie), is an overindulged 23-year-old girl struggling to cope with the loss of her beloved father, her sister's resulting mental breakdown, and the discovery that she's now penniless. Fortunately Raul, an admiring young attorney, offers assistance to the traumatized young woman.

Jennet Carter escaped the dark faeries of Feyland once. Now, fey magic is seeping out of the prototype game, beguiling the unwary and threatening everyone she cares about. Tam Linn may be a hero in-game, but his real life is severely complicated. Still, he'll do whatever it takes to stop the creatures of Feyland. Despite the danger, Jennet and Tam must return to Feyland to face the magic of the Bright Court - and a powerful new enemy who won't stop until the human world is at the mercy of the Realm of Faerie.

At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland - the anticipated second novel from Michelle Hoover - follows the Hess family in the years after World War I as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.

The tight-knit residents of Blue Moon Mountain, nestled high in the Colorado Mountains, form an interconnected community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy will be felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways.

The leaders of my House want her dead. The men I've secretly aligned myself with want her punished for screwing up their coup. I've been sent by both to deal with her, but one look at the feisty redhead and I've got plans of my own. Before I carry out anyone else's orders, she's going to give me what I want. And only when I'm satisfied will I decide if she lives or dies. Depending, of course, on just how easily she surrenders....

Professor Erika Szymanski makes wine science accessible to non-experts. Rather than approach wine science as body of facts about wine, Szymanski explores how wine science can open up multiple ways of seeing, understanding, and appreciating wine. Too often, wine science is presented as a comprehensive body of knowledge that enthusiasts aiming to become experts should memorize. This book instead uses scientific research to explore wine as an endlessly rich cultural phenomenon.

Dr. Gideon Box, world-famous surgeon, is extremely good at his job. He’s never lost a patient…but he has issues. He’s antisocial. Doesn’t mix well with others. Breaks into people’s homes and assumes their identities. Occasionally kills other doctor’s patients. He’s had bad luck with women his entire life. Big surprise, right? His psychiatrist tells him to join a dating service. Tells him to seek women from small towns. Says they’ll possess basic core values, be less shallow and self-centered than the hookers and strippers he’s been dating.

Karolina Waclawiak’s breakout novel, Life Events, follows Evelyn, who, at 37, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of everyone she loves. She combats her existential crisis by avoiding her husband and aimlessly driving along the freeways of California looking for an escape.

When thirty-three-year-old Athena Matthias is asked, yet again, to be a bridesmaid, she’s not exactly enthusiastic about the idea. Still reeling from a messy divorce from her wife, she’s never felt less inclined to celebrate love. But Athena can't say no, especially to one of her oldest friends, and at least it's a destination wedding, which means three days of sun and sand.

Yubin knows she's different than the other girls in the pop group SIITY. Yes, they all got sucked into the same machine, giving up schooling and signing ridiculously long contracts with no guarantee of success, but that's how Korean stars are made. Yubin is supposed to be thankful for that, but she isn't. She doesn't even like the girls she performs with. She's more connected to her former schoolmate Jieun, even though all they ever do is text. Over the last two months, Jieun has become her confidant and best friend, connecting Yubin to the real world in a way she desperately needs. Now that SIITY is going to appear on the reality show Incredible Race: Asia, Yubin will need that connection more than ever, which is why she's devastated to discover Jieun has been dead five years and is actually haunting her.

Recently suspended for a so-called outburst, high school English teacher Anna Crawford is stewing over the injustice at home when she is shocked to see herself named on television as a suspect in a shooting at the school where she works. Though she is quickly exonerated, and the actual teenage murderer identified, her life is nevertheless held up for relentless scrutiny and judgment as this quiet town descends into media mania. Gun sales skyrocket, victims are transformed into martyrs, and the rules of public mourning are ruthlessly enforced.

Becoming a warden was an almost insurmountable task that pushed Lillin down a dark and winding path, but all of her training did little enough to prepare her for what was to come from beyond the walls of Black Mark. An insidious force moves, taking shape in the shadows and it rides on the winds of madness and misery. Lillin must struggle with her own lack of control over her abilities if she wishes to make a stand, but against such a terrible force, can anyone truly hold their ground?

Budapest is a city of secrets, a place where everything is opaque and nothing is as it seems. It is to this enigmatic city that a young American couple, Annie and Will, move with their infant son, shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. Annie hopes to escape the ghosts from her past; Will wants to take his chance as an entrepreneur in Hungary's newly developing economy. But only a few months after moving there, they receive a secretive request from friends in the US to check up on an elderly stranger who also has recently arrived in Budapest.

It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love and their first true loss.

In recent years, nicotine has become as verboten as many hard drugs. The literary styles in this volume are as varied as the moral quandaries herein, and the authors have successfully unleashed their incandescent imaginations on the subject matter, fashioning an immensely addictive collection.

Twenty-four-year-old Summer Johnson knows two things. The first is that due to a quickly worsening medical condition, she faces a risky surgery in three months' time that may or may not end in her death. The second is that she would like to fall in love before then.

Eðna Jonsdottir is on a mission. Touch down in 10th-century Iceland, gather what she needs regardless of the consequences, and return to the 22nd century, becoming the world's first time machine test pilot. Falling in love isn't on the checklist. Brosa Ulfsson is handsome, capable, easygoing - or he was, until tragedy and grief swallowed him. Eðna coaxes him from the grave and wakens his forgotten dreams. But she has no intention of staying in his Viking world.

Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.