Showing results by narrator "Jacques Roy" in All Categories

Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings - alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life.

Our understanding of the ‘tree of life’, with powerful implications for human genetics, human health and our own human nature, has recently completely changed. This book is about a new method of telling the story of life on earth - through molecular phylogenetics. It involves a fairly simple method - the reading of the deep history of life by looking at the variation in protein molecules found in living organisms. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection.

A groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class - its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.

Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: Their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple...and still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them and that they have helped to create.

After months of disturbing behavior, Gardner Quinn has vanished. Her older sister Fredericka is desperate to find her, but Fred is also pregnant - miraculously so, in a near-future America struggling with infertility. So she entrusts the job to their brother, Carter. Carter, young but jaded, is in need of an assignment. Just home from war, his search for his sister is a welcome distraction from mysterious physical symptoms he can’t ignore...and his slightly-more-than recreational drinking. Carter’s efforts to find Gardner lead him into a dangerous underground.

A sweeping, and groundbreaking treasury of the most essential presidential writings, The Best Presidential Writing features a mix of the beloved and the little-known, from stirring speeches and shrewd remarks to behind-the-scenes drafts and unpublished autobiographies.

Who are you when no one is watching? When beloved high school student Lucinda Hayes is found murdered, no-one in her sleepy Colorado suburb is untouched - not the boy who loved her too much; not the girl who wanted her perfect life; not the police officer assigned to investigate. In the aftermath of the tragedy, these three indelible characters - Cameron, Jade, and Russ - must each confront their darkest secrets in an effort to find solace, the truth, or both.

The envelope is unremarkable. There is no return address. It contains a single folded sheet of white paper. The envelope drops through the mail slot like any other piece of post. But for the nine complete strangers who receive it—each of them recognising just one name, their own, on the enclosed list—it will be the most life altering letter they ever receive. It could also be the last, as one by one, they start to meet their end.

Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe, a famous writer, chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back to Philippe's teenage years, to a winter morning in 1984, a small French high school, and a carefully timed encounter between two 17-year-olds. It's the start of a secret, intensely passionate, world-altering love affair between Philippe and his classmate, Thomas.

Here is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a 'forever virus,' destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly.

A romantic comedy about high school, heartbreak, and having all the answers. What if the secrets of dating and love were revealed in one simple formula? That’s the tantalizing proposition high school senior Shane Chambliss offers the hopeless and hapless guys who come to him for relationship advice.

They said that the first generation of man was brought low by its appetites: for knowledge, for power, for wealth. They said mankind's voracity was so great, the Lord sent his own Daughter to bring fire and devastation to the world. The survivors were few, but over the course of centuries they banded together to form a new civilization - the Descendancy - founded on the belief that the mistakes of the past must never be repeated. Brothers Clive and Clover Hamill, the sons of a well-respected Descendant minister, have spent their lives spreading that gospel.

Jonas Anderson might be an excellent teacher if he weren’t addicted to drugs. Instead, at age 28, he’s been fired from yet another creative writing position after assigning homework like visit a stranger’s funeral and write about it. Jonas needs to do something drastic and, as a dual American-Swedish citizen, he knows Sweden is an easy place to be a graduate student and a difficult place to be a drug addict. The year is 2015 when he arrives in Malmö, a city trying to cope with the arrival of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees.

A passionate, ambitious behavioral psychiatrist, Doctor Ed Malinowski is now the superintendent of a mental institution and finally turning the previously crumbling hospital around. He also has a home he can be proud of and a fiercely independent, artistic wife Laura, whom he hopes will soon be pregnant. But into this perfect vision of his life comes Penelope, a beautiful, young epileptic who should never have been placed in his institution and whose only chance at getting out is Ed. She is intelligent, charming, and slowly falling in love with her charismatic, compassionate doctor.

Long-married couple Junior and Henrietta live a quiet, solitary life on their farm, where they work at the local feed mill and raise chickens. Their lives are simple, straightforward, uncomplicated. Until the day a stranger arrives at their door with alarming news: Junior has been chosen to take an extraordinary journey, a journey across both time and distance, while Hen remains at home. Junior will be gone for years. But Hen won't be left alone.

Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band midtour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest....

Hans-Åke Lilja, founder of Lilja's Library, has compiled a brand-new anthology of horror stories to celebrate 20 years of running the number-one Stephen King news website on the web! This anthology includes both original stories like a brand new novella by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In), very rare reprints like The Blue Air Compressor by Stephen King, and at least one classic tale that inspired Lilja's love of the macabre at a very young age! Now, let's join Lilja....

After their devastating journey from the Anchor to Sophia, Clive and Clover Hamill, Gemma Poplin, and Paz Dedios have all been separated - not only in space, but in their convictions. In the Anchor, Clive would like nothing better than to never speak with Paz again, but when he is tapped to help with her interrogation, the two of them begin to reconcile their differences, which don’t run nearly as deep as they expected. In Sophia, as Clover learns more and more about the city and its enigmatic director, Zeno, his faith in his mission begins to waver.

Don DeLillo's seventh novel is an exotic thriller. Set mostly in Greece, it concerns a mysterious 'language cult' seemingly behind a number of unexplained murders. Obsessed by news of this ritualistic violence, an American risk analyst is drawn to search for an explanation. We follow his progress on an obsessive journey that begins to take over his life and the lives of those closest to him.

Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook, and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before. The Crossed-Out Notebook is Pablo’s diary of this time.