Showing results by narrator "Kristen Sieh" in All Categories

When Nolan Grey receives news that his father, a once-prominent biologist, has drowned off Leap's Island, he calls on Elsa, his estranged, older half-sister, to help pick up the pieces. This, despite the fact that it was he and Elsa who broke the family in the first place. The Greys have been avoiding each other for a dozen years. Elsa and Nolan travel to their father's field station, a wild and isolated spot off the Gulf Coast.

Nothing is what it appears to be in this lush destination thriller that takes listeners behind the ornate doors of the most secretive palazzos in Venice, romantic chateaus in France and the Vatican’s halls of power. Contessa Giselle Verona - the art world’s current "It Girl" is happily absorbed in her creation of dangerous sculptures that have gotten her banned from museums, but have collectors reaching for their checkbooks.

Maggie Duprès, recently "involuntarily separated from payroll" at a Silicon Valley startup, is whiling away her days in The Dragonfly's Used Books, a Mountain View institution, waiting for the Next Big Thing to come along. When the opportunity arises for her to network at a Bay Area book club, she jumps at the chance-even if it means having to read Lady Chatterley's Lover, a book she hasn't encountered since college, in an evening.

Sixteen-year-old Honor Augustine never set out to become a felon. As an academic all-star, avid recycler, and dedicated daughter to her PTSD-afflicted father, she's always been the literal embodiment of her name. Coloring inside the lines is what keeps Honor's chaotic existence orderly. But when she discovers her father's VA benefits drying up, coupled with a terrifying bank letter threatening the family's greenhouse business--Honor vows to find a solution. She just doesn't expect to spot it on the dry erase board of English lit--"Nature's first green is gold."

A collection of glittering, surprising, darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives - from the award-winning author of Dual Citizens. Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the 13 stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp - sparkling with pain, humor, and beauty.

The war of biblical proportions is building to its final battle, and still the pawns don’t see where they stand. Detective Lampani doggedly continues his investigation as the bodies pile up - hoping to close the case before whatever’s wrong with his head kills him. Raphielli Scortini discovers she has a rebellious streak a mile wide. Even in Exile, Giselle finds time to get creative, but her guardians put a damper on her dangerous style. And the architects of the whole plan suddenly discover too late that they’re disappearing one by one.

Mona Gray was 10 when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade.

This is a story about a life lived in two halves. It’s about what happens when real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen. It’s about where we go when existential threats loom and the high stakes of reality that claim us back. It’s about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy and justice in the universe and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Despite a scholarship, law student Saraswati “Sara” Bhaduri holds down two jobs in order to make her way through school, but it’s still a struggle. She’s had to do things to pay the bills that most people wouldn’t expect “a nice Indian girl” to do. Sara is working at the campus bar one seemingly ordinary Tuesday night when her boss demands that she deal with a drunk girl in the bathroom.

Just once, Delia Reese wants to be the one calling the shots — not the one waiting to be called. Despite her stellar resume, hiring managers at the big banks won’t give her a chance. Following yet another failed interview, Delia commiserates with her roommates and drunkenly finds herself wishing she had the advantages that come with being a man. If society wasn't locked into gender roles, she'd be climbing the corporate ladder in designer heels with no apologies. By morning, her mirror reflects a surprising makeover.

The statues disappeared in an instant. While they were on Earth, they caused confusion and destruction without ever lifting a finger. They also contributed to the untimely death of April May: a young woman who stumbled into their path, naming them the Carls and gaining viral fame in an avalanche of conspiracy theories. When April's friends try to carry on with their lives, a series of clues arrive - mysterious books that seem to predict the future - and which also seem to suggest April may be very much alive...But there's a bigger mystery to solve.

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

For a decade and a half, Rachel Cunningham has chosen to lock herself away in a psychiatric facility, tortured by gaps in her memory and the certainty that she is responsible for her parents' deaths. But when she learns new details about their murders, Rachel returns, in a quest for answers, to the place where she once felt safest: her family's sprawling log cabin in the remote forests of Michigan.

It’s the summer of 1969, and the shock of conflict reverberates through the youth of America, both at home and abroad. As a student at a quiet college campus in the heartland of Indiana, Terry Ives couldn’t be farther from the front lines of Vietnam or the incendiary protests in Washington. But the world is changing, and Terry isn’t content to watch from the sidelines. When word gets around about an important government experiment in the small town of Hawkins, she signs on as a test subject for the project, code-named MKULTRA.

The Whitsun Daughters is a story of three contemporary teenage girls - sisters and cousins - in a small Midwestern town, narrated by the ghost of a young woman who, over a century earlier, lived and loved on the same small patch of farmland the girls now call home. The book follows both the present-day story of the three Whitsun girls and the story of Jane Murphy a century earlier as they fight to assert their own desires in worlds determined to ignore and minimize them.

From the aftermath of Order 66 comes a new group of former Jedi, each with their own reason to serve the Empire under Darth Vader. Among them is Iskat, who survived the destruction of her old Order to claim a new destiny in the Force. Iskat joins the Inquisitors in the hope of uncovering her hidden past that the Jedi refused to share with her.

Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by that make a more humane, more hopeful way of living seem possible.

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

Part Two of the Venice Trilogy begins three weeks after Salvio Scortini’s rampage through the calles and canals of the floating city...which is indeed floating since the acqua alta season is drenching everyone. The Verona family struggles to keep calm and carry on, but the pressure is building as the secret holding the family members hostage unravels. Raphielli Scortini thinks she’s being watched, and the anxiety of keeping her monstrous husband locked away in a friend’s basement is wearing on her.

Matilda Goodman is an underemployed wedding photographer grappling with her failure to live as an artist and the very bad lie she has told her boyfriend (that she has a dead twin). Harry, her (totally alive) brother, is an untenured professor of literature, anxiously contemplating his publishing status (unpublished) and sleeping with a student.