Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

Nothing ever happens in a sleepy American town like Middlebrook. Until the shocking events of one hot Saturday afternoon when, at a back-to-school party, nine children sneak off to a barn. And one child is shot by another. The press are asking questions. About the type of parents who let their children play unsupervised in a house with guns. About how damaged a child must be to commit this kind of atrocity. Two questions are the most urgent, and the most baffling. Of the nine children who were present in that barn, which one actually pulled the trigger?

Part memoir, part travelogue, this is the story of one woman's six years as an outsider in a reindeer-herding village in the Arctic Tundra, forging a life on her own in one of the most unknowable cultures on earth. An ancestry test suggesting she shared some DNA with the Sámi people, the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic tundra, tapped into Laura Galloway's wanderlust; an affair with a Sámi reindeer herder ultimately led her to leave New York for the tiny town of Kautokeino, Norway.

Mankind has spread out and conquered the galaxy by mastering the fundamental language of the universe. With the right training, the right application of words, truth itself can be rearranged. Language is literally power. Peace reigns now. Order reigns. For if a planet deviates too far from what the authorities plan, an agent is sent out to correct that. To quietly and with great skill, end that world. One such agent is Elyth - a true believer.

At 47, Stephanie Jardine is at the apex of her career and her life, running the American branch of Jardine’s, the prestigious Crown Jewellers of London. Having fully come to terms with her long widowhood, Stevie now draws emotional strength and contentment from her work and her family. Then, one day, an unexpected act of violence committed by a stranger on the other side of the world plunges Stevie into turmoil and despair.

Bill Fitzgerald is an acclaimed American television foreign correspondent. Exhausted after a long stint in Bosnia, he travels to Venice to meet Francis Xavier Peterson, an old friend. Whilst at the bar of the Gritti Palace Hotel on the Grand Canal with Frankie, Bill is struck by the dark beauty of a young woman seated alone. Vanessa Stewart is a glass designer from New York who is visiting the glass-blowing works in Murano. The three expatriates meet and decide to celebrate Thanksgiving together. And that evening, full of warmth and camaraderie, begins an illicit though fateful love affair.

In the heart of the Sonoma Valley, on the edge of a sun-drenched meadow, lies the idyllic community of Greengage - where the residents wear simple clothes and lead quiet lives and whose manners could almost seem to be of another time. Into this world stumbles single mother Lux Lysander, trying to lose herself in the peaceful beauty of the Californian countryside while her young son visits his grandparents. It's a world far away from the unpaid bills piling up and the overwhelming sense of struggle to make ends meet.

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.

In 2012 Kyo Maclear met a musician with a passion for birds. Curious about what had prompted a young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature, she decided to follow him for a year to find out. Observing two artists through seasonal shifts and migrations, Birds Art Life Death celebrates the particular madness of chasing after birds in a big city and explores what happens when the principles of birdwatching are applied to other aspects of art and life.

People don't need to know you're a murderer. They just have to think you could be.... June 1980. Seventeen-year-old Kelly Lund is jailed for killing Hollywood film director John McFadden. Thirty years later Kelly is a free woman. Yet speculation still swirls over what really happened that night. And when her father-in-law and close friend of McFadden is found dead - shot through the head at point-blank range - there can be only one suspect.

Karin Slaughter has called Julia Keller 'a rare talent', and Dennis Lehane has praised her 'remarkable writing'. Now Bell Elkins returns - a high-profile development has been green-lit in Acker's Gap, but with one resident refusing to sell his land, tensions are running high, and when a body is found it's up to Bell to find out the truth.

After a lifetime spent living firmly in English, Lauren Collins finds herself adrift in French-speaking Geneva. Having fallen in love with Olivier, a Frenchman, Lauren wakes up one day to the realisation that she is living in a community where she cannot speak the language and that she is married to a man whose name she doesn't dare speak in public, for fear of mispronunciation. A New Yorker journalist skilled at making a living through her writing, Lauren is suddenly no longer able to communicate with the local shop owners, let alone her in-laws.

Joanna Smith Rakoff's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century.

In 1955 New York City is full of post-war euphoria and glamour, and the Barbizon Hotel - the place where Grace Kelly lived when she first came to the big city - is where young women from good families stay while they launch their careers and wait for Mr Right to come calling with a dozen roses and a date night at El Morocco.

Elizabeth Hampton has not spoken to her mother in weeks when she gets the phone call. Her mother has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. But who would want to kill a woman who stayed at home to care for her son Ronnie’s special needs? And why did her mother recently change her will? The police tell Elizabeth this is not only a murder investigation.

Evie, a rebellious young American, leaves New York in search of art and adventure in jazz-age Paris, where her grandmother lives. But on arrival, her grandmother’s sudden death leaves Evie compelled to carry out her dying wish: to find a man from her past called Zhenya. The quest leads Evie deep into the heart of the Russian émigré community of Paris. With Jean, a liberal Russian writer by her side, Evie finally seems to have found the passion and excitement she’s yearned for.

Sarah McAdams needs a fresh start. So she's come home to the shores of Oregon's wild Columbia river, to renovate the old Victorian mansion where she grew up. Her daughters, Jade and Gracie, aren't impressed by the run-down property, and as soon as they pull up the isolated drive, Sarah too is beset by uneasy memories - of her cold, distant mother, of the half-sister who vanished without a trace, and of a long-ago night when Sarah was found outside, feverish and delirious.

We had a tangled history, Adair and I. He had been my lover and my teacher, master to my slave. We had literally been prisoners to one another. Somewhere along the way he fell in love with me, but I was too afraid to love him in return. Afraid of his unexplainable powers, and his furious temper. Afraid of what I knew he was capable of and what even he himself didn’t know he could do. I ran away to follow a safer path with a man I could understand.

Babe, Grace, and Millie have been best friends since kindergarten. Despite their differences, they’ve played together, grown up together, and shared each other’s secrets. And when World War Two becomes a reality for America, each quickly marries her first true love. With the men away, life is difficult for these women. But when no fewer than 16 telegrams arrive on a single morning in 1944 - all bearing news of the worst kind from the War Department - the girls know that nothing will ever be the same again.

When Elsa's father is killed in a tornado, all she wants is to escape. For years she has been haunted by a sight once seen from an aeroplane: a tiny, isolated settlement called Thunderstown. In Thunderstown, they say, the weather can come to life and when Elsa meets Finn Munro, an outcast living in the mountains above the town, she wonders whether she has witnessed just that. For Finn has an incredible secret: He has a thunderstorm inside of him.

On the eve of her wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband to come home, listening for his car along the dark, icy roads. As the night draws on, and he fails to appear, Mary reflects on the true nature of their marriage: the secrets, the silences, and the unmentionable yet inescapable fact that for each loss and disappointment, there has been a corresponding physical gain: the woman she once is now imprisoned in mountainous flesh.