Showing results by narrator "Carrington MacDuffie" in All Categories

Casie Carmichael is hardworking but softhearted. She has a broken-down mare, two lambs, three lost teens, a busted-up bronco rider, and a whole lot of trouble. Casie has returned home to Hope Springs, South Dakota, to sell the family’s tumbledown ranch with the hope of returning to Sioux Falls and her very practical fiancé. But leaving Hope Springs isn’t quite as easy as she thought it would be, especially since her barn seems to have a homing beacon leading every stray in the territory straight to it.

Lopsided is not your ordinary cancer memoir. Meredith Norton displays the razor-sharp wit of a master humorist as she chronicles her experience, from the first appearance of her bizarre symptoms to moving in with her compulsive parents and their five television sets.

Retired police chief Katherine Sullivan moved away from Edina, Minnesota, to feed her artistic soul in New Mexico. But when she receives an urgent call, her serenity is shattered. Nathan Walker, her best friend and former colleague from her days on the police force, is missing and his crew of security experts hasn't seen him in days. Now it's up to Katherine to fly home and track him down.

In the third book of this fun, action-packed Highlands Trilogy, Victoria Roberts introduces her baddest bad boy yet. Laird Alexander MacDonell has a choice: stay true to his duty or lose his heart forever to the woman who betrayed him - his own wife. Lady Sybella MacKenzie is forced to search for her clan’s ancient seeing stone under the roof of her father’s enemy. When she finds the precious artifact, will she choose the family who raised her, or will she stand with the man who has captured her soul?

Wild horses, wildhearts - and a diapered lamb under the Christmas tree…

Could life get any more hectic at the Lazy Windmill? With the holidays reminding Casie of every mistake she's ever made, and her assistant Emily struggling to be a single mom, it's anyone's guess what the New Year will bring. Then bad boy Colt Dickenson shows up with a ring. No one has ever gotten under her skin like he has, but Casie can't believe a rough stock cowboy will stick around for the long haul.

One thousand years ago, chaos loosed itself upon Japan, upending an era in which the arts flourished. At the dawn of 250 years of civil war, in the opulent court of Lord Norimasa, the beautiful but cruel poet Lady Utsu wages war with men's hearts and holds the fearsome lord and his devoted samurai Matsuhito in her thrall. As the two men raze Japan's landscape in futile battles for unity, Utsu falls for Matsuhito even as Lord Norimasa continues to love her.

In this, the third tale of the Nedao people, Nisana the AEldra of the cat-kind narrates her experience among the beleaguered humans. She wishes that there were others left to speak of such a story, yet she is the only witness able to tell of it. Sharing both the agonies and the victories of her companion, the warrior queen Ylia, Nisana is determined to see things through to their conclusion.

International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of small children, and of children running barefoot through her family's coffee plantation, gorging themselves on fruit from the robust and plentiful mango trees.

Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, but for the deeply religious Mary, farming is at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher.

Emery Blackwood's life was forever changed on the eve of her high school graduation, when the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her best friend, Lily. She'd once dreamt of running away with August, eager to escape the misty, remote shores of Saoirse Island and chase new dreams together. Now, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence among this tight-knit community steeped in folklore and tradition, ruled by the seasons and ancient superstitions.

Among the towering firs and windswept beaches of a Pacific Northwest island, a woman's long-ago first love unexpectedly returns, teaching her the damaging power of secrets and the liberating lessons of love. Widow Phoebe Allen has single-handedly raised a wonderful daughter and established a successful business supplying nets to fisherman, and now enjoys the amorous attentions of a longtime friend.

Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary. Val wrote a controversial book, Bright Morning of Pain, which was essentially a novelization of Helen’s all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in modern-day New Haven. In Conscience, Alice Mattison paints the nuanced relationships between the palpable personalities of Olive, Griff, and Jean with her signature wit and precision.

Dr. Erica Bauer - an identical twin - studies twins at the university in Vancouver. Through the course of her research, she meets a set of preteen twins who are evidently fraternal, but who insist emphatically that they are identical. Their mother, Karen Oxley, is a West Van single mum whose life is on the wrong road - and who discovers an urgent need to put it back on the right one. As Erica sets out to help the twins, their family’s lives become increasingly intertwined with hers in unexpected ways.

In 2031 mankind's survival instinct is put to the test when a civil war in China spirals into a global conflict. Nations are torn apart. Millions are killed. And for many, like Air Force pilot Alec Killian, survival will mean shedding some of their flesh in exchange for biotech and machine.

What would cause a cheese-loving, meat-eating lawyer to become a vegan? Her dog. Teresa Rhyme and Seamus the beagle both survived cancer once, so when Seamus develops yet another cancer, Teresa vows to fight again. Unsure of the best way to battle the unseen enemy, she embarks on some experiments to create a healthier life for her family. She finds better food for Seamus, and a plant-based diet becomes her own guide, but she realizes that's not enough for her-and it's not enough for the animals.

Stuck at home caring for her severely depressed mother and abandoned by her father, Mazzy has only the day-to-day dramas of her neighborhood to keep her busy. But between flirting with the boy next door and worrying about the fact that she's flat-chested, Mazzy has to face the fact that her mom is emotionally paralyzed by a family tragedy. As readers delve into the story, they'll eventually discover what it was that tore Mazzy's family apart, and they'll see what it takes to put it back together.

Spend time in the funny, oddball village of Arnold Falls, where larger-than-life characters deal with the smallest of problems. Somehow, it all comes out right in the end. Given the choice of go big or go home, nine times out of 10 the townspeople of Arnold Falls will go home, get back into their house slippers, and forget about the whole thing, whatever the whole thing was this time. Tempests great and small (mostly small) are always brewing in this tiny, upstate hamlet where half of the residents are fighting to preserve Arnold Falls as it was in its red-light-district heyday.

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them - and are surprised when the world comes roaring back. An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow housewives. Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions.

All his life, William Stanley searched for a wild place of his own. Growing up in the straightened-out city blocks of his childhood and finding some respite in summer trips to a cabin in the woods, he yearned for space, fragrant soil, tall trees, and the silence that surrounds them. In Hawaii, he learned of acres of land depleted from toxic agricultural practices, and he became determined to restore that land and create one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world.

There was a time when March Monroe thought that she and her daughter, Olivia, would never really cut the cord. They'd just upgrade to a wireless connection. Now, Olivia is heading off to college, and March hasn't even told her that she's decided to continue her own higher education. So it's hard to say who's more shocked when they run into each other at a local radio station where, it turns out, they're both student interns.