Showing results by narrator "Alex McKenna" in All Categories

When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in northwestern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again. The sur­prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape.

Hopuonk, Massachusetts, 1999: Taylor Garland's good looks have earned her the admiration of everyone in her small town. She's homecoming queen, the life of every party, and she's on every boy's most-wanted list. People think Taylor is living the dream, and assume she'll stay in town and have kids with the homecoming king - maybe even be a dental hygienist if she's super ambitious. But Taylor is actually desperate to leave home, and she hates the smell of dentists' offices. Also? She's completely in love with her best friend, Susan.

Fourteen-year-old Azar Rossi’s first year of high school has mostly been silent, and intentionally so. After a bad case of colic as a baby, Azar’s vocal folds are shredded—full of nodules that give her a rasp the envy of a chain-smoking bullfrog. Her classmates might just think she’s quiet, but Azar is saving her voice for when it really counts and talking to her classmates is not medically advisable or even high on her list.

Khosa is given to the sea, a girl born to be fed to the water, her flesh preventing a wave like the one that destroyed the Kingdom of Stille in days of old. But before she's allowed to dance an uncontrollable twitching of the limbs that will carry her to the shore in a frenzy - she must produce an heir. Yet the thought of human touch sends shudders down her spine that not even the sound of the tide can match.

Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of 17 grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by a vanity press: the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

Cole Weston - former friend, former boyfriend - has become dangerous, erratic. Something needs to be done. Getting rid of Cole is practically a public service. So high school seniors Holly Morse, Grayson Hobbs, Logan Bailey, and Meeka Miller devise a plan. Kill Cole. Bury him in the woods behind Meeka's house. Bury him deep, deep in the ground along with four old cell phones, wiped except for their video confession as insurance that no one will ever betray the group.

The Spectacular has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the publisher.

New York. 1977. Be there when it explodes. It’s New Year’s Eve, 1976, and New York is a city on the edge. As midnight approaches, a blizzard sets in - and amidst the fireworks, an unmistakable sound rings out across Central Park. Gunshots. Two of them. The search for the shooter will bring together a rich cast of New Yorkers. From the reluctant heirs to one of the city's greatest fortunes to a couple of Long Island kids drawn to the punk scene downtown.

Jenny Kennedy appears to have it all. She’s the perfect daughter, the popular girl at school and a successful beauty queen. But then Jenny is found dead in a murder that rocks the small town she grew up in to the core. Her estranged half-sister Virginia finds herself thrust into the spotlight as the case dominates the news and is desperate to uncover who killed Jenny. But she soon realises that maybe Jenny’s life wasn’t so perfect after all. The truth is that Jenny has more than a few secrets of her own, and so do her neighbours. What really happened that night?

Ten years after graduation, a group of friends plan a reunion in a remote house in upstate New York. It isn't a bachelor party, as they've led one of their friends to believe, but instead an intervention for an escalating drug addiction. They lost one member of their friendship group in college, and they'll do anything to make sure that doesn't happen again. But from the moment they arrive, something doesn't feel right.

Happiness is Pearl's job. Using the revolutionary Apricity machine, every day she provides customers with personalised recommendations for their emotional well-being: from eating more tangerines to cutting off a finger, from getting a dog to getting a divorce. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her. But Pearl is starting to wonder whether it’s even possible to measure an emotion. Pearl's teenage son, Rhett, is a sensitive boy who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence. If only Pearl could persuade him to take the Apricity test...

Even after achieving her dream of selling her debut novel, Stephanie Danler feels adrift in New York. Struggling in the throes of a doomed relationship and haunted by her tumultuous childhood, something nameless compels her to return home to Southern California. In a cottage in Laurel Canyon, as a new life begins to shape itself, she finally succumbs to memories of the past that have proved impossible to escape.