Showing results by narrator "Kimberly Farr" in All Categories

In 1980 Doris Christopher, a former home economist and teacher, was itching to get back into the workforce after an eight-year hiatus as a stay-at-home mom. Drawing on her personal and professional expertise, and determined to make cooking easier and more convenient for families, she started selling high-quality kitchen tools through cooking demonstrations to groups of women in their homes. Today, the company she started in her basement, The Pampered Chef, is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

From Gail Godwin, three-time National Book Award finalist and acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Evensong and The Finishing School, comes a sweeping new novel of friendship, loyalty, rivalries, redemption, and memory.

A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is 17 shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege.

As lyrical as a sonata, Ayelet Waldman’s follow-up novel to Love and Other Impossible Pursuits explores the aftermath of a family tragedy. Set on the coast of Maine over the course of four summers, Red Hook Road tells the story of two families, the Tetherlys and the Copakens, and of the ways in which their lives are unraveled and stitched together by misfortune, by good intentions and failure, and by love and calamity.

Many women - regardless of income, size, shape, ethnicity, and age - are uncomfortable in their own skin. We fixate on our body image and try endless diets, implants, hair extensions, and new shoes, but it's never enough. The problem is that girls and women have been socialized to mistakenly conflate body esteem and self-esteem. Body esteem refers to how you think and feel about your physical appearance: your size, shape, hair, and features.

"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon…" This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959. The whole family on the porch, relaxed, half listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. Yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home.

Tom and Charlie are living out what's left of their lives on their own terms in a remote forest, two pot growers their only connection to the outside world. But then two women arrive - a photographer on the trail of survivors of a decades-ago forest fire and an elderly escapee from a psychiatric institution - and everything changes. And the Birds Rained Down, the recipient of several prizes, is a haunting meditation on aging and self-determination.

He was a boy with a guitar. She was a girl with a piano. Raised by loving grandparents in Depression-era rural Texas, their humble beginnings playing local shows to put food on the table started Willie and Bobbie Nelson on a remarkable path to global stardom. In a story filled with details of a childhood in rural Texas - with church socials, general stores, and town dances - Willie and Bobbie weave together an inspiring story of a long-ago time. With triumphs and tragedies, hard work, and determination, here is a deeply personal, gorgeously written, and profoundly moving tale of hope.

Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat in the 2008 Democratic primary brought her to the nadir of her political career, vanquished by a much younger opponent whose message of change and cutting-edge tech team ran circles around her stodgy campaign. And yet, six years later, she has reemerged as an even more powerful and influential figure, a formidable stateswoman and the presumed front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, marking one of the great political comebacks in history.

Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply lovable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she comes to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her. Olive adjusts to her new life with her second husband, challenges her estranged son and his family to accept him, experiences loss and loneliness, witnesses the triumphs and heartbreaks of her friends and neighbours in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine - and, finally, opens herself to new lessons about life.

Blessed with three wonderful children and a life full of material comforts, Rick and Ellen have always had a happy, if increasingly busy, marriage. But when Rick announces that he's been offered a promotion that will require the family to pick up and move across the country for a fourth time, Ellen is dismayed. What will he do when she tells him that she doesn't want to start all over again?

An awkward first meeting with US Army officers, on the eve of the Civil War. A conversation on the White House portico with a young cavalry sergeant who was a fiercely dedicated abolitionist. A tense exchange on a navy ship with a Confederate editor and businessman. In this eye-opening book, Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines six intriguing, mostly unknown encounters that Abraham Lincoln had with his constituents.

In the tradition of her widely popular Kauffman Amish Bakery series, author Amy Clipston tells the tale of Anna Mae McDonough who was shunned by her family four years ago when she left her Amish community in Lancaster County, PA, to marry an 'Englisher' (non Amish) man and move with him to Baltimore.

Vera Hart has it all: a successful cosmetics company, a devoted daughter, and worldwide adulation. But someone is sabotaging her company by killing women through the cosmetics that bear her name. Marti Phelps, a military doctor in the first Gulf war who wants a quiet life with her child, is Vera's estranged daughter whom Vera wants back.

The second novel in the captivating Chanters of Tremaris trilogy follows Calwyn and her friends to the desolate Merithuran Empire. As they search for a group of kidnapped children who have the gift of chantment, they must negotiate both the unforgiving desert and the even more treacherous Palace of Cobwebs, where they uncover the dreadful secret that holds the Empire together. Meanwhile, Darrow has broken away from the group to form a new alliance of his own. Can he still be trusted?

Containing forty-one stories and extensive author's notes, Collected Stories is the definitive compilation of Lewis Shiner's short work.

She watches from her terrazza as the three American women carry their luggage into the stone villa down the hill. Who are they, and what brings them to this Tuscan village so far from home? An expat herself, and with her own unfinished story, she can't help but question: will they find what they came for?

Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.

Non-profits are big business. As the sector expands to embrace new issues, there is increased pressure for accountability, relevancy, and efficiency. Practitioners are expected to be experts in a variety of fields. In Five Good Ideas, 40 professionals from successful nonprofits large and small offer information, strategies for action, and management solutions that are easy to implement and will improve how organizations function.

Twelve-year-old orphan Eva Root travels the country pretending to channel spirits at séances. Her audiences swear their loved ones have spoken to them from beyond the grave. This, of course, is impossible. But one day, Eva experiences another impossibility: she hears a voice in her head telling her to come to the World’s Fair in Chicago. There, she meets a mysterious magician who needs her help to bring magic to life.