Showing results by narrator "Nancy Peterson" in All Categories

Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now 15 and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, believing her neighbors that they pose no real threat, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate. Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears.

Berlin, 1930—When a wave of change sweeps a radical political party to power, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes’s academic husband benefits from the ambitions of its newly elected chancellor. Although Sofie and Jürgen do not share the social views growing popular in Hitler’s Germany, Jürgen’s position with its burgeoning rocket program changes their diminishing fortunes for the better. But as Sofie watches helplessly, her beloved Berlin begins to transform, forcing her to consider what they must sacrifice morally for their young family’s security, and what the price for their neutrality will be.

In the spring of 1942, young Elzbieta Rabinek is aware of the swiftly growing discord just beyond the courtyard of her comfortable Warsaw home. She has no fondness for the Germans who patrol her streets and impose their curfews, but has never given much thought to what goes on behind the walls that contain her Jewish neighbors. She knows all too well about German brutality - and that it's the reason she must conceal her true identity. But in befriending Sara, Elzbieta makes a discovery that propels her into a dangerous world of deception and heroism.

Disgraced dime novelist Kate Tenney fled the city that banned her latest book for a fresh start at a cattle ranch in the Arizona Territory. She hopes ranching turns out to be as romantic as she portrayed it in her novels. But what awaits her is a much harder life. There is no room for mistakes on a working cattle ranch in 1895, and Kate is ill-prepared for her new life. She quickly learns that dawn comes early...every day. But she is tenacious. Having been abandoned by a string of men, Kate has no intention of ever marrying. But she didn't expect to meet Luke Adams either.

Philadelphia, 1921. Edie Shippen has officially started her new career as a private investigator . . . even though she has yet to book a client. When she runs into an old friend, the film actress Ava Sylvester, Edie is delighted at the chance to rekindle their relationship. But when Ava's costar and new husband, Duncan, dies suddenly, all signs point to Ava. Edie's first official case begins in earnest, desperately trying to clear her friend's name.

Trees have much to offer as soul friends, and their millennia of growth and loss provide deep wisdom, if we know how to pay attention. The Spiritual Wisdom of Trees encourages us to revel in the beauty and wonder of trees as they increase our capacity to bear witness to loss and grief. Integrating science and spirituality, coauthors Beth Norcross and Leah Rampy explore the knowledge held within the living world of trees and planted within each of us.

Christians begin their first steps in Christ at the moment of conversion. From that moment on, they have access to freedoms that weren't possible prior. But every disciple must understand those freedoms and learn how to walk in them, which requires practice. In First Freedoms, Jennifer Barnett unpacks many "first freedoms" that Christians own but often don't fully integrate into their relationship with God and explains how to foster freedoms such as cultivating a powerful prayer life, abiding fully in God's presence, healing emotional scars, battling the schemes of the enemy, and many others.

Sarah Prescott has never known a respectable life. Just a hardscrabble childhood and brothers who taught her to shoot first and ask questions later. Justin Wells left Boston in disgrace, heading out alone on the dusty trail to Texas. But when the once-respected clergyman encounters a feisty redhead in handcuffs with a dying US Marshal at her side, their journey takes a dramatic turn. His high-society expectations and Sarah's outlaw habits clash from the start. With a price on her head and recused orphaned baby, Justin and Sarah make the difficult journey toward Rocky Creek.

Surprised by Oxford is the memoir of a skeptical agnostic who comes to a dynamic personal faith in God during graduate studies in literature at Oxford University.

Charlotte Mabry moves to a small town in Alabama, full of plans for a better life, especially for her son, Taylor. Cash is short, but at least she's free from the crushing heartbreak of being married to a man who only cared about money. So even though Nate Haverton sends her pulses racing from the moment they meet, she refuses to let her heart lead her back into misery. Because he might be her son's T-ball coach, but he's also a billionaire.

For most of her eighty years, Mary Jackson has been waiting. As she’s endured the steady invasion of tourists, influencers and real estate developers who have discovered the lakeside charm of Good Hart, Michigan, she’s also patiently anticipated the arrival of a stranger she’s believed since childhood would one day carry on her legacy—the Very Cherry General Store. Like generations of Jackson women before her, Cherry Mary, as she’s known locally, runs the community hub.

Everything Hope knows about the Orchard House is from the stories of her late mother. So when she arrives at the northern Michigan family estate late one night with a terrible secret and her 10-year-old daughter in tow, she’s not sure if she’ll be welcomed or turned away with a shotgun by the aunt she has never met.

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? If you're the US Army in 1944, you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways. That's not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we've been given, but it's the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in What Soldiers Do.

Marty Coursin is finally living the good life. Free of the erroneous FBI charges against him, now he's able to spend his days in comfort on Orcas Island. Sure, there's a bit of a mystery surrounding who's been sending him strange, anonymous messages. But who cares about that when everything is going his way, including the arrival of a beautiful, fascinating new resident?

Mary McAuliffe's Dawn of the Belle Epoque took the listener from the multiple disasters of 1870-1871 through the extraordinary re-emergence of Paris as the cultural center of the Western world. Now, in Twilight of the Belle Epoque, McAuliffe portrays Paris in full flower at the turn of the 20th century, where creative dynamos such as Picasso, Matisse, Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Proust, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan set their respective circles on fire with a barrage of revolutionary visions and discoveries.

Actress Nora Kemp loves two men. One is Hugh Iverson, a philanthropic movie star who gives Nora security and respectability. The other is Hugh’s twin brother, Trent, a Hollywood bad boy who brings out Nora’s wild side. When Trent and an unidentified woman are found dead on the Iversons’ Beverly Hills property, more than Nora’s and Hugh’s reputations are at stake.

So much has been accomplished. Lillian Walsh has stepped out courageously beyond what she'd ever dreamed of being able to achieve. Two years ago, she was an only child, living in a big house with her adoptive parents. Now, she shares the large home with her newly rediscovered sister, Grace, and the orphaned children to whom Grace has devoted her life. But then the letter arrives - an official complaint revoking the sisters' permission to manage their little children's home.

The Lioness of Boston is a portrait of what society expected a woman's life to be, shattered by a courageous soul who rebelled and was determined to live on her own terms.

Spanning nearly a century, from 1930s Siberia to contemporary Brighton Beach, a pause resisting, epic family saga centering on three generations of women in one Russian Jewish family - each striving to break free of fate and history, each yearning for love and personal fulfillment - and how the consequences of their choices ripple through time.

The Soviet army is sweeping into East Prussia, with their sights set on punishing Germans for the Nazis' reign of terror. Thirteen-year-old Giti and her younger brother, Otto, live with their mother and grandmother. When soldiers arrive and brutally attack the two adult women, killing their grandmother, the farm is set ablaze. The children, along with their severely wounded mother, are loaded into a crowded train bound for the Soviet Union.