Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

On a June night in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, Marit Deym prowls her land, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the van from the Dangerfield Zoo. When it finally comes - hours late - five wolves leap out onto the sprawling wildlife refuge Marit has created. And then one night, the wolves bring a stranger to her door. A poetry instructor at a school for the blind, Gabriel Frankman lives in self-imposed exile after the death of the girl he loved. He visits her grave every weekend. He carries sunflower seeds in his backpack and his friends are the birds.

Fred and Lorraine Stone met at the famous Woodstock music festival in upstate New York. And as all couples must, they grew up - just not in the same direction. Now in their 40s, Fred has become Frederick, a sell-out accountant whose last vestige of his free-wheeling years is a vegetarian diet. Meanwhile, Lorraine, who now goes by the name Chandra (Sanskrit for changeable), has morphed into a psychology teacher and animal rights activist.

Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She's scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives - from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco.

Softly padding through the darkness, Moonlight the cat explores the world on her favorite night. With eloquently simple words, Moonlight evokes the excitement of Halloween in a beautifully warm and reassuring way - giving the very youngest of readers a cozy, friendly Halloween experience. Celebrated author Cynthia Rylant tells a lyrical tale of smiling pumpkins, glowing stars, and a very happy Halloween cat.

It takes a certain kind of woman to have the courage to defy societal conventions. In an era when her female counterparts were still expected to marry early and have children, Tania Grossinger set out on her own. This is her story. When you reach the age where there is more to look back at than forward to, what do you regret, if anything? One woman’s brave memoir about a life well lived. It takes a certain kind of woman to have the courage to defy societal conventions. In an era when her female counterparts were still expected to marry early and have children, Tania Grossinger set out on her own.

Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building. An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents—neighbours, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial centre of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch. Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her flat with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them.

Most popular accounts of the Holocaust typically cast Jewish victims as meek and ask, "Why didn't Jews resist?" But we know now that Jews did resist, staging armed uprisings in ghettos and camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In Hope and Honor, Rachel L. Einwohner illustrates the dangers in attempting resistance under unimaginable conditions and shows how remarkable such resistance was. She draws on oral testimonies, published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and other written materials produced both by survivors and those who perished.

Trying to think up some tricks to play on Mom and Dad for April Fools’ Day, Harry and his little sister, Emily, know they’ll need something even more special than the plastic spiders and whoopee cushion they used last year. A trip to the magic shop gives them all they need to play some tricky tricks, but Harry thinks Emily is too little to fool him. Can Emily come up with a trick that will surprise her big brother? A popular children’s author takes a gently humorous look at sibling rivalry in this tale of a holiday loved by kids of all ages.

Harry and his sister Emily learn all about the first Thanksgiving when they celebrate with some unusual guests. This story includes turkey, pumpkin pie, family and beasts! Hear about Harry and Emily’s other holiday adventures in April Fool! and Spookier Than a Ghost.

Always on the verge of something better, Brown’s characters are often hard drinking and fast driving—tending to be both violent and religious. And as they grasp for hope, they sometimes make a leap into a new life.

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet old man and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to. Until Josef tells her the evil secret he's kept for sixty years…

The Kingdom of Rye unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers listeners a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians' ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia's social structures from within.

Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania. What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey?

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendour of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night.

She'd been the pampered and protected wife. Now she was a widow with both daughters off at college and she was suddenly desperate to fill her empty nest with something, anything. So when Jill Townsend finds a mysterious key in her late husband's office she sets out to find the door it opens.

Sana Krasikov's short story collection has won widespread accolades and earmarked the author as a writer of immense promise. In these affecting tales, Russian and Georgian immigrants find love and fear in their new homeland.

Paras is a spirited young racehorse living in a stable in the French countryside. That is until one afternoon when she pushes open the gate of her stall and, travelling through the night, arrives quite by chance in the dazzling streets of Paris. She soon meets a German shorthaired pointer named Frida, two irrepressible ducks and an opinionated crow, and life amongst the animals in the city’s lush green spaces is enjoyable for a time.

John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost is a work of vast brilliance, allegory and philosophy. Its dramatic, sweeping visions of heaven and hell entrance readers. Jessica Martin's brilliant eight-part guide takes the listener through the key theological questions of the poem in a wonderfully engaging style. The How to Believe series of books explores the teachings, philosophies and beliefs of major thinkers and religious texts.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

Eleven-year-olds Tripti Kapoor, a feisty "word nerd" from Massachusetts, and Sam Cohen, a shy, imaginative, budding geologist from California, are both miserable at Camp Dilloway, a summer camp in upstate New York. On the last night of camp, they follow a shooting star to a quiet creek. There they find two silvery rocks glowing in the night. They each take one home, and their long-distance friendship begins. It's soon clear that these are no ordinary rocks. They seem to move on their own, get strangely hot, and even take over Tripti and Sam's thoughts!