Showing results by narrator "Xe Sands" in All Categories

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

When Olivia James receives a phone call just after midnight, she recognizes her brother's voice. But there's a problem: Her brother has been dead for the past nine weeks. Moving back to her old childhood home in Tennessee - the place where her brother has just died - her young daughter, Teddy, seems troubled, telling her mother that she's being visited by a menacing ghost. When another tragic death occurs and her daughter disappears, Olivia must confront the demonic force that has cursed her family.

In the near year and a half following her tragic ordeal in She Dreams of Fire, Agatha “Aggy” Grae and her allies have been hunting the remnants of the Umbra coven. By fighting back against the corrupt witches who imprisoned and killed the Fae for their blood, Aggy and her friends have become beacons of hope. But inner turmoil plagues the team, as the price for freedom is a weight upon their souls.

That rat bastard Michael Wallace is back. The last person Olivia Parker expects to walk into her lingerie shop is her high school sweetheart. She's so over him. Mostly. Except that he's hotter than ever and still knows her better than she knows herself. But how can she risk her heart when she knows he's just going to leave again?

Fifteen years ago, Krista Bremer would not have been able to imagine her life today: married to a Libyan-born Muslim, raising two children with Arabic names in the American South. Nor could she have imagined the prejudice she would encounter or the profound ways her marriage would change her perception of the world.

Spanning the years of the first great settlement of the west, The Removes tells the intertwining stories of 15-year-old Anne Cummins, frontierswoman Libbie Custer, and Libbie’s husband, the Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer. When Anne survives a surprise attack on her family’s homestead, she is thrust into a difficult life she never anticipated - living among the Cheyenne as both a captive and, eventually, a member of the tribe. Libbie, too, is thrown into a brutal, unexpected life when she marries Custer.

This version of the children's classic, read by Xe Sands, will delight listeners of all ages with its story of wisdom and boundless love.

Jen has reached her early 30s and has all but abandoned a once-promising painting career when, spurred by the 2008 economic crisis, she takes a poorly defined job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation's ostensible aim is to empower women, but staffers spend all their time devising acronyms for imaginary programs, ruthlessly undermining one another, and stroking the ego of their boss, the larger-than-life celebrity philanthropist Leora Infinitas.

With divorce looming, Paige MacInnes isn’t sure what to do with herself. She’s spent so much time being everything to everyone else that she’s pretty sure she’s forgotten how to just be Paige, the woman. Maybe, she’ll be able to find herself again in Magnolia Bloom.... With the help of loved ones and lifelong friends (and maybe even a sexy Scotsman), Paige will need to figure out how to preserve the legacy of the MacInnes estate - all while learning the importance of trusting her heart, the power of second chances, and ensuring her own happily ever after.

Grace Holm-D’Angelo is at her wit’s end, trying to create a new life from broken pieces. Newly divorced, she is navigating suddenly becoming a single mother to her 14-year-old daughter. Emma, resentful about being uprooted from Chicago to Los Angeles and still reeling from the divorce, is generally giving her mother a hard time. Then Grace’s best friend, Leeza, succumbs to breast cancer after a long battle, and Grace realizes you don’t get a second chance at life. She returns to her hometown of New London, Wisconsin, to try to reconcile with her own mother, Lorraine, from whom she’s been estranged for longer than she cares to remember.

Once a century, for only six days, the bay around a small Washington island glows like a water-bound aurora. Dr. Rachel Bell, a scientist studying the 100-year miracle and the tiny sea creatures that create it, knows a secret about the phenomenon that inspired the region's myths and folklore: the rare green water may contain a power that could save Rachel's own life (and change the world).

Until recently, scientists could only guess at what lay past the edge of spacetime. But as pioneering theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton explains, today new scientific tools are giving us the ability to peer beyond the limits of our universe and test our theories about what is there. Her groundbreaking research suggests that we sit in a quantum landscape whose peaks and valleys hide a multitude of other universes, and whose topography holds the secret to the origins of existence itself.

If only life were as simple as breathing in and letting go. Millie Hart has made a career writing happy endings. While her real life is often less than enchanting, at least she has her stories, featuring strong, vibrant women ready for any challenge and men who stand in support of their dreams. Millie makes millions of readers swoon, but despite her agent’s deep objections, her new project is fueled by her intense drive to prove something. All she needs is four months in Bodega Bay. No meet-cutes, no kissing, just blissful silence. Drake Branch is happy to be alive.

Anna Brundage is a rock star. She is tall and sexy, with a powerhouse voice and an unforgettable mane of red hair. She came out of nowhere, an immediate indie sensation. And then, life happened. Anna went down as fast as she went up and then walked off the scene for seven years. Without a record deal or clamoring fans, she sells a piece of her famous father's art to finance just one more album and a European comeback tour.

Morning finds them covered with dried blood, their clothing shredded and their memories hazy. Things soon become horrifyingly clear: the Whistler is a vampire and Natalie and Sophie are his latest victims. The young women leave their babies with Natalie's mother and hit the road, determined not to give in to their unnatural desires. Hunger and desire make a powerful couple. So do the Whistler and his Mother, who are searching for Sophie and Natalie with the help of Twitter and the musician's many fans.

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment. But others have noted Julia's emerging gifts, and soon she's recruited to track down an elusive missing person who might have a connection to her mother.

These 10 classic tales attest to the growing depth of Gurganus's genius. Offering characters antic and tragic, Gurganus charts the human condition as we live it now. His parables recall William Faulkner's scope and Flannery O'Connor's corrosive wit. We encounter a seaside couple fighting to save their dog from Maine's fierce undertow; a mortician whose dedication to his departed clients exceeds all legal limits. A virginal 78-year-old grammar-school librarian has her only erotic encounter with a Joe Exotic-like polyamorous snake farmer.

The Last Kid Left begins when a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl. The police find two bodies in the trunk. Nineteen-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder, and after details of the crime rip across the Internet, his 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis - a sheltered teen who's been off the grid until now, her first romance coinciding with her first cell phone - is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not.

As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded by a loving family; although her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. In a vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice (think Anne Lamott meets Katrina Kenison), Silverman tells of a family's evolution - from her parents' devastating loss of their infant son to raising bright and wildly unique daughters. It's also the creation story of her own family - raising her own bright and wildly unique daughters and taking a journey to adopt two boys from Ethiopia.

Hollywood stars have always furthered fashion's cause of seducing the masses into buying designers' clothes by acting as living billboards. Now, red carpet celebrities are no longer content to just advertise and are putting their names on labels that reflect the image they - or their stylists - created.