Showing results by narrator "Sands Xe" in All Categories

On the morning after Harry Cline’s funeral, a rare ice storm hits the town of Wesleyan, Georgia. The community wakes up to find its controversial statue of Confederate general Henry Benning destroyed—and not by the weather. Half the town had wanted to remove the statue; the other half had wanted to preserve it. Now that the matter has been taken out of their hands, the town’s long-simmering tensions are laid bare. When the Moon Turns Blue is a timely novel about family, friendship, and what can happen when we discover that we don’t particularly like the people we love.

Grace Mercer’s unmatched wraith-killing ability made her the unofficial defender of a city shattered by supernatural catastrophe. So there’s no way she’ll allow the new regent of Seattle’s most powerful dragon-shifter clan to "protect" her from a vicious evil stalking the ruined streets or keep her from the freedom she’s risked everything to earn. Leif’s science-honed instincts tell him Grace is the key to keeping shifters and humans safe, but helping this wary fighter channel her untapped power is burning away the dragon’s sensual self-control and putting a crucial alliance at risk.

1941. Audrey Coltrane has always wanted to fly. It's why she implored her father to teach her at the little airfield back home in Texas. It’s why she signed up to train military pilots in Hawaii when the war in Europe began. And it’s why she insists she is not interested in any dream-derailing romantic involvements, even with the disarming Lieutenant James Hart, who fast becomes a friend as treasured as the women with whom she flies. Then one fateful day, she gets caught in the air over Pearl Harbor just as the bombs begin to fall, and suddenly, nowhere feels safe.

Most parenting books focus on changing a child's behaviour, but the truth is that children only change when their relationship with their parents changes. In Calm Parents, Happy Kids, Dr Laura Markham introduces an approach to parenting that eliminates threats, power struggles and manipulation, in favour of setting limits with empathy and communication.

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall–until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death.

Luella Campbell is having the weirdest day ever. Getting fired from her job at the sunscreen factory for no good reason is bad enough, but when a mysterious dog brings a tempest into her former workplace, Luella’s life is completely upended by the sudden gift of wild and windy magical powers.

In The Influential Mind, neuroscientist Tali Sharot takes us on a thrilling exploration of the nature of influence. We all have a duty to affect others - from the classroom to the boardroom to social media. But how skilled are we at this role, and can we become better? It turns out that many of our instincts - from relying on facts and figures to shape opinions, to insisting others are wrong or attempting to exert control - are ineffective because they are incompatible with how people's minds operate.

Stiletto is a timely, fast-paced feminine mystery told in two diverse voices—a tense, erotic duet between the sharp, intuitive Detective Anna Crane and her prime suspect, the brilliant biochemist Eleanor Kiernan. Both women are haunted by the tragic loss of a sibling, but Kiernan's twin brother died of an overdose of the opiate she helped to create.

The global fiction sensation - published in 32 countries around the world: Meet Doris, a 96-year-old woman living alone in her Stockholm apartment. She has few visitors, but her weekly Skype calls with Jenny - her American grandniece, and her only relative - give her great joy and remind her of her own youth. In writing down the stories of her colorful past - working as a maid in Sweden, modelling in Paris during the '30s, fleeing to Manhattan at the dawn of the Second World War - she may help Jenny, haunted by a difficult childhood, unlock the secrets of their family....

Why would a father abduct his own child? A wedding is planned in Jane Ryland's family, but there's a disaster instead. Nine-year-old Gracie - supposed to be the flower girl - has been taken by her stepdad. Where are they? Is the girl in danger? Reporter Jane Ryland learns there's a limit to the bonds of family - and learns to her peril what happens when loved ones are pushed too far. Meanwhile, Detective Jake Brogan's got a doozy of a case.

It’s 1956, and working-mother Ava Lark and her son, Lewis, have rented a house in a less-than-welcoming Boston suburb. There, Lewis finds he is only able to befriend the other fatherless kids on the block, Jimmy and Rose. But when Jimmy goes missing, neighborhood paranoia ramps to new heights, further ostracizing Ava and Lewis.

It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for 30 years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing it - the Southern Reach - has collapsed on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking.

Rette was born on a small dairy farm in southern Wisconsin—land with wide pastures bordering on forest and a cold, clear trout stream rimming its edge. From the beginning her parents could see that she was odd, different from other children in the way that she was always listening, often with her ear pressed to a tree or flat to the ground, hearing the sounds of roots at work in the earth, listening to the thoughts of the animals.

Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore's longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some 18 years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since.

When Rachel Somerstein had an unplanned C-section with her first child, the experience was anything but the “routine” operation her doctor described. A series of errors by her clinicians led to a real-life nightmare: surgery without anesthesia. The ensuing mental and physical complications left her traumatized and desperate for answers about how things could have gone so wrong. In the United States, one in three babies is born via C-section, a rate that has grown exponentially over the past fifty years.

After a fire rips through her loft, destroying the seven billboard-size paintings meant for her first major exhibition, a young painter is left with an impossible task: recreate the lost artworks in just three months without getting caught - or ruin her fledgling career. Homeless and desperate, she begs her way into Pine City, an exclusive retreat in upstate New York notorious for three things: outrageous revelries, glamorous artists, and the sparkling black lake where brilliant prodigy Carey Logan drowned herself.

Anna Jeffries has spent the last 32 years blending in, content in her worn-out reading chair - her happy corner of the world - spinning romantic scenarios she’s certain reality can’t deliver. After three years of teaching Shakespeare at UC Berkeley, Anna is working toward full tenure. Her life in the classroom means everything and she can’t imagine wanting more...until she does.

Felicity Miner is not normally an anxious person, and she’s been on her own since high school. But after a shoplifter steals from her bookshop, she calls the cops. When Officer Leo Russo shows up, Felicity has to tell herself that just because the romance novel she’s been reading has a hero police officer doesn’t mean she needs to project her imagination onto the real man. Yes, Officer Russo is unexpectedly generous, and he helps make Felicity’s home more secure when her worries won’t settle down.

Traveling with Sugar reframes the rising diabetes epidemic as part of a 500-year-old global history of sweetness and power. Amid eerie injuries, changing bodies, amputated limbs, and untimely deaths, many people across the Caribbean and Central America simply call the affliction "sugar" - or, as some say in Belize, "traveling with sugar". A decade in the making, this audiobook unfolds as a series of cronicas - a word meaning both slow-moving story and slow-moving disease.

Cassidy Morgan's life has always followed a carefully laid track: top education, fulfilling career, and marriage to the love of her life. The next logical step was starting a family. But when a late-term miscarriage threatens to derail everything she's worked so hard for, she finds herself questioning her identity, particularly what it means to be a mother. Unable to move past her guilt and shame, she realizes there's more to fix than a broken heart.