Showing results by narrator "Sarah Naughton" in All Categories

In these wonderfully funny and poignant stories, Willett’s eccentric, complex characters think and do the unconventional. Soft, euphonic women gradually grow old; weak, unhappy men confront love and their own mortality; and abominable children desperately try to grow up with grace. With a unique voice and dry humor, Willett gives us a new insight into human existence, showing us those specific moments in relationships when life suddenly becomes visible. Critically acclaimed when it was first published, Jenny and the Jaws of Life is being brought back due to popular demand.

Falling into catatonic states where she freezes in the middle of a resuscitation and hears dead nuns talking to her? Not good. Maybe Angela should check herself into her own hospital...except a lost girl's life depends on her. Because the girl IS real. The threat to her is deadly. Aided by a police detective fallen from grace, Angela searches the midnight catacombs beneath the city, facing down a ruthless gangleader and stumbling onto a serial killer's lair. Her desperate quest to save the girl leads her to the one thing she least expected to find: a last chance for love.

Gina Ricci takes on a job as a cigarette girl to earn money for her ailing father. She’s enchanted by the harsh, glamorous world she discovers at Chicago’s most notorious 1920s speakeasy - all overseen by the club’s imposing owner, Signora Castallazzo. But the staff buzzes with whispers about Gina’s predecessor, who died mysteriously, and the brooding photographer, Marty, warns her to be careful. When Marty is brutally murdered, with Gina as the only witness, she’s determined to track down his killer.

New Zealand's remote Milford Track seems the perfect place for forensic investigator Alexa Glock to reconnect with her brother Charlie, with whom she hasn't spent much time since they were kids. But their backpacking trip seems ill-fated from the start: She must stop on the way to examine nine skeletons—most likely Māori tribespeople—whose graves have been unearthed by highway construction. Before she opens the first casket, a Māori elder gives her a dire warning: The viewing of bones can unleash misfortune to the living. Or worse.

TV reporter Kate Bradley arrives in Manhattan ready to take on a challenging new position as a national news correspondent. When a massive power outage plunges New York City into darkness, the disaster she expected to cover takes an unexpected turn. Someone is leaving thousands of mysterious gifts throughout the city, and the only clue to the giver's identity is the occasional note from "A Stranger."

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly 500 stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap.

Many predicted that pageants would disappear by the 21st century. Yet they are thriving. America's most enduring contest, Miss America, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2020. Why do they persist? In Here She Is, Hilary Levey Friedman reveals the surprising ways pageants have been an empowering feminist tradition.

Despite her world of privilege, Hélène is inspired early on by the radical ideas of her progressive governess. Though her family tries to intervene, the seeds of revolution have already been planted in Hélène’s heart, as are the seeds of love from an unlikely friendship with a young jeweler’s apprentice. Hélène’s determination to find true love is as revolutionary as her attempt to unravel the truth behind the concealed murder that tore her family apart.

When Tara Peary’s twin sister Sophie goes missing, Tara dives into New York’s underbelly to find her. Sophie is the one person who’s ever truly understood her, and Tara knows her sister isn’t the only one who needs help. Tara is also on the run emotionally from her complicated childhood. Her memories are threatening to derail the hunt for Sophie. A psychotherapist keeps her afloat, but then Tara begins dating her therapist’s young tech-millionaire neighbor. The more she uncovers about her the dark side of the rich elite, the less certain of the truth she becomes.

Sixteen-year-old Winnie Schulde has always seen splits - the moment when two possible outcomes diverge, one in her universe and one in another. Multiverse theory, Winnie knows, is all too real, though she has never been anything but an observer of its implications - a secret she keeps hidden from just about everyone. But her physicist father, wrapped up in his research and made cruel by his grief after the loss of Winnie’s mother, believes that if he pushes her hard enough, she can choose one split over another and maybe, just maybe, change their future and their past.

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s 19-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny's play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses" - all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously - to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives. Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. Even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken.

As an inmate psychologist at a state prison, Frank Lundquist has had his fair share of surprises. But nothing could possibly prepare him for the day in which his high school object of desire, Miranda Greene, walks into his office for an appointment. Frank knows he has an ethical duty to reassign Miranda’s case. But Miranda is just as beguiling as ever, and he’s insatiably curious: how did a beautiful high school sprinter and the promising daughter of a congressman end up incarcerated for a shocking crime?

After nine months as a cigarette girl at the Third Door, one of Chicago’s premier moonshine parlors, Gina Ricci feels like she's finally getting into the swing of things. The year is 1929, the Chicago Cubs are almost in the World Series, neighborhood gangs are all-powerful, and though Prohibition is the law of the land, the Third Door can't serve the cocktails fast enough. Two women in particular are throwing drinks back with abandon while chatting up a couple of bankers, and Gina can't help but notice the levels of inebriation and the tension at their table.

When burglars target the palatial estates of American billionaires in a series of high-tech heists, Kate must venture inside the world of the superrich to investigate the biggest story of the year. But the answers don’t come easy. The Los Angeles police detective who’s helping Kate with the case has mysteriously disappeared, Kate’s senator father demands she stop investigating, and the billionaire victims refuse to talk to the media. Still, Kate uncovers clues that prove the crimes are anything but ordinary: those behind the robberies have shocking - but uplifting - motives....

Anxious to get married, thirty-year-old Virginia Carey lands a job as an operator at a police tip line, where she thinks finding a husband will be easy. There’s Charlie Ford, a surprisingly sweet homicide detective, and charming police chief Declan “Deck” Brady. But just as Virginia’s plans begin to fall into place and she can almost picture a ring on her finger, she answers a call from Verona—a mysterious woman who provides a tip about four bodies on a remote local beach.

The future doesn’t just happen.... Somebody has to build it. Martin L. Shoemaker, author of "Today I Am Paul", presents stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary work. Planning, exploring, constructing...living and growing and dying...across the Solar System.

For most of her adult life, Cecily Ross has compared herself to other women - and come up short. After a painful divorce from her emotionally abusive husband, Cecily returns to her hometown of Canyon, Texas, looking to heal. But coming home isn't what she expects. In a town as small as Canyon, her pain is difficult to escape - especially with her model-perfect ex - sister-in-law working at the town's popular coffee-shop hangout.

It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love and their first true loss.

Ella is flat broke: wasting away on bodega coffee, barely making rent, seducing the occasional strange man who might buy her dinner. Unexpectedly, an Upper East Side couple named Lonnie and James rescue her from her empty bank account, offering her a job as a nanny and ushering her into their moneyed world. Ella’s days are now spent tending to the baby in their elegant brownstone or on extravagant excursions with the family. Both women are just 26 - but unlike Ella, Lonnie has a doting husband and son, unmistakable artistic talent, and old family money.

Trinity Academy’s gold-plated secret society is about to be turned upside down. Seventeen-year-old Sam Evans plots revenge on her ex-bestie, Jessica, who happens to perch at the top of the Society’s social ladder - and helped put Sam’s dad in jail. Sam may no longer be cool enough to be invited to rush the Society, but she’s tech-savvy enough to know how to use it in her plan.