Showing results by narrator "Candace Thaxton" in All Categories

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal, but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

What do you do with a little kid who...won't brush her teeth...screams in his car seat...pinches the baby...refuses to eat vegetables...runs rampant in the supermarket? Organized according to common challenges and conflicts, this book is an essential emergency first-aid manual of communication strategies, including a chapter that addresses the special needs of children with sensory processing and autism spectrum disorders.

The Voss family is anything but normal. They live in a repurposed church, newly baptized Dollar Voss. The once cancer-stricken mother lives in the basement, the father is married to the mother’s former nurse, the little half-brother isn’t allowed to do or eat anything fun, and the eldest siblings are irritatingly perfect. Then, there’s Merit. Merit Voss collects trophies she hasn’t earned and secrets her family forces her to keep. While browsing the local antiques shop for her next trophy, she finds Sagan.

In this deeply scary and intensely unnerving debut novel, Jake and a woman known only as "The Girlfriend" are on a drive to visit his parents at their secluded farm. But when Jake leaves "The Girlfriend" stranded at an abandoned high school, what follows is a twisted unraveling of the darkest unease, an exploration into psychological frailty, and an ending as suspenseful as The Usual Suspects and as haunting as Misery.

Meredith May had a difficult childhood, with a mother who was physically present but emotionally absent. She learned early on to fend for herself, and never had to care for anyone else. When she and her wife, Jenn, adopt Edie, a sweet golden retriever puppy with saucer brown eyes and buttery white fur, Edie wins their hearts immediately. But it isn’t long after Edie joins the family that the problems begin.

The end of the world didn't happen overnight. After years of war, societal breakdown, freak storms, and rising tides, humanity already hovered near the edge. Then came the most unexpected threat of all: the world's corpses rising up to deliver the final blow.

No one is more shocked than Ginger Mitchell, former call girl, current PI, at how well this whole crime-fighting thing is going. In the short time since she returned home to Portland, she’s taken down an entire crime ring and exposed a corrupt police department. Not bad for her first year on the job. But it’s not like all that success made Ginger’s life easier. Hired hit men are after her. Darlene, the boss who killed her mother, is still at large. Ginger’s brother is missing.

Jake and his girlfriend are on a drive to visit his parents at their remote farm. After dinner at the family home, things begin to get worryingly strange. And when he leaves her stranded in a snowstorm at an abandoned high school later that night, what follows is a chilling exploration of psychological frailty and the limitations of reality. Iain Reid's intense, suspenseful debut novel will have listeners' nerves jangling. A series of tiny clues sprinkled through the relentlessly paced narrative culminate in a haunting twist.

The first novel in nearly a decade from Myla Goldberg, the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Bee Season - a compelling and wholly original story about a female photographer grappling with ambition and motherhood, a balancing act familiar to women of every generation.

DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in 1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York City journalist trailing the activities of an influential senator. In the process, she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to “star” Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.

Ginger Mitchell accomplished the impossible; the former call girl and now sort-of private investigator got into all of this to bring her mother’s killer to justice. But Darlene is still on the loose. It was bad enough when the woman was manipulating Ginger from afar, but now Darlene is in Portland wreaking up-close-and-personal havoc under the assumed identity of Isabelle Dunkirk.

Acclaimed journalist and critic Jason McBride offers a full-scale authorized biography of the pioneering experimental novelist Kathy Acker, one of the most original and controversial figures in 20th-century American literature. Eat Your Mind draws on exclusive interviews with hundreds of Acker’s intimates as well as her private journals, correspondence, and early drafts of her work and offers a thrilling account and a long-overdue reassessment of a misunderstood genius and revolutionary artist.

The drought - or the Tap-Out, as everyone calls it - has been going on for a while now. Everyone’s lives have become an endless list of don’ts: don’t water the lawn, don’t fill up your pool, don’t take long showers. Until the taps run dry. Suddenly, Alyssa’s quiet suburban street spirals into a warzone of desperation; neighbors and families turned against each other on the hunt for water. And when her parents don’t return and her life - and the life of her brother - is threatened, Alyssa has to make impossible choices if she’s going to survive.

One morning while passing through Grand Central Terminal on her way to work, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. Unable to resist her own curiosity, Grace opens the suitcase, where she discovers a dozen photographs - each of a different woman. In a moment of impulse, Grace takes the photographs and quickly leaves the station. Grace soon learns that the suitcase belonged to a woman named Eleanor Trigg, leader of a network of female secret agents who were deployed out of London during the war.

Esta’s parents were murdered. Her life was stolen. And everything she knew about magic was a lie. She thought the Book of Mysteries held the key to freeing the Mageus from the Order’s grasp, but the danger within its pages was greater than she ever imagined. Now the Book’s furious power lives inside Harte. If he can’t control it, it will rip apart the world to get its revenge, and it will use Esta to do it. To bind the power, Esta and Harte must track down four elemental stones scattered across the continent. But the world outside the city is like nothing they expected.

Three years ago, Tyrus Domitrian shocked the galaxy by killing the woman he swore to love forever. The woman for whom he upended the Empire. Now, the once-idealistic heir apparent has become the cruel Emperor Tyrus, wielding his authority with an iron fist, capable of destroying planets with a single word, controlling all technology with a simple thought. He has bent the Grandiloquy to their knees, and none have the power to stand against him. But there is a muttering among the Excess. They say that Nemesis is not truly gone.

New York, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. At turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed, Lucy is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, scion to a prominent New York family who insists he wishes to resist upper crust fate. As she navigates this complex relationship with all its youthful heartache, Lucy is seduced by a different kind of life - one less consumed by conventional success and the approval of men.

Lana Granger lives a life of lies. She has told so many lies about where she comes from and who she is that the truth is like a cloudy nightmare she can’t quite recall. About to graduate from college and with her trust fund almost tapped out, she takes a job babysitting a troubled boy named Luke. Expelled from schools all over the country, the manipulative young Luke is accustomed to controlling the people in his life. But, in Lana, he may have met his match. Or has Lana met hers?

Cassandra Collins is forced to make a choice. She can do what she's told and have a safe, protected life. Or she can strike out on her own and make her own way. Cassandra chooses the easy path and regrets it her whole life. Until she dies and wakes up in her 18-year-old body, on the cusp of that same decision.

Ellie is so not the pageant type. They’re Coralee’s thing, and Ellie is happy to let her talented friend shine in the spotlight. But what’s she supposed to do when Coralee asks her to enter a beauty pageant, and their other best friend, Bert, volunteers to be their manager? Then again, how else is she going to get through this summer with her dad, who barely knows her, while her mom is off on her honeymoon with Ellie’s amazing gym teacher? Ellie decides she has nothing to lose.