Demitra's mother died in America in the 1930s when Demitra was three years old. Her father took her home to the Greek island of Cephalonia, where she endures a lonely childhood and dreams her dead mother watches over her like the goddesses she reads about in her mythology books. When Demitra comes of age, she refuses to marry the man chosen for her. Instead, she defiantly begins an affair with a forbidden man who ignites her passion for painting the goddesses she once imagined protected her.

Sam Carlson is a projectionist in small-town Minnesota, where fantasies unspool in glorious black and white—for him and for his sweetheart, college-bound math whiz Sarah Haber. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Sam is sent to the Philippines and captured as a POW. Brutalized but unbroken by the Bataan Death March and POW camps, Sam is one of eighteen hundred starved and weakened prisoners herded into the cargo hold of a barbaric hell ship called the Arisan Maru, his survival doubtful.

Charlotte, a commercial airline pilot, attends an auction with her boyfriend Henri at Hotel Drouot, now the oldest auction house in Paris. Successfully bidding on a box of wine saved from the German occupation during the Second World War, Henri gives Charlotte a seemingly inferior bottle he finds inside the box. Cleaning the label, Charlotte makes a shocking discovery that sends her on a quest to find the origins of this unusual—and very valuable—bottle of wine, a quest that will take her back fifty years into the past.

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is conflicted when an injury results in her reassignment to the relative comfort of the English countryside. Love has never been part of her plan, but despite herself, she falls for an officer with three bullet wounds, startling blue eyes and a wicked sense of humor.

Since her husband’s death six months ago, Yesica Diaz-Taylor seems to be taking her grief in stride. Then an angry outburst at work shatters the illusion. Her mandated support group counseling doesn’t help much. Yesica has always kept her feelings close, so even when an unlikely friendship blossoms with the group’s facilitator, she still has reasons for holding back. She’s just not ready to share.

Kathryn Walker enjoys an enviable life. Her husband is an accomplished doctor, her children are bright and successful, and she devotes herself to charity work that uplifts her Suburban Colorado community. Settling into a new year, her life couldn’t be better. . . Until April.

On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident that stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past. She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall. One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life, who transformed both Natalia and her art.

Cannabis kingpin Burl Spoon has reigned over the Jackson County area for three decades, building a powerful backwoods empire. But behind a well-run organization, his personal life is crumbling—his daughter can’t stay clean; his son has hated him since coming out; and after enduring years of infidelity, his wife is straying too. The only person not on his payroll who still adores him is his six-year-old granddaughter, Chelsea.

New Brunswick, 1934. When a cook in a logging camp finds an orphaned baby bear, he brings it home to his wife, who names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside her newborn daughter, Pearly. Growing up, Pearly and Bruno share a special bond and become inseparable. While life in the camp can be perilous—loggers are regularly injured or even killed—the Everlasting family form a close-knit community with the woodsmen, who accept and embrace the tame young bear.

Sisters Nadia and Cass Brenner are heirs to Ocean House, a decades-old empire that builds superyachts for the rich and powerful: emirs, oligarchs, and titans of industry throughout America and Europe. They’re a next-generation success with the design of their soon-to-be-commissioned megayacht for a Chinese billionaire. But the sisters’ entrée into the coveted Asian market is tragically cut short when Cass falls from a fortieth-floor hotel balcony.

In the small college town of Troy, Alabama, amidst the backdrop of 1967, Katia Daniels lives a life steeped in responsibility. At the Pike County Group Home for Negro Boys, she pours her heart into nurturing the young lives under her care, harboring a longing for children of her own. Katia's romantic entanglement with an older man brings comfort but also stirs questions about the path she's chosen.

In 1625, the Franconian village of Eisbach has been plagued by disease, famine, heinous crimes, and a merciless winter. Katarin Jaspers is the maidservant to the enigmatic Reverend Zacharias Engel, appointed by Rome to cure the village of suspected diabolism and save every God-fearing soul.

Ethan Dove’s family has moved to a new home in a safe community, and it’s exactly the fresh start they need. Not only is his marriage to Emma hanging by a thread, but his son, Dylan, and twelve-year-old daughter, Rose, deserve to have a happy childhood. After Rose is bullied by the boys across the road, Ethan is relieved when the woman who lives next door steps in. Fiona Smith has come into their lives at just the right moment, and when she offers to look after Rose during the school holidays, Ethan and Emma can’t believe their luck.

Liza Day’s mother isn’t dead, but leave it to Darla Day to throw herself a funeral anyway. It’s the kind of attention grab Liza left behind to build a quiet life for herself and her rebellious teenage daughter, Avery. But between her students discovering her old daytime TV show—putting her teaching job at risk—and her mother’s unexpected funeral invitation, Liza’s life feels truly like a soap opera.

Spring, 1918. The Great War is at a crucial stage, the Germans are making one last push into France, and the Allies are struggling to hold them back. Battle lines are shifting, and men, and their machines, are being sent up and down the front to shore up defenses. Major Heathcliff Lennox, and his batman Greggs, are told to report to their new HQ. They set off on a sunlit day to fly the distance, but the enemy is never far away, and disaster strikes. They're sent crashing to the ground behind enemy lines, where life, death, and love await.

When the federal government catches hotshot financial adviser Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer defrauding his NFL-player clients, it’s time to come clean. He has no reasonable defense. What he has is a bigger story to spill to the feds—that of a multibillion-dollar conspiracy that exploits the most talented college athletes and implicates one of the most popular entertainment industries in the nation. The DOJ is listening, and the truth could literally set Marty free. All he has to do is prove that the NCAA is a vast ongoing scam.

Since her husband’s death six months ago, Yesica Diaz-Taylor seems to be taking her grief in stride. Then an angry outburst at work shatters the illusion. Her mandated support group counseling doesn’t help much. Yesica has always kept her feelings close, so even when an unlikely friendship blossoms with the group’s facilitator, she still has reasons for holding back. She’s just not ready to share.

Caesar, an undercover operative, enters Carmichael with the briefest of orders from his boss and a countdown on his phone. What will happen when the clock strikes zero? Deputy Amelia Miller is dispatched from a nearby city, and a series of events keeps her around much longer than she'd expected. In the middle of the night, something shifts, and the whole town disappears off the face of the Earth. Who caused the shift, and what lies beyond the veil of their settlement?

Mary Poffenroth, PhD, is a scientist, professor, and fear expert who has spent her career researching how we can all live more courageously, every day. With anxiety rates tripling and depression rates quadrupling since 2019, Brave New You could not be timelier as it gives listeners actionable steps to navigate the underlying cause of our current mental health crisis: fear. Not fight-or-flight, but the kind of pervasive, debilitating everyday fears triggered by problems, stresses, and challenging issues we all face in our day-to-day lives.

Ethan Dove’s family has moved to a new home in a safe community, and it’s exactly the fresh start they need. Not only is his marriage to Emma hanging by a thread, but his son, Dylan, and twelve-year-old daughter, Rose, deserve to have a happy childhood. After Rose is bullied by the boys across the road, Ethan is relieved when the woman who lives next door steps in. Fiona Smith has come into their lives at just the right moment, and when she offers to look after Rose during the school holidays, Ethan and Emma can’t believe their luck.

Depuis l'âge de quatre ans, Petite Fleur se fait bander les pieds par sa mère. Si elle supporte la douleur, c'est pour avoir des lotus d'or parfaits, des pieds de dix centimètres, qui lui assureraient un mariage respectable malgré la pauvreté de sa famille. Mais à la mort de son père, Petite Fleur est vendue comme muizai à la riche famille Fong et devient la suivante de Linjing, une petite fille gâtée et cruelle.

In a sleepy German village, Allina Strauss’s life seems idyllic: she works at her uncle’s bookshop, makes strudel with her aunt, and spends weekends with her friends and fiancé. But it's 1939, Adolf Hitler is Chancellor, and Allina’s family hides a terrifying secret—her birth mother was Jewish, making her a Mischling. One fateful night after losing everyone she loves, Allina is forced into service as a nurse at a state-run baby factory called Hochland Home. There, she becomes both witness and participant to the horrors of Heinrich Himmler’s ruthless eugenics program.

After a long and trying journey from her home, Hannah arrives at a charming village nestled in the foothills of the Swabian Mountains, eager to find Helmut Kerner, a traveling seed merchant she loved and lost. Enchanted by the glorious wildflowers and thriving harvests stretching as far as the eye can see, Hannah feels less like an outsider with each passing hour, until she meets Seraphine, an ethereally beautiful dreamer engaged to be married to Helmut, the father of Hannah's unborn child.

Kathryn Walker enjoys an enviable life. Her husband is an accomplished doctor, her children are bright and successful, and she devotes herself to charity work that uplifts her Suburban Colorado community. Settling into a new year, her life couldn’t be better. . . Until April.

The summer of 1936 in Parsons, Georgia, is unseasonably hot, and Opal Pruitt senses a nameless storm brewing. She hopes this foreboding feeling won’t overshadow her upcoming 18th birthday or the annual Founder’s Day celebration in just a few weeks. She and her Grandma Birdie work as housekeepers for the white widow Miss Peggy, and Opal desperately wants some time to be young and carefree with her cousins and friends.

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north.

The world is about to end. Again. Ever since the first Storm wreaked havoc on civilization as we know it, seventeen-year-old Liz Flannery has been holed up in an abandoned bookstore in suburban New Jersey where she used to work, trading books for supplies with the few remaining survivors. It’s the one place left that feels safe to her. Until she learns that another earth-shattering Storm is coming . . . and everything changes. Enter Maeve, a prickly and potentially dangerous out-of-towner who breaks into the bookstore looking for shelter one night.

In Women of the Silk, Gail Tsukiyama takes listeners back to rural China in 1926, where a group of women forge a sisterhood amid the reeling machines that reverberate and clamor in a vast silk factory from dawn to dusk. Leading the first strike the village has ever seen, the young women use the strength of their ambition, dreams, and friendship to achieve the freedom they could never have hoped for on their own.

Daughters are the Ang family’s curse. In 1948, civil war ravages the Chinese countryside, but in rural Shandong, the wealthy, landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother—abused by the family for failing to birth a boy—finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen.

It’s the early 1990s in Glasgow, Scotland, and Stephen has emerged from a lengthy hospital stay. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, a little-understood disease which has robbed him of any prospects of work, friends, or independent living, he moves slowly toward new goals and meets others like him, including Richard, a friend from school, and Carrie, a young woman bedridden for five years. Feeling isolated and alone, they form their own support group, and try to get by with as little money and pain as possible.