Showing titles in City Life

Olivia Strauss is turning thirty-nine. No major milestone. She still considers herself young. At least young enough to assume she has decades (emphasis on the plural) to check the unchecked boxes of her life’s to-do list. Ballerina? Too late. But not too late for poet. Or for reigniting the romantic spark in her marriage, spending more quality time with her son, switching careers, learning to cook, or even dyeing her hair a bright bohemian pink. She’ll get to that one. There’s time—until Olivia’s best friend, Marian, gives her a birthday present she could have lived without.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men - employees at the resort - are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.

4 a.m., New York City. A silent disaster. There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island—for now. The next night, it happens again. Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York’s Emergency Management team and are tasked with disaster response for “The Unmapping.”

Breasts & Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the 30-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent.

Fiddle player Eliza Bancroft had to improvise after an unplanned pregnancy four years ago. Instead of pursuing her dream of performing live music, she changed keys and has focused on being a good mom and a sought-after studio musician in Nashville. Her rhythm is set until she spots her son’s father in a local magazine and realizes the man she was unable to track down lives right under her nose in Music City.

At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything - her husband and only child dead within months of each other - leaving her loosely tethered to this world.

I'm not like most women. I don't have fantasies of finding the perfect man and settling down to have two point five children. My job is my baby. My dream position is so close I can taste it, but the rug is pulled out from beneath me when I find out there's a catch: they want the role filled by someone who is married. Liam Remington is my best friend, Natalie's, brother-in-law with a hero complex. We've both been living with her for the past three years, helping to raise her four small children after she fled an abusive marriage.

In late 2000, a young boy in Ahmedabad dreams of owning a business. To accommodate his friends' passion, he opens a cricket shop. However, nothing comes easily in a turbulent city. To realise their goals, they will have to face it all - religious politics, calamities, unacceptable love and, above all, their own mistakes. Will they make it? Can an individual's dreams overcome the nightmares of real life? Can we succeed despite mistakes?

Daddy’s best friend bought me like a commodity…and knocks me up. He’s a ruthless billionaire and almost 20 years older than me. When my family’s business spirals into bankruptcy, I am sold at an auction. That’s where he takes his chance…to make me his wife whether I want to or not. I grew up innocent and sheltered, never thrust into their dangerous world. But suddenly I’m sold and forced into a marriage to protect my family’s status. A marriage with a cold and intimidating billionaire. A marriage that is surely only for show…or so I thought. Because my new husband demands ...

A man hangs himself in a neighborhood chapel. Bodies of young girls are being found in canals and rivers across the city with high levels of Mandrax in their bloodstream. McCoy is asked to watch over a colleague's niece, who has left home young and is running with a bad crowd in Glasgow. DS Wattie is attempting to become a sergeant. Drugs in Glasgow have gotten darker and more dangerous. Glasgow, its music, and its inhabitants all have rough edges in this hard city fought over by gangs, organized crime, the forces of law and order, and ordinary people trying to get by.

*Formerly: The Need To Have Him A scandalous game... A stranger in her apartment... An intruder with an agenda... A game gone wrong? Maybe! “Don’t move,” were the words that will forever echo in her mind. In one second, Joi’s world changed. He stood behind her, hands over her mouth. And her life would never be the same. Joi thought it was a game. But it wasn’t! After that night, Dominic tried to move on. He tried to get past the guilt he feels. A game played through a social media app, has him wondering about the woman at the root of it all. Her teasing and taunting of men, that ...

Raymond Jaffe feels like he doesn’t belong. Not with his mother’s new family. Not as a weekend guest with his father and his father’s wife. Not at school, where he’s an outcast. After his best friend moves away, Raymond has only two real connections: to the feral cat he’s tamed and to a blind ninety-two-year-old woman in his building who’s introduced herself with a curious question: Have you seen Luis Velez?

Washington D. C., 1925. Clara Johnson talks to spirits, a gift that saved her during her darkest moments in a Washington D. C. jail. Now a curse that’s left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So, when the Empress, the powerful spirit who holds her debt, offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, a desperate Clara seizes the chance. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District.

Young, ambitious and single in New York City in the late ’80s, Faith Sibley is energized by the early success of her Have Faith catering enterprise. But she’s cast into an unexpected new role when she runs into old high school friend Emma Stanstead at a swanky uptown party: sleuth!

I have a weakness for bad boys… even with the one I just slept with who is now my new boss… Jack Steele is a handsome, mature, grumpy Billionaire single dad… and a sizzling bad boy that women can’t resist. So, when we bumped into each other at a local bar, I let him show me his bad boy ways. But then, I started my new nanny job, and my heart just about stopped — my new boss is Jack. Now, I’m caring for his daughter and I love her like she’s my own. So he’s off-limits. All we do is bicker and disagree. Until he steps up to protect me. And I see another caring side to him. ...

One night with a stranger ignited a fire I couldn't extinguish. He was everything forbidden, everything dangerous—wrapped in power and mystery. I didn't know his name, only the way his touch branded me as his, searing his presence into my soul. Years later, I'm back in his world, living in the shadows, hiding the secret that binds us together. He's the ruthless kingpin hunting a card counter who defied him. He doesn't know it's me. He doesn’t know what I’m keeping from him. But the truth is a ticking time bomb, and when it finally explodes, it won’t just expose my secret—it’ll ...

Anthony Trollope was one of Victorian England’s most popular and prolific authors. He worked for the Post Office while establishing himself as a writer, and is credited with introducing the pillar box to Britain. Best known for his ‘Barsetshire’ and ‘Palliser’ novels, he wrote over 50 works in total, including short stories, travel books, biographies and a posthumously published autobiography. Collected here are a selection of superb adaptations of his much-loved novels, as well as a fascinating documentary and an original radio play by Patricia Cumper.

My plan was to marry the kind of man I write about in my sweet romance novels, not lose my v-card to the ultimate bad boy… my brother’s best friend… Women always line up to be with Travis Ray—a handsome, arrogant, alpha, playboy, rodeo star, and billionaire cattle rancher. I can’t stand Travis, but my brother convinces me to work as his assistant while I get my writing career off the ground. So I meet with Travis, and our banter turns into him challenging me. Then kissing me and taking control of my body in ways I’ve never felt before. But that can’t happen again. He’s now ...

City Girl is a gripping street fiction novel that delves into the turbulent life of Rasha "Raz" Collins, a determined twenty-year-old woman living in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Annapolis. Rasha dreams of escaping her troubled community, and her middle school sweetheart, Monte, appears to be her ticket out.

Kara Davis is a girl caught in the middle - of her Canadian nationality and her desire to be a “true” Jamaican, of her mother and grandmother’s rages and life lessons, of having to avoid being thought of as too “faas” or too “quiet” or too “bold” or too “soft”. In “Little Jamaica”, Toronto’s Eglinton West neighbourhood, Kara moves from girlhood to the threshold of adulthood, from elementary school to high school graduation, in these 12 interconnected stories.