Showing titles in City Life

Clover Brooks has always felt a stronger connection with those at the end of their life than in the middle of it. She dedicates herself to ushering people peacefully though their final days, working as a death doula in New York City. Her client's last words are collected in three treasured notebooks, neatly labelled: ADVICE, CONFESSIONS and REGRETS. Then she meets Claudia: a woman who has had the kind of life that Clover hasn't dared imagine for herself.

The Vanderhaven family of Manhattan has it all: wealth, prestige, good looks, and a thriving business empire. But their seemingly perfect world is ripped apart when their younger daughter, eight-year-old Brenna, runs off after overhearing her parents arguing. Out on the streets, she quickly realizes she’s lost. Even more frightening, Brenna soon realizes that a man is following her. Meanwhile, in a townhouse in Brooklyn, Callie Griffin is throwing a birthday party for her one-year-old son, Oliver. The joy of the day is ruined by her sister Lauren’s too short, drive-by appearance.

Tom is a photographer and dreamer, capturing snapshots of the city around him, talking to the people on the fringes of his world, always searching for something he knows is missing but can never quite grasp. He speaks to a beggar. He saves a woman from a gang on a darkened alley. He takes his photos...but only as he develops the negatives does he see the magical, hidden world he has brushed up against in all its beauty, and menace, and danger. And deep in those negatives is the clue he needs to continue his search.

It’s 2015 in New York City, and three women all known as Mrs. Tobias—Veronika, the matriarch, her daughter-in-law Mel, and Mel’s daughter-in-law Birdie—are trying to navigate personal difficulties, some of which are with one another. Veronika and Mel, despite having little in common, are both psychotherapists who are more skilled at helping other people than solving their own problems. Birdie, still dealing with the culture shock of moving to New York City and marrying into the Tobias clan, is pushed to her limit when her husband gets into trouble.

While the years rewind from 2040 back to 2014, Shanghailanders brings listeners into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family, parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit-a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. As they build their lives in this old, futuristic city, we see Leo, his wife Eko and their daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko trip over their own desires in their bids to connect with one another, in their attempts to be a family.

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders - Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world.

We leave shadows, not footprints. Newlywed Danny McKenna's honeymoon ends abruptly when he learns his father has died, uncannily, on the same day as his hero, Frank Sinatra. Returning home to his knotty Irish American family, Danny is confronted with a painful truth--while he knows everything about the famous singer, his own father is a mystery. Tasked with giving a eulogy for a man he hardly knows, Danny sets out to uncover his dad’s past--an immigrant's tale of mid-twentieth-century America and the harsh realities of WWII lived in stark contrast to Frank Sinatra's famously extravagant life.

Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed. Traveling through the 1980s to present day, it delves into New York City's free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt.

One New Year’s Eve, Georgie James and her friends come up with a genius plan to help them stick to their resolutions… They all write down secrets, seal them in envelopes and then post them to each other. The secrets will be revealed at the end of the year if they haven’t kept their resolutions. It’s perfect. Except…Georgie's secret is BIG... and revealing it could destroy their friendships. She has no idea why she chose that one to write down. There are plenty of innocent things she could have said – even admitting she finds newcomer Raf incredibly annoying would have been better.

Eliza Bright is living the dream as an elite video game coder at Fancy Dog Games, the first woman to ascend that high in the ranks — and some people want to make sure she’s the last. To her friends, Eliza Bright is a brilliant, self-taught coder bravely calling out the misogyny that pervades her workplace and industry. To the men who see her very presence as a threat, Eliza Bright is a woman who needs to be destroyed to protect the game they love.

Carefree personal trainer Drake North is long on charm and short on connections that do more than skim the surface. His main ties are to his family and his best friend, so when his friend’s little sister moves to town, Drake promises to look out for her. But when he offers her his spare bedroom for a few nights, he might be getting in over his head.

Nick Hornby meets Patti Smith, Mean Streets meets A Visit from the Goon Squad in this quintessential New York City story about two people who knew each other in the downtown music scene in the 1980s, meet again in the present day, and fall in love.

Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive. He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates - the highly rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

I have a sick, nauseous feeling in my stomach as I pull into the parking lot. The drive seems to take much longer than it should. I cranked the punk rock CD in my car to distract me. Finally, I'm in view of familiar faces, which seem to calm my nerves as I get out of my car. I'm greeted by a couple of other drivers. They seem a little bewildered and in shock. We all walk in silence with our heads down towards the door to get in. Once we get close, we can see that there is a line waiting to get in. We wait patiently and quietly as the line starts to move toward the door.

The Bronx, 1958. The Policewoman's Bureau doesn’t officially exist, and yet it handles those cases only a woman's touch could solve. Marie Cirile, a young officer with the 44th Precinct, has joined the few women stepping away from the select matronly duties available to female officers to take up serious cases. With courage and a stiff upper lip when undercover, Marie is dispatched in often grim and scary circumstances, using her air of innocence and others' prejudice against her to take down degenerates and sex offenders.

For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises, it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor.

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

Oyeyemi treats you to a kaleidoscopic weekend in Prague, as dazzling as it is effortlessly unique. Get lost in the story like you would an unfamiliar city and let it reward you with moments of philosophical clarity, wheelbarrow rides, raw emotion and raw onions. This novel is a holiday, an adventure, a marvel and a guide. It is a story about the lies behind the lies we tell and a city as a living thing, sustained by the lives of its inhabitants. Suffused with warmth and joy, Parasol Against the Axe is a love letter to Prague, and to the art of storytelling.

A small university in Miami, Florida, is facing a rapid decline of incoming students. The social, athletic, and financial status of the school is dying. Dr. Hyatt, the school’s president, has his back against the wall. He sends his recruiter, Phillip Brown, to recruit a team of guys who have been banned from other schools to rob rival universities in Florida. Their objective is to revitalize his program and bring the other schools down.

The Pelletiers are a prominent French family living in Beirut. The patriarch, Louis, has built a successful business that he hopes to pass on to his eldest son. With no head for management, Jean nearly runs the company into the ground, then marries a materialistic young woman who insists they emigrate to Paris and join high society. But there's another reason Jean must leave—he has committed a terrible crime.