Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

During her senior year of college, Clare Michaels takes a spring break trip to Florida with three other girls, including her best friend, Lee. She's hoping for adventure and a few stories to share back at school. Instead, a string of bad choices leads to a horrific encounter, and Lee offers herself up so that Clare can escape. In the months that follow that fateful incident, Lee, once so dynamic and ambitious, flounders and withdraws. Clare was the only person to whom she'd ever confided about her troubled past. For Clare, that role felt like an honor - until it became a burden.

Patricia Highsmith was one of the great 20th-century novelists, celebrated for classics The Talented Mr Ripley, Carol and Strangers on a Train, but she was also a masterful and prolific short-story writer. This definitive new collection, featuring two stories that have never been published before, confirms Highsmith as a genius of the genre. Peerlessly disturbing, exhilarating and savagely funny, Highsmith's stories still have the power to startle, presenting a world that is frighteningly familiar and as relevant today as when they were written.

We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds and even our deaths. Yet emerging science challenges our assumptions of mastery: at the microscopic level, the cells in our bodies facilitate tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening consequences. In this revelatory audiobook, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that our bodies are a battleground over which we have little control and lays bare the cultural charades that shield us from this knowledge.

Sherry has lived with her family in a sealed bunker since things went wrong up above. But when they run out of food, Sherry and her dad must venture outside. There they find a world of devastation, desolation... and the Weepers: savage, mutant killers. When Sherry's dad is snatched, she joins forces with the gorgeous but troubled Joshua - an Avenger, determined to destroy the Weepers. But can Sherry keep her family and Joshua safe, when his desire for vengeance threatens them all?

John Langan, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel The Fisherman, returns with ten new tales of cosmic horror in Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies. In these stories, he continues to chart the course of 21st century weird fiction, from the unfamiliar to the familial, the unfathomably distant to the intimate.

Emily was in a restaurant, having lunch with her father – the next thing she remembers is waking up, naked, in a strange hotel room, next to a man she did not know. She suspected she had been drugged and raped. She later found out she had been filmed without her consent. What happened to her that night could have happened to anyone. What came next happens to far too many victims, as failures by the police, CPS and other parts of the system, led to Emily doubting she would ever find justice.

Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, the promise and peril of a technological and communications revolution: these forces shaped the life and work of Joseph Conrad at the dawn of the 20th century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization as we recognize it today.

Elizabeth's eyes have failed. She can no longer read the books she loves or see the paintings that move her, but her mind remains sharp, and music fills the vacancy left by her blindness. When her father's journals are discovered on a shipwrecked boat, she enlists the help of a delinquent teen, Morgan, to read to her. As an unlikely friendship grows between them, Elizabeth is carried back to her childhood home - the lighthouse on Porphyry Island, Lake Superior - and to the memory of her enigmatic twin sister, Emily.

Natalie isn’t a romantic. She doesn’t believe in true love or destiny. She thinks that people are just plain lucky if they happen to find someone. It’s coincidence and nothing more. As a wedding dress designer, though, she knows she has to keep these feelings under wraps. Even if she’s suspicious that Harper, the bride she’s working with, might secretly agree with her. Because if Harper admitted she wasn’t sure about love, it might also mean giving up on a millionaire husband-to-be and the lavish island wedding of her dreams.

The Rusel family is famous throughout Enderlain as breeders of enchanted horses, but their prestige is no match for their rising debts. To save her family’s ranch, Mikira Rusel is left with only one option: enter the Illinir, a cutthroat, cross-country horserace known for its high death rate as much as its flashy prize money. To have any chance of success, she’ll have to recruit Ari, an unlicensed enchanter who creates golems in place of enchanted animals, and Damien Adair, a lord in the midst of a succession battle.

The ballad is one of the oldest poetic forms in English and are simply poems or songs that tell a story. Maybe it’s because of childhood associations or that we all enjoy a cracking good story told in rhyme but as this volume demonstrates, the ballad has endless appeal. We include favourites such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp Weaver, Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee as well as classics such as Sir Patrick Spens, the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats.

Hired by a socialite friend of his editor to track down the truth about her half-breed mother’s parentage, San Francisco reporter Arnold Rednapp embarks upon an odyssey of discovery into the hinterland of the remote Klamath River country of northern California, befriending a number of intriguing characters among the First Nation peoples of the area and discovering things not only about his client’s parentage, but also about himself and the world he has always taken for granted.

In this world, Dr Charlotte Stone is an expert psychologist helping to catch serial killers. In the next world, Charlotte's ghostly lover - wrongly executed killer Michael Garland - is facing death yet again: the ultimate annihilation of his soul. Can Charlie prove Michael's innocence and rescue him from total oblivion?

The power of economics to affect everyone's lives has become increasingly important in recent years, so The Complete Idiot's Guide to Economics is here to help you master the basics. It covers micro and macroeconomics, looking at everything from inflation and international trade to savings and supply and demand. This audiobook makes difficult economic concepts clear and easy to grasp, and key issues such as global climate change, the environment and the social safety net are covered from an economic perspective.

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's summer house on a remote Minnesota lake. Her mother and two sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she leaves the house to her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability - a way to give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning....

Germany, 1945, and the bombs are falling. In Heidenfeld, Etta and her husband, Josef, roam an empty nest: their eldest son, Max, is fighting on the front lines, while 15-year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nürnberg school for the Hitler Youth. At home, news of the war provokes daily doses of fear as the planes grow closer, taking one city after the next. When Max is unexpectedly discharged, Etta is relieved to have her eldest home and safe. But soon after he arrives, it’s clear that the boy who left is not the same returned.

A mother moves to Geneva with her husband and their two young children. In their beautiful new rented apartment, surrounded by their rented furniture, and several Swiss instructions to maintain quiet, she finds herself totally isolated. Her husband’s job means he is almost never present, and her entire world is caring for her children - making sure they are happy, and fed and comfortable, and that they can be seen as the happy, well-fed, comfortable family they should be. Everything is perfect. But, of course, it’s not....

Witness early, bloody, anaesthetic-free operations and first crude surgical instruments, trace the mapping of the circulatory system, follow the painstaking detective work that led to the decoding of the human genome and understand the role that potions, cures, therapies, herbal medicines and drugs have played in the human quest to tame and conquer disease, injury and death. An engrossing history and tale of drama and discovery that celebrates the milestones of medical history across generations and cultures.

Only Willow has the power to defeat the malevolent Church of Angels, and they will stop at nothing to destroy her. Willow isn’t alone, though. She has Alex by her side - a trained Angel Killer and her one true love.But Willow will always be a half-angel, and when Alex joins forces with a group of Aks, she’s treated with mistrust and suspicion. She’s never felt more alone - until she meets Seb.

Marching to Zion is the tragic story of Minerva Fishbein and Magnus Bailey, a charismatic Black man and the longtime business partner of Minerva's father. From the brutal riots of East St. Louis to Memphis, Tennessee, during the 1920s and the Depression, Marching to Zion is a tale of passion, betrayal, and redemption during an era in America when interracial love could not go unpunished.