Showing results by narrator "Barbara" in All Categories

Waiting for Morning is the poignant tale of a woman who, in the face of tremendous personal tragedy, hardens her heart and turns from God. Now two kind people are struggling to rescue her faith.

On Prince Edward Island, aging siblings Mathew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to adopt a boy to help with chores around the farm. But when Mathew arrives at the train platform, the only living creature in sight, legs dangling from the piles of shingles where she sits, is a freckled, green-eyed, redheaded little girl. Mathew senses immediately that life at Green Gables is going to be very different. And how right he is.

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.

Emily’s tranquil domesticity with new husband Cyrus is interrupted when she is called to Hong Kong in pursuit of a vanished agent.

Dark secrets lurk beneath the glamour and glitter of New York's high-society life in this riveting tale of murder, obsession, and revenge. Jo Slater, one of the grandest of New York's grande dames, is knocked off her pedestal when her husband of 20 years dies under strange circumstances and leaves his fortune to a mysterious French countess. When Jo discovers she has been the victim of a plot, she decides to set things straight. And nothing is going to get in her way.

Mrs. Pollifax has a new hat, and only she and Mr. Carstairs know it conceals eight false passports which she must smuggle into Bulgaria.

Always The Music is the fascinating story of Morris’ personal metamorphosis through the highest levels of the world of classical music, his learning and insights into how storied musical institutions function, great artists create, and audiences engage. Over the course of 34 years running the Boston Symphony and The Cleveland Orchestra, he had the growing realization that American orchestras had become ingrown on themselves, with rigid structures and cultures that conspired to perpetuate those structures rather than the music experiences they were built to create.

A former CIA operative turned art dealer waits in Italy, wounded and in hiding, for the cavalry. According to his SOS, only Mrs. Pollifax will do....

Libby Sawyer and her father return from summer vacation to find another family living in their home. Widower Michael Dobrescu brought his family all the way from Romania to stake a decades-old claim on their house, and he has no plans to leave. As a contentious legal battle drags on, Libby finds herself drawn to Michael and his mysterious past. But she’ll soon have to choose between her family and a man with decidedly unclear intentions.

Thornton Wilder is one of America's most important literary figures. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times - for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth - and is the only person to be awarded the Pulitzer for both fiction and drama. Included here are four of his key works, set in different times and places, but sharing the same fundamental motifs - the universality of human experience and our search for life's meaning.

Mrs. Frisby, a widowed mouse with four small children, is faced with a terrible problem. She must move her family to their summer quarters immediately, or face almost certain death. But her youngest son, Timothy, lies ill with pneumonia and must not be moved. Fortunately, she encounters the rats of NIMH, an extraordinary breed of highly intelligent creatures, who come up with a brilliant solution to her dilemma.

All Mrs. Pollifax has to do is help a bumbling CIA agent confirm the identities of seven undercover informants in Morocco. A simple assignment. But right away, things go wrong. The first informant is murdered just after Mrs. P. identifies him in Fez. Worse, she has the frightening sensation that her associate is not who or what he says he is.

"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.

Emily Pollifax accompanies her young friend Kadi back to Africa, where a mutual friend is to be crowned king of his small country. But when several people are slashed by murderous lion claws and Kadi disappears, Mrs. Pollifax must begin a perilous investigation. Fortunately for all, staunch determination and polished karate skills are on her side.

Former foster kid Sebastian Grant has leveraged his intelligence and hard work to become a pediatric heart surgeon. But not even his career success can erase the void he’s tried so hard to fill. Then he meets high school teacher Leah Montgomery, and his fast-spinning world comes to a sudden stop. He falls hard, only to make a devastating discovery - Leah is the woman his best friend set his heart on months before.

Gwen, Beth, and Lacy Gallatin fashion a life for themselves in the Montana wilds, operating a roadhouse that is located at the crossroads of two major stage lines. When their father is accidentally killed, the oldest sister, Gwen, reasons that she's cursed. After all, death seems to haunt her: her mother, now her father...and she was married for a mere ten days before her husband died from a bout of measles.

An enchanting New York Times and international best seller and award-winner about life, art, literature, philosophy, culture, class, privilege, and power, seen through the eyes of a 54-year-old French concierge and a precocious but troubled 12-year-old girl.

Brilliantly executed and compulsively listenable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred - whether family or friends - and in the strength of the human spirit.

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment.

You know those problems in your life that never change, no matter what you try? What if they are actually where your greatest growth and transformation can be found? It turns out that being stuck is not an endpoint, it's a clue. Wherever there is something in your life that is impossible to think, or feel, or do, you are finding the exact spot where the next steps in your life are waiting to unfold.