Showing results by narrator "Jacques Roy" in All Categories

An addictive debut thriller about the mysterious death of a small-town golden girl and the secret lives of three people connected to her: the social misfit who loved her from afar, the rebellious girl who despised her, and the policeman investigating her death.

Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, withdraws from the comforts of life on a university campus in search of a place to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime - a complicated source of national fascination, often stereotyped and little understood. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp is naïvely determined to fix the huge, broken city with his own hands and on his own terms.

In 2017, Paolo Cognetti returned to Nepal, not to conquer the mountains but to journey through the high valleys of the Dolpo with a copy of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard in hand. Drawing on memories of his childhood in the Alps, Cognetti explored the roots of life in the mountains, truly getting to know the communities and the nature that forged this resilient, almost mythical region. Accompanying him was Remigio, a childhood friend who had never left the mountains of Italy, and Nicola, a painter he had recently met.

Author Brin-Jonathan Butler was granted unique access to the two-and-half-week tournament (the World Chess Championship) and watched every move. In The Grandmaster, he aims to do for Magnus Carlsen what Norman Mailer did for Muhammed Ali in The Fight, John McPhee did for Arthur Ashe in Levels of the Game, and David Foster Wallace did for Roger Federer in his famous New York Times Magazine profile. Butler captures one of the world’s greatest sportsmen at the height of his powers and attempts to decipher the secret to that greatness.

A captivating novel of Renaissance Italy detailing the mysterious life of Bartolomeo Scappi, the legendary chef to several popes and author of one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, and the nephew who sets out to discover his late uncle’s secrets - including the identity of the noblewoman Bartolomeo loved until he died.

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the 30 years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers not only its own citizens but all of humanity.

Hans-Åke Lilja, founder of Lilja's Library, has compiled a brand-new anthology of horror stories to celebrate 20 years of running the number-one Stephen King news website on the web! This anthology includes both original stories like a brand-new novella by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let the Right One In), very rare reprints like "The Blue Air Compressor" by Stephen King, and at least one classic tale that inspired Lilja's love of the macabre at a very young age!

When Sasha's best friend, Xavier, gets back together with his cheating ex, Ivy, Sasha knows she needs to protect him. So she poses as a guy online to lure Ivy away. But Sasha's plan goes sickeningly wrong. And she soon learns to be careful of who you pretend to be because you might be surprised by who you become. Told in multiple points of view, Bad Girls with Perfect Faces is sexy and twisted, with shocks at every turn.

Surprising and revealing, set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, Ann Beattie's astutely observed new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging.

Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers and creative dreamers of our time. His enduring legacy as a storyteller, novelist, and space-age visionary radiated out into popular adaptations for stage, film, and television, and now the fascinating narratives and insights of his personal and professional correspondence are revealed for the first time. Remembrance offers the first sustained look at his life in letters from his late teens to his ninth decade.

When a young Israeli walks into an American embassy and offers to betray his country for money and power, he has no idea that the CIA agent interviewing him is a Russian mole. Years later, the Israeli has risen in the ranks to become a trusted advisor to Israel's prime minister, and throughout his career, he's been forced to share everything with the Kremlin. Now, however, a hint that there may be a traitor in the highest realms of power has slipped out....

Ten teens are left alone in the wilderness during a three-day survival test in this multi-authored novel edited by award-winning author Shaun David Hutchinson. At Zeppelin Bend, an outdoor-education program designed to teach troubled youth the value of hard work, cooperation, and compassion, 10 teens are left alone in the wild. The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life and were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around.

For 4,000 years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion — quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles — resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world.

Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: Their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with a homosexual couple...and still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent to the violence that surrounds them and that they have helped to create.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Google, Goldman Sachs and Kraft Foods combined. But very few people have ever heard of Koch Industries because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way. Now, in Kochland, Christopher Leonard has managed what no other journalist has done before: to tell the explosive inside story of how the largest private company in the world became that big. In doing so, Leonard also tells the epic tale of the evolution of corporate America over the last half century, in all its glory and rapaciousness.

A sweeping, and groundbreaking treasury of the most essential presidential writings, The Best Presidential Writing features a mix of the beloved and the little-known, from stirring speeches and shrewd remarks to behind-the-scenes drafts and unpublished autobiographies.

The Waiter takes place entirely in a restaurant where everything from the menu to the cutlery is carefully thought out. Our narrator is a middle-aged waiter who takes pride in the classic and unchangeable aspects of his job....

They said that the first generation of man was brought low by its appetites: for knowledge, for power, for wealth. They said mankind's voracity was so great, the Lord sent his own Daughter to bring fire and devastation to the world. The survivors were few, but over the course of centuries they banded together to form a new civilization - the Descendancy - founded on the belief that the mistakes of the past must never be repeated. Brothers Clive and Clover Hamill, the sons of a well-respected Descendant minister, have spent their lives spreading that gospel.

After months of disturbing behavior, Gardner Quinn has vanished. Her older sister Fredericka is desperate to find her, but Fred is also pregnant - miraculously so, in a near-future America struggling with infertility. So she entrusts the job to their brother, Carter. Carter, young but jaded, is in need of an assignment. Just home from war, his search for his sister is a welcome distraction from mysterious physical symptoms he can’t ignore...and his slightly-more-than recreational drinking. Carter’s efforts to find Gardner lead him into a dangerous underground.

Jonas Anderson might be an excellent teacher if he weren’t addicted to drugs. Instead, at age 28, he’s been fired from yet another creative writing position after assigning homework like visit a stranger’s funeral and write about it. Jonas needs to do something drastic and, as a dual American-Swedish citizen, he knows Sweden is an easy place to be a graduate student and a difficult place to be a drug addict. The year is 2015 when he arrives in Malmö, a city trying to cope with the arrival of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees.