Showing results by narrator "Tavia Gilbert" in All Categories

In the final months of World War II, San Francisco newspaper secretary Ellie Morgan should be planning her wedding and subsequent exit from the newsroom into domestic life. Instead, Ellie, who harbors dreams of having her own column, is using all the skills she's learned as a would-be reporter to try to uncover any scrap of evidence that her missing pilot father is still alive. But when she discovers a stack of love letters from a woman who is not her mother in his possessions, she vows to find out the truth about the father she loves - and the woman who loved him back.

The rhythm, ritual, and pleasure of knitting are celebrated in this new collection for lovers of both knitting and literature. In Knitting Pearls, two dozen writers write about the transformative and healing powers of knitting. Lily King remembers the year her family lived in Italy, and a knitted hat that helped her daughter adjust to her new home. Laura Lippman explores how converting to Judaism changed not only Christmas but also her mother's gift of a knitted stocking.

Tis the season...for ghosts. Verity Long has come to terms with the fact that she can see spirits, and talk to them, and...she's actually making cookies for one of them. But she's drawing the line at any more ghost hunting or mystery solving. Until a dear friend needs help locating a missing antique at the party of the year. Not one to leave a friend in need, Verity straps on her sparkly heels and sneaks in to see what she can find - only to uncover a startling secret that will change everything.

After getting caught in an affair months ago, Ethan ended things with Lindsey in an attempt to win back his wife. Lindsey refuses to let go of the relationship so easily and begins stalking Tessa. Tessa, still shattered from Ethan’s infidelity, finally hits her breaking point and snaps, devising a plan to lure Lindsey to her home one weekend when her husband is away.

Emma Keim was heartbroken when her husband, Sanford, passed away, leaving her to raise three young daughters alone. In the years since, her relatives have made it no secret that they expect Emma to remain a widow, mourning Sanford indefinitely. But when she meets Jay Hilty - a widower with three young sons of his own - Emma is delighted to have a new friend who understands her struggles. Emma is dismayed her family is so opposed to their friendship - and the idea of it ever becoming anything more.

The story of the "Lentil Underground" begins on a 280-acre homestead rooted in America's Great Plains: the Oien family farm. Forty years ago, corporate agribusiness told small farmers like the Oiens to "get big or get out." But 27-year-old David Oien decided to take a stand, becoming the first in his conservative Montana county to plant a radically different crop: organic lentils. Unlike the chemically dependent grains American farmers had been told to grow, lentils make their own fertilizer and tolerate variable climates, so their farmers aren't beholden to industrial methods.

You're home making dinner for your husband. You expect him any second. The phone rings - it's the call you hoped you'd never get. You jump in your car and race to a neighborhood you thought you'd never visit. You peer into the dark, deserted building. You brace yourself for the worst. And then, you remember nothing else. They tell your husband you've been in an accident. You lost control of your car as you sped through the worst side of town. The police suspect you were up to no good. But your husband refuses to believe it.

Betty Sweet never expected to be a widow at 40. With so much life still in front of her, she tries to figure out what's next. She couldn't have imagined what God had in mind. When her estranged sister is committed to a sanitarium, Betty finds herself taking on the care of a 5-year-old nephew she never knew she had. In 1960s LaFontaine, Michigan, they make an odd pair. Betty with her pink button nose and bouffant hair. Hugo with his light brown skin and large brown eyes. But more powerful than what makes them different is what they share: the heartache of an empty space in their lives.

Ten-year-old Pearl Spence is a daydreamer, playing make-believe to escape life in Oklahoma's Dust Bowl in 1935. The Spences have their share of misfortune, but as the sheriff's family, they've got more than most in this dry, desolate place. They're who the town turns to when there's a crisis or a need. Pearl is proud of her loving, strong family, though she often wearies of tracking down her mentally impaired older sister or wrestling with her grandmother's unshakable belief in a God. Then a mysterious man bent on revenge tramps into her town of Red River.

For Cassie Beaumont, it's meeting her perfect match. Cassie, at 33, wants a husband and kids, and so far, nothing's worked. Not blind dates, not the Internet and certainly not leaving love to chance. What's left? A professional matchmaker. He's Simon Dodson, and he's very choosy about the clients he takes on. Cassie finds Simon a difficult, acerbic know-it-all, and she's astonished when he accepts her as a client.

Written with the wisdom and grace devoted readers have come to expect from the award-winning author of The Virgin of Small Plains, here is a brilliantly moving tale of family, murder, and redemptive love.

Last month I was a single preschool teacher whose greatest thrill consisted of color-coding my lesson plans. That was before I learned I was a slayer. Now it's up to me to face curse-hurling imps, vengeful demons, and any other supernatural uglies that crop up. And to top it off, a hunk of a shape-shifting griffin has invited me to Greece to meet his family.

New York, 1910: A city of extravagant balls in Fifth Avenue mansions and poor immigrants crammed into crumbling Lower East Side tenements. A city where the suffrage movement is growing stronger every day, and Vera Garland is set on making her mark in a man’s world of serious journalism. Shortly after the world-famous Hope Diamond is acquired for a record sum, Vera begins investigating rumors about schemes by its new owner, jeweler Pierre Cartier, to manipulate its value. Vera is determined to find the truth behind the notorious diamond and its legendary curses.

Based on extensive research and access to Alcott's journals and correspondence, Cheever chronicles all aspects of Alcott's life, beginning with the fateful meeting of her parents to her death, just two days after that of her dynamic and domineering father, Bronson. Cheever examines Alcott's role as a woman, a working writer, and a daughter at a time when Alcott's rejection of marriage in favor of independence - a decision to be no man's "little woman" - was seen as defying conventional wisdom.

Finally available as an audiobook, Joyce Carol Oates' lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide. Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: She was one of the original scientists who developed the drug.

Do your kids think that clean, folded clothes magically appear in their drawers? Do they roll their eyes when you suggest they clean the bathroom? Do you think it's your job to pave their road to success? As parents, so often we hover, race in to save, and do everything we can for our kids - unintentionally reinforcing their belief that the world revolves around them. When Kay Wyma realized that an attitude of entitlement had crept into her home, this mother of five got some attitude of her own.

Susannah, a young widow and single mother, has remarried well: to Max, a charismatic artist and popular speaker whose career took her and her 15-year-old son out of New York City and to a quiet Vermont university town. Strong-willed and attractive, Susannah expects her life is perfectly in place again. Then one quiet morning, she finds a note on her door: "I Know Who You Are." Max dismisses the note as a prank. But days after a neighborhood couple comes to dinner, the husband mysteriously dies in a tragic accident while on a run with Max. Soon, a second note appears on their door....

What is math? And how exactly does it work? In How to Bake Pi, math professor Eugenia Cheng provides an accessible introduction to the logic of mathematics - sprinkled throughout with recipes for everything from crispy duck to cornbread - that illustrates to the general listener the beauty of math.