Showing results by narrator "Jacques Roy" in All Categories

Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer's A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives.

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.

A romantic comedy about high school, heartbreak, and having all the answers. What if the secrets of dating and love were revealed in one simple formula? That’s the tantalizing proposition high school senior Shane Chambliss offers the hopeless and hapless guys who come to him for relationship advice.

Thirteen-year-old Jack Buckles is great at finding things. Not just a missing glove or the other sock but things normal people have long given up on ever seeing again. If only he could find his father, who has disappeared in London without a trace. But Jack's father was not who he claimed to be. It turns out that he was a member of a secret society of detectives that has served the crown for centuries - and membership into the Lost Property Office is Jack's inheritance.

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.

A groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class - its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.

Don DeLillo's seventh novel is an exotic thriller. Set mostly in Greece, it concerns a mysterious 'language cult' seemingly behind a number of unexplained murders. Obsessed by news of this ritualistic violence, an American risk analyst is drawn to search for an explanation. We follow his progress on an obsessive journey that begins to take over his life and the lives of those closest to him.

From its glitzy heyday in the 1980s through to the 2000s, American publishing empire Condé Nast and its magazines—including Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and GQ—defined how to live the good life, with its editors and writers creating a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped cultural and consumer trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world over.

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....

Ever since his girlfriend ended things, Thomas’s life has been on a downward spiral. A gifted medical student, he has spent his entire adulthood struggling to escape the legacy of his father, an esteemed psychiatrist who used him as a test subject when he was a boy. Thomas lived his entire childhood watched over by researchers lurking behind one-way glass. But now the tables have turned. Thomas is the researcher, and he’s convinced an experiment he has concocted will cure three homeless men of their delusional claims. Then the experiment careens out of control....

Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band midtour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest....

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In this remarkable novel of menace and mystery, 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. And still they remain untouched, 'players' indifferent to the violence that surrounds them - and that they have helped to create.

When Billy Twillig, a genius adolescent, wins the first Nobel Prize ever to be given in mathematics, he is recruited to live and work in the company of 30 Nobel laureates in obscurity underground. There, away from the rest of the world, this panel of estranged, demented and lovable scientists work together on a secret scientific project: deciphering a mysterious transmission received from outer space, from just near Ratner's Star.

Jack and Gwen are framed for the theft of a historic crown jewel - the Black Prince's Ruby, one of three cursed rubies said to bring knowledge, loyalty, and the command of nations to whomever wields them all. Now they must retrieve the other jewels before the true thief does or risk unleashing a reign of terror unlike anything history's ever seen.

When Billy Twillig, a genius adolescent, wins the first Nobel Prize ever to be given in mathematics, he is recruited to live and work in the company of 30 Nobel laureates in obscurity underground. There, away from the rest of the world, this panel of estranged, demented and lovable scientists work together on a secret scientific project: deciphering a mysterious transmission received from outer space, from just near Ratner's Star.

The envelope is unremarkable. There is no return address. It contains a single folded sheet of white paper. The envelope drops through the mail slot like any other piece of post. But for the nine complete strangers who receive it—each of them recognising just one name, their own, on the enclosed list—it will be the most life altering letter they ever receive. It could also be the last, as one by one, they start to meet their end.

Here is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a 'forever virus,' destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly.

Richard and Lisa have decided to sell the treasured summer home and retire to Florida. Before they do, the family will spend one last weekend at the lake. But what should to be a joyous farewell takes a nightmarish turn when the family witnesses a tragedy that triggers a series of dramatic revelations among the Starlings - alcoholism, infidelity, pregnancy, and a secret the parents have kept from their sons for over thirty years. As the weekend unfolds, relationships fray, bonds are tested, and the Starlings are forced to reckon with who they are and what they want from this life.

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.

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.