Showing results by narrator "Bernadette Dunne" in All Categories

Ardis Cameron mines extensive interviews, fan letters, and archival materials including contemporary cartoons and cover images from film posters and foreign editions to tell how the story of a patricide in a small New England village circulated over time and became a cultural phenomenon.

For All the Obvious Reasons is Lynn Stegner's superb collection of nine remarkably distinct tales of passion, clear-eyed wisdom, and honesty honed to a cutting edge. These are stories the listener can't shake: A woman living a marital shadow life realizes that her long compensating heart has begun to ominously decompensate. An affluent New Yorker becomes a hoarder to escape a future he cannot bear to take up. A baby dies in a miasma of sibling resentments, and from that the secrets of culpability unravel.

Having recently lost both her parents in a tragic car accident, Alex Woods is shocked to discover through the family lawyer that her beloved mother was keeping a secret: a baby she gave up for adoption when she had just left high school. Fresh out of graduate school and back in the suburbs of Boston where she grew up, Alex is already overwhelmed trying to figure out what to do with the family home and finding a job. But when, at last, she decides to search for her long-lost sister - and finds her - Alex is in for a terrible surprise....

From the critically acclaimed best-selling author of Bee Season comes a travelogue through the magical and historic city of Prague, a city of vast beauty and wonderfully intimate detail. In Time's Magpie, Myla Goldberg uses her eye for the wonder of tiny objects and everyday things to put us in touch with the essence of this haunting and fantastical place. Goldberg takes us through the city's historic streets, some eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002.

Frances Barnett and Abby Bernacki are two haunted young mothers living in the same house in two different centuries. In 1885, Frances Barnett is in the Northampton Lunatic Hospital, telling her story to a visitor. She has come to distrust her own memories and believes that her pregnancy, birth, and early days of motherhood may have impaired her sanity.

Martha "Marty" Nickerson, a Cape Cod district attorney turned defense lawyer, must defend a man who shot his son's presumed killer on live television. The only possible defense is insanity, but the grieving father refuses to say he was crazy when he pulled the trigger. In a seemingly unrelated case, a battered woman is held for the murder of her spouse, and all evidence points to her as the murderess.

Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, but for the deeply religious Mary, farming is at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher.

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial Black poet LeRoi Jones.

After President Woodrow Wilson suffered a paralyzing stroke in the fall of 1919, his wife, First Lady Edith Wilson, began to handle the day-to-day responsibilities of the chief executive. Mrs. Wilson had had little formal education and had only been married to President Wilson for four years, yet in the tenuous peace following the end of World War I, she dedicated herself to managing the office of the president, reading all correspondence intended for her bedridden husband.

Marlene Marcoli made the mistake of falling in love and almost lost her life. Hoping to put her abusive marriage behind her, Marlene moves to Wolf Creek, Pennsylvania. But danger follows her once again when her apartment is vandalized. To make matters worse, the sexy detective working the case is distracting her beyond reason.

Out of the mist and darkness they come, child-creatures of the night who prey upon the unsuspecting.

Late one rainy night, a young school teacher arrives outside her apartment building and spies a mysterious, naked boy at the edge of Central Park. Thinking him injured or lost, she approaches him, despite the chilling fear slowly enveloping her. He flees, luring the young woman into the darkest, densest part of the park. There, out of the fog-laden woods, four more children emerge, restless and wild-eyed.

The matriarch of a Long Island clan with a stubbornly suicidal son and a defiant, restless granddaughter, Esther has hired a Russian landscaper to watch over the family as well as the grounds of their secluded waterfront estate. But he has been watching Esther, too. And his love for her is growing wild enough to uproot them all.

America’s ever-expanding waistline—we see it, we hear about it, and we worry about it, but can anything be done about it? We know all the usual suspects: red meat, dairy, white flour, refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, a lack of exercise, too much television—the list goes on and on. It seems simple, right? Not really. There’s a lot more going on below the surface when it comes to what America is eating for dinner—and breakfast and lunch and in between.

Martha "Marty" Nickerson, an assistant district attorney on Cape Cod, speaks for victims of crime and their families and sees the system as a means for doing right. After she wins a murder case, a suspect is put behind bars. But soon another body turns up in disturbingly similar circumstances. Did Marty and her colleagues target the wrong man? Her supervisor refuses to reopen such a high-profile case. But Marty fears that the real killer will strike again.

In the early days of the fundamentalist revolution in Iran, a 17-year-old girl is arrested because of her brother's involvement with leftist politics. She is placed in a makeshift jail, a former bathhouse, in which other women are also being held captive.

By the end of the Civil War, nearly half a million slaves had taken refuge behind Union lines in what became known as "contraband camps". These were crowded, dangerous places, yet some 12 to 15 percent of the Confederacy's slave population took almost unimaginable risks to reach them, and they became the first places Northerners came to know former slaves en masse.

At the urgent request of Harry Madigan, Martha "Marty" Nickerson takes on the defense of Louisa Rawlins, a woman suspected of murdering her wealthy husband. Harry is Marty's law partner, her lover, and, coincidentally, Louisa Rawlins' ex-lover. Glamorous and charismatic, Louisa is the polar opposite of Marty. Though the evidence against Louisa is compelling, Marty's gut tells her that something doesn't quite fit. Yet, as the trial progresses, Marty begins to doubt her own judgment.

Still Water Saints chronicles a momentous year in the life of Agua Mansa, a largely Latino town beyond the fringes of Los Angeles. Agua Mansa is home to the Botanica Oshun, where people come seeking charms, herbs, candles, and above all, the guidance of the shop's owner, Perla Portillo. Perla has served the community for years, arming her clients with the tools to overcome all manner of crises, large and small.

Sydney Simone, herself a type of casualty, is dedicated to helping those whose wrongs can't be righted by orthodox means. Via a cloaked website and identity, she first verifies the client's story and then accepts payment: half up front, half on completion of her work. Usually it's a form of human pest control.

Living in exile, Lilah is in love with Antinoes, a Persian warrior. They have known each other since they were children, and Antinoes dearly wants to make Lilah his wife. Yet Lilah does not feel she can marry without the blessing of her brother, Ezra. She and Ezra are close, and Lilah knows her brother well - he does not want his sister to have a husband outside their faith.