Showing results by narrator "Laurence Bouvard" in All Categories

The year is 1880. Two hundred years after the trials in Salem, witches Adelaide Thom and Eleanor St Clair finally feel safe and have opened a tea shop in Manhattan, specialising in cures, palmistry and potions. When an enchanting young woman called Beatrice joins the witches as an apprentice, she soon proves indispensable, but her new life is marred by strange occurrences. She sees things no one else can see. She hears voices no one else can hear. Objects appear out of thin air, as if gifts from the dead.

From best-selling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed historical and contemporary commercial novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.

Brilliant scientist Rose Franklin has devoted her adult life to solving the mystery she accidentally stumbled upon as a child: a huge metal hand buried beneath the ground outside Deadwood, South Dakota. The discovery set in motion a cataclysmic chain of events with geopolitical ramifications. Rose and the Earth Defense Corps raced to master the enigmatic technology, as giant robots suddenly descended on Earth's most populous cities, killing one hundred million people in the process.

Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit.

Living with an emotionally absent partner can be overwhelming. Constantly overcoming the silent distance can leave you with the sense that the give and take in your relationship has disappeared. But even the most broken relationship can be reinvigorated. In helping real-world couples achieve fulfilling futures, Harvard University clinical psychologist Dr. Holly Parker has developed a program filled with practical exercises and powerful advice for individuals on both sides of an emotionally damaged relationship.

In Good Bones and Simple Murders, Margaret Atwood displays, in condensed and crystallized form, the trademark wit and virtuosity of her best-selling novels. Among the jewels gathered here are Gertrude offering Hamlet a piece of her mind, the real truth about the Little Red Hen, a reincarnated bat explaining how Bram Stoker got Dracula all wrong, and the five methods of making a man. There are parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fiction, reconfigured fairy tales, and other miniature masterpieces.

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era to the crossroads of its complex present.

When two murders happen in Chicago, a witch hunt ensues, and Kristin quickly finds herself at the centre. The problem is she isn't sure of what she did or didn't do. Armed with a life insurance payout, she runs away to Sweden to start her life over. But it's not that easy to escape the past. And whatever she's done, someone is on her tail, wanting her to pay.... The question is: could she be a killer and not even remember?

Lieutenant Lorraine Page once had everything - a devoted husband, two beautiful daughters and an impressive career with the Homicide Squad. It's impossible to believe that she could be thrown out of the police force and end up on Skid Row. Without Lorraine, her colleagues struggle on, as the hunt for a nightmare serial killer spirals into an all-out search for a missing witness: a victim who escaped. But Lorraine Page is about to be brought right back into that world again....

In Lionel Shriver's entertaining send-up of today's cult of exercise - which not only encourages better health, but now like all religions also seems to promise meaning, social superiority, and eternal life - an aging husband's sudden obsession with extreme sport makes him unbearable.

The sheikh's last challenge. Stepping off his private jet in his designer suit, Sheikh Asad returns to his kingdom ready to secure his legacy. For beneath the starched white shirt beats the heart of a desert warrior! Iris Carpenter barely recognizes the man standing before her. He's more magnificent than he was six years ago and even more dangerous. Especially when the searing heat of his eyes burns hotter than the fierce desert sun.

Who is JT LeBeau? A best-selling crime writer whose words have gripped the world. The only mystery greater than his stories is his true identity. One woman thinks she's found him - her husband has millions in the bank and a letter for the enigmatic author. But the truth is far more twisted.... 

Bitter life lessons have taught Crown Prince Maksim Yurkovich that duty must come before desire. His country needs an heir, so when he discovers his lover can't have children, he must sever their ties. Only Maks can't resist spending one last night in her bed. Now he faces the biggest diplomatic crisis of his life. Against all odds, Gillian Harris has become pregnant.

After Kim and her husband, Brian, decide to quit their jobs to travel around the world, they're given a yellow envelope containing a check and instructions to give the money away. There are only three rules for the envelope: don't overthink it, share your experiences, and don't feel pressured to give it all away. Through Ecuador, Peru, Nepal, and beyond, Kim and Brian face obstacles, including major challenges to their relationship.

David Moloney’s Barker House follows the story of nine unforgettable New Hampshire Correctional Officers over the course of one year on the job. While veteran guards get by on what they consider survival strategies - including sadistic power-mongering and obsessive voyeurism - two rookies, including the only female Officer on her shift, develop their own tactics for facing “the system”. 

Years ago, just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, 10 men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers - chosen male descendants of the original 10 - are allowed to cross to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires.

On a cold day in 1997, student Sara Morgan was killed in the woods surrounding her liberal-arts college in Upstate New York. Her boyfriend, Blake Campbell, confessed, his plea of temporary insanity raising more questions than it answered. In the wake of his acquittal, the case comes to haunt a strange and surprising network of community members, from the young woman who discovers Sara’s body to the junior reporter who senses its connection to convicted local serial killer John Logan. 

Cash is the puppy nobody wants - a pit-bull - a throwaway dog. A shivering wet bundle, Cash arrives in the life of twelve-year-old Mackenzie. And from that moment boy and dog share a love neither has ever known before. But when Cash is kicked out by Mackenzie’s father, she finds herself lost and alone in a cruel world. Will she ever find her boy again?

Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with Tami’s hometown of San Diego as their ultimate destination. But the two free spirits and avid sailors couldn’t anticipate that less than two weeks into their voyage, they would sail directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history. 

NASA's history is a familiar story, culminating with the agency successfully landing men on the moon in 1969. But NASA's prehistory is a rarely told tale, one that is largely absent from the popular space-age literature but that gives the context behind the incredible lunar program. America's space agency wasn't created in a vacuum; it was assembled from preexisting parts, drawing together some of the best minds the non-Soviet world had to offer.