Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

Midnight, June 13, 1942: Peter Burger stands on a foggy beach, ears primed as a submarine hull scrapes the sandy sea bottom. He has endured seventeen months in a Gestapo prison and seventeen days on a Nazi U-boat only to have landed on American shores with six boxes of explosives and no escape. After slipping into New York City, Peter finds himself at a massive military parade where he meets Grete Baum, a German-Jewish refugee grappling with loneliness and loss. Grete is drawn to Peter’s brooding vulnerability, and the pair instantly bond.

On the cusp of graduation, Cadence is finally feeling in control. She’s about to become one of the prestigious Elites working in the Hall of Love. Plus, she can take her place as a full member of the underground Sirens who meet secretly in Love City. She’ll finally be able to use her memory skills for good, instead of reporting people as a Watcher. But a dangerous trap is set, throwing Cadence into unwelcome and unfamiliar territory. Someone in the Collective remembers things that could very well get her killed. The Muse is by her side, after all, but will she be protected?

A young girl’s life is torn apart when her parents are killed in the NATO bombing of Belgrade, Serbia, during the 1999 Kosovo War. An embittered Katarina Petrovic grows up with a hatred for Americans and becomes a willing candidate for special training by Russian agents. Alex Baker commanded an Air Force Office of Special Investigations unit until an incident forced him to resign his military commission. Still in his thirties, he finds a new career as the owner of a Manhattan-based travel agency specializing in tour packages.

Caring for someone with dementia is challenging, especially when it comes time to think about other living arrangements. What do you need to know about dementia, including its different stages? Gerontologist and dementia care consultant Rachael Wonderlin has written a compassionate book to help friends and family members of those living with dementia answer the tough questions. In practical, down-to-earth language, The Caregiver's Guide to Memory Care and Dementia Communities walks the listener through key points about dementia care.

Mary Wishram is desperate to hang on to her few loved ones, a brother fighting in the South Pacific and Japanese friends in a relocation camp. Determined to end the war by any means necessary, she is willing to use her language skills as Yakama tribe member to become a spy and face any danger to bring them all home safe. John Painted Horse struggles with the loss of his father who died in WWI for a country that didn’t consider him a United States citizen, much less give him the right to vote. He is desperate to bring long overdue recognition and honor to his people, no matter the cost.

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. Among his effects is a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek the help of museum curator Brad Osgood to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it just another forgery? Brad Osgood’s four-year-old niece, Brynn, needs a safe home, and Brad longs to provide it. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, Castillo de San Marcos, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

Only last year, Fannie O’Brien was considered a beauty with a brain, and her future shone bright, despite the war in Europe. With her father’s sudden death and her brothers overseas, Fannie must now do the work of three men on their 200-acre farm—until eight German prisoners arrive and, just as Fannie feared, trouble comes too. Someone seems intent on causing “accidents,” and Fannie is certain the culprit is one of the two handsome older Germans—or possibly both. Can she manage the farm, keep the prisoners in line, and hold her family together through these turbulent times?

Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother in Istanbul, visit her father's grave, and study for the MCAT. Instead, she finds herself watching Turkish soap operas and self-diagnosing her own possible chronic illness with the four humors theory of ancient medicine. Also on Sibel's mind: her blond American boyfriend who accompanies her to Turkey; her energetic but distraught younger sister; and her devoted grandmother, who, Sibel comes to learn, carries a harrowing secret.

A mother is a dissident, a refusenik, and a prisoner in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her daughter, eleven years old, is left without a family. A grandmother is in the USA, waiting for her daughter and granddaughter and not knowing if she'll ever see them again. "I am fine," the three of them write to each other in their letters. How can you be "fine" when you have to fight to survive? When you must be silent? When the place that you love turns against you?

Ginny Mathis had no intention of staying rooted in the Outer Banks—then war broke out. While working as a clerk for Oregon Inlet ferry, naval officers ask her to be watchful for German U-boats reportedly spotted in the area. To help occupy her younger sister, Ginny enlists the Girl Scout troop she leads to help watch for suspicious activity. Soon the girls are sneaking around, hiding a shipwreck survivor. Ginny must take charge, but is this man the enemy, or does he hold secrets that could turn the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic in the allies' favor?

A successful historical mystery writer, Chloe Whitfield comes to Ca’ d’Zan to research her next novel. Chloe’s fascination with the circus is rooted in family stories of her great-grandmother Lucinda Conroy, who reportedly was a trapeze artist of some renown. She’s heard hints of scandal—and perhaps larceny, but no details. Chloe’s grandmother—rumored to be Lucinda’s only offspring—was raised in an orphanage and never knew her mother. Intrigued as she is, Chloe has no intent of writing about Lucinda until she sees a poster featuring Lucinda as the star performer in May of 1936.