Showing results by narrator "Ruth Ann Phimister" in All Categories

Everyone has keys to Susan's New York apartment: all her friends, and friends of friends. So one afternoon, when Alice unlocks Susan's door to water the plants, she isn't surprised to find two men sitting in the living room. That they are both dead is a shock, however.

An acclaimed biographer, Lauren Kessler immerses herself in her work to construct compelling portraits of her subjects. In Dancing with Rose, she recounts her time at a West Coast Alzheimer's facility. Working as an unskilled resident assistant, Kessler learns important lessons about humanity while conducting interviews with patients in various stages of the disease.

As foreclosure fragments her family, five-year-old Mildred and her three siblings find refuge with her grandparents enjoying a modest retirement. When the "little heathens" flush the seniors and their child-rearing skills out of retirement, the grandparents deploy tough but loving bedtime schedules, Bible and prayer routines, and plenty of character-building chores. Having no electricity or indoor plumbing and with little heat or money on the farm, Mildred learns to find joy in the priceless blessings of life.

Anne George’s novels offer a delightful mix of gentle comedy and compelling mystery. Murder Runs in the Family finds two feisty 60-something sisters doing a little amateur sleuthing into the death of a visiting genealogist. Mary Alice has spared no expense for her daughter’s wedding. Two days after the glittering affair, Mary Alice and Patricia Anne are spending a fascinating lunch listening to the groom’s cousin explain the ’dog-eat-dog" world of professional genealogy.

To save her brother Stefan’s life, Marisia and her family must leave their home in Poland and sail to America, where they have heard people are free to do as they choose and the streets are paved with gold. After a rough ocean passage to the New World, Marisia and Stefan must face the harsh reality of immigrant life in New York, searching for work and struggling to find a safe place to live. But Marisia has bigger dreams for herself - and a fiery spirit to help her make those dreams come true!

Jane Smiley brings her extraordinary gifts, comic timing, empathy, emotional wisdom, an ability to deliver slyly on big themes and capture the American spirit, to the seductive, wishful, wistful world of real estate, in which the sport of choice is the mind game. Her funny and moving new novel is about what happens when the American Dream morphs into a seven-figure American Fantasy.

Janet Allen provides an inside look at some of the problems faced by teenagers in the classroom from the viewpoint of a teacher. This practical "how-to" audiobook will appeal to teachers, parents, and anyone else concerned about indifferent or hostile students. The author enters the teaching profession with plans for sharing her love of literature with her high school English class. The first day shatters her dreams. Instead of having a roomful of students eager to learn, she is faced with teenagers who not only never read Shakespeare, they never read anything.

This collection of short poems from Newbery Award-winning author Paul Fleischman delightfully celebrates the essence of birds. The companion to Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, its poems feature two voices speaking sometimes together and sometimes in turn. Experience the magic and magnificence of the immortal phoenix. Enjoy the fluttering elation of finches at dawn and the swiftness of swallows at dusk. And empathize with the loneliness of the pigeon in the Cincinnati Zoo.

The Southern sisters have just returned from a trip to Europe, but they barely have time to get over jet lag before they are involved in another mystery. An anguished cousin has lost his wife to a snake-handling preacher, and when the sisters travel to a remote mountain settlement to find her, they discover a corpse instead. An award-winning novelist and poet, Anne George has entertained millions of fans with her Agatha Award-winning mysteries.

Captured by the Comanches at the age of nine, Helen dreams of escape for more than fourteen years yet, when the time comes to choose freedom she discovers no choice exists as she has become absorbed in the Comanche culture.

Award-winning author Helen Frost takes us into the breathtaking Alaskan winter landscape in this thrilling adventure with a touch of fantasy. Twelve-year-old Willow - whose heritage is both Athabascan Indian and European - wants nothing more than to mush the sled dogs to her grandparents’ home. After pressing her parents for some time, she is finally allowed to go alone. But when she commits a critical mistake, Willow wonders how she’ll ever make things right again.

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Teresa humbly accepted it on behalf of the poorest of the poor to whom she joyfully dedicated her life. Truly a saint for the 20th century, she taught compassion not only for the sick and destitute, but also for the lonely, neglected, and unappreciated who surround us every day.

Deeply affected by a teenaged affair with a man nearly three times her age, Marcy Bunkleman subtly shapes the lives of everyone she meets. As she and the people closest to her tell their stories, an incredible picture emerges of secrets and lies, of knowledge and ignorance, and gradually of people longing to recapture those moments of effortless goodness in their lives. As Huddle gently strips away the layers of stories we tell ourselves and others, we find the strengths and weaknesses of people like ourselves.

When a best-selling novelist begins writing an allegory of her troubled son's life, she soon wonders how much control she has over her creation. Angela Hunt, best-selling, Christy Award-winning author of more than 70 books, fills The Novelist with suspense and spiritual dilemmas. Through alternating narratives, it achieves additional drama.

The beloved American Girl History Mysteries features intrepid girls faced with intriguing situations. The author of this installment, Kathryn Reiss, has received the ALA Best Book for Young Adults Award. In Riddle of the Prairie Bride, it's 1878 and Ida Deming and her papa are looking forward to meeting his mail-order bride. But is this woman really who she claims to be?

A Long Way Home is the story of two outcasts searching for a place to call their own. After seven years in prison, Duncan Malone returns to Washita, Texas desperately wanting to reclaim his family’s farm. But it is now owned by Franki Taylor, a young unmarried woman who is six months pregnant. In the eyes of the townspeople, they are both suspicious and untrustworthy. So when Duncan starts working for Franki, a storm of gossip threatens to destroy the two of them.

Clyde Edgerton’s ear for regional voices and his eye for life’s small but significant details enable him to create characters who are charming and utterly convincing. Beginning with an engagement announcement and ending with the birth of a son, Raney is a snapshot of the first few years of a modern Southern marriage. Newly married, Raney is a Southern Baptist who has lived her whole life in her tiny home town. Her husband, Charles, is a newcomer, a liberal raised in Atlanta.

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was 20 and he was 40. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.

In 1992, Marilyn French was told she had one year to live. A smoker of 48 years she was diagnosed as having cancer of the oesophagus, a cancer which is almost always fatal. Five years on, having battled with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, a heart attack and her back breaking, she is very much alive. And - astonishingly - her body shows no sign of cancer.

In Murder Gets a Life, middle-aged sisters Mary Alice and Patricia Ann are sleuthing their way through a mystery that is hotter than Alabama in August. Mary Alice’s son has married Sunshine, a petite blond who is cute as a button. Her family, however, lives in a junk-filled trailer compound dotted with rusty engines and pit bulls. When Mary Alice and Patricia Ann pay a call on the family, the sisters hardly have time to meet Sunshine’s spirit-channeling grandmother before they stumble over a large corpse on her floor. The local sheriff just can’t seem to get moving in the summer heat.