Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Family Life

Set in Ireland in the 1990s, Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen’s adored brother, Declan, is dying. Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea, where the six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, must listen to and come to terms with one another.

Erica Ryan is flying home from London after a disastrous business trip. Free spirit Abby Hayes is flying into New York City to visit her mother before jetting off again. Both end up in Gander, Canada, when their flight is diverted because of 9/11. For ninety-six hours they share a rollercoaster of emotions and find themselves drawn to one another. Will their nascent connection survive everyday life when they return home?

Angie Righetti is the daughter of a sprawling but close-knit Italian American family. She's out and they're proud. Jillian Clark's family is the white bread to Angie's olive oil. Stoic and emotionally buttoned up, they don't want to think about Jillian's sexuality. It's 1988 when they move in together, on the brink of starting their careers. Like every couple at the start of their life together, they expect to live happily ever after. And for 23 years life happens.

When his father falls ill, Andrés, a professor of public health, returns to his suburban hometown to tend to his father's recovery. Reevaluating his rocky marriage in the wake of his husband’s infidelity and with little else to do, he decides to attend his 20-year high school reunion, where he runs into the long-lost characters of his youth.

As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.

All it took to destroy Andy Nocera's seemingly perfect life was an anonymous tryst at an Interstate rest area. Sentenced to probation and thrown out by his wife, he spends his week as a traveling salesman, and his weekends at his mother's house where no questions are asked - and no explanations are offered. To clear his record, the State of North Carolina requires Andy to complete one year of therapy without another arrest. He attends his sessions reluctantly at first, struggling to comprehend why he would risk everything.

From the critically acclaimed writer, Michael Thomas Ford, comes a highly anticipated first novel that follows the intertwining lives of three men, set against the backdrop of summer-time in the breezy coastal community of Provincetown.

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing. Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milk-stained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table.

Saying that Benjamin Sean Quinn had "anger issues" was an understatement. For those who knew him for the shortest amount of time, his life was in order: He was physically fit, had a great job which provided him a house in the suburbs and the material things he desired, a loving, monogamous relationship, two happy, healthy daughters and an established circle of friends. In all accounts, his life seemed perfect. But to those who knew him the longest, they knew he was an idle grenade, waiting for someone to pull the pin.

Leisa Yeats has always defined herself by the things that are important to her - a good family, a loving relationship, and a meaningful job working with kids. Life is good. But within a span of a few weeks, all of that changes. She’s always known she was adopted, but newly revealed lies and secrets kept by her parents make her question everything she thought she knew about her beginnings. Her 10-year relationship with her partner, Nan, is unexpectedly on shaky ground when she discovers that Nan, too, has kept a secret from her all these years.

Thomas McGurrin is a fourth-grade teacher and openly gay man at a private primary school serving Portland, Oregon's wealthy progressive elite when he is falsely accused of inappropriately touching a male student. The accusation comes just as Thomas is thrust back into the center of his unusual family by his younger brother's battle with cancer. Although cleared of the accusation, Thomas is forced to resign from a job he loves during a potentially life-changing family drama.

Blanche McCrary Boyd’s first novel in 20 years continues the story of her protagonist Ellen Burns. When Tomb of the Unknown Racist opens in 1999, Ellen - now sober, haunted by her activist past, her failed relationships - is taking care of her demented mother in South Carolina....

The world of this novel moves back in time as the layers are peeled away to reveal the truth about a long-ago family tragedy that impacts the characters' lives for years after. Beginning with a young college student haunted by her own choices and ending with the surprisingly serene image of an aging woman looking back on her turbulent life, the story encompasses a panorama of events set against the changing social backdrop of the middle years of the 20th century.

After twenty-three years of marriage to Zack Ronan - and after raising the widower's three kids - Chris finds himself facing an uncertain second act. Seeking refuge in North Carolina's Outer Banks, Chris has to come to terms with his own empty nest and challenge himself to move forward with a new relationship. This is a subtle depiction of the meaning of family and motherhood, and of the search for your true soul.

In The Boomerang Kid, Maura Ostryder is coming into her own, professionally and privately, as she begins her 51st year. Maura has always been the master of her own life and has reared her son, Kai (named for the Hawaiian word for sea) to be the same way. But now a grown Kai has come home, having fled emotional attachments to both a young man and a young woman, bringing with him his addiction to painkillers.

In The Beloved Son, one family must cope with life's ever-changing moments as two sons are faced with the issue of their aging parents. Karl Preston lives an ideal American life with his wife and daughter in an affluent North Carolina suburb. At his father's request, Karl travels to Florida for a weekend visit that starts a roller coaster of family drama and heartache. Not only does Karl have to deal with his gay brother Sven, who is the primary caretaker of their parents, he must also confront his mother's growing dementia.

In The Good Neighbor, Rory Fallon is walking his dog along the streets of the exclusive Venetian Vistas neighborhood when he notices activity at the house next door. New neighbors have arrived in the form of Austin and Meg Harden, along with their two children. Before long, the Hardens and Rory and his partner Bruno have formed a strange, sometimes symbiotic relationship, bringing up questions of love and marriage, trust and temptation.

Nora and Fern's relationship as mother and daughter is a tumble of love and distrust. To Nora, her daughter is an enigma - at the same time wonderful and unfindable. Fern sees her mother as treacherous - for busting up their family to move in with her lover, Jeanne. As their lives become complicated by the arrivals of a skateboarding boyfriend for Fern, a shadowy affair for Nora, a baby in need of a family, and by the failing health of Lucky, their beloved dog, this mother and daughter find their way onto a fresh footing with each other.

When a car accident leaves photographer Burke Crenshaw in need of temporary full-time care, he finds himself back in the one place no forty-year-old chooses to be--his childhood bedroom. There, in the Vermont home where he grew up, Burke begins the long process of recuperation, and watches as his widowed father finds happiness in a new relationship that's a constant reminder of everything Burke wants and lacks. Exploring local history, Burke discovers an intriguing series of letters from a Civil War soldier to his fianc.

In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the gay brother of Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family, and friends lived; from wealth and position in prerevolutionary Russia, to the halls of Cambridge University, and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey, our young gay narrator, that hook the reader.