Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Family Life

A fourteenth wedding anniversary is nothing to sneeze at, Elliott Banner knows, but it's not exactly a landmark year, like fifteen or twenty, when he'll take his wife, Laura, to Paris. But when a headache on the drive home from their anniversary date, two days before Christmas, turns out to be more than a migraine, he wishes he had celebrated every year as though it were their last.

A tale of family and friendship, tragedy and triumph, loss and love, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder features the warmth, humor, soul, and wonder that have made Wells one of today's most cherished writers, and gives us an unforgettable new heroine to treasure.

When four-year-old Teensy Whitman prisses one time too many and stuffs a big old pecan up her nose, she sets off the chain of events that lead Vivi, Teensy, Caro, and Necie to become true sister-friends. Ya-Yas in Bloom shows us the Ya-Yas in love and at war with convention.

After her recent divorce, the last thing Diane "Andy" Calhoun wants is another relationship. But then she meets Tom Dabney, a strong and sensitive man who focuses on protecting the wilderness. Andy can't help falling in love with this committed environmentalist who lives alone in the woods. Their passionate affair inspires Andy, as does Tom's battle to stop the building of a nuclear arms plant, but as time marches on, she must decide whether to spend her life with the man she has come to love.

At 24, Gordon McKenna thinks he's already heard the worst news of his life when he learns that his sister Georgia is fatally ill. Then Georgia and her husband die in a car accident, leaving behind their baby daughter, Keefer. Gordon and his parents are able to survive their sorrow only by devoting themselves to the care of the beloved one-year-old.

Anny Butler is a caretaker, a nurturer, first for her own brothers and sisters, and then as a director of an agency devoted to the welfare of children. What she has never had is a real family. That changes when she meets and marries Lewis Aiken, an exuberant surgeon 15 years older than Anny. When they marry, she finds her family: not a traditional one, but a group of Charleston childhood friends who are inseparable, who are one another's surrogate family. They are called the Scrubs.

Caroline "Caro" Venable has everything her Southern heritage promised: money, prestige, a rich husband. So what if she drinks a little too much and has a less-than-perfect marriage? She's doing what she was born to do: be the chatelaine of a magnificent home and hostess to her husband's wealthy friends and clients.

The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. One day on the beach, Frank McKotch is struck by an image he cannot forget: his 13-year-old daughter, Gwen, strangely infantile in her child-sized bikini, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin Charlotte. At that moment, he knows a truth that he can never again unknow: something is terribly wrong with his only daughter.

At 12, Peyton McKenzie isn't ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone Nora, her redheaded, cigarette-smoking cousin who just rolled into town behind the wheel of a pink Thunderbird. But her father seems to like Nora, and she does make for good conversation with her friends at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which means she can't be all bad. In fact, maybe Nora is just what quiet Lytton, Georgia, needs this summer.

At 12, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic. And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season.

Molly Bell Redwine was raised to believe that nothing is more important than "The Family". But everything Molly values is challenged when her domineering mother dies, her husband leaves her for a younger woman, and her Atlanta family scatters to the four winds. She takes refuge by visiting friends in Martha's Vineyard, a very different world that hastens her changing identity.

Adventure and calamity strike when a model wife and mother takes an uncharacteristic risk. She joins her daughter and sister for a roadtrip along the San Andreas Fault, just as a major earthquake hits. The quake causes extensive damage and strands the women for days. Best-selling novelist Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Downtown and Colony, charts this remarkable trip that forever transforms these three strong women and their relationships to one another.

When they posed for a photo at their high school graduation, they vowed they'd be friends forever, but teenage promises are so easily broken, and now, thirty years later, they're practically strangers. Cici—stuck in a rut, married to a cheating husband. Genie—caring for her ailing father but never getting any thanks. Kate—everyone knows people who look perfect on Instagram are not. And Laurie—the most successful of them all—now tragically gone. So, to celebrate Laurie's life, three former friends in a 1962 red Lincoln Continental convertible take the road trip of their lives.

Charlotte McGanley knows happiness. Just ask anyone who's read Perfect Happiness, her best-selling book about how she, a busy mother and professor, used her no-nonsense positive psychology research to brighten her own life. She always pictured her career beginning and ending in the halls of academia, but now she's become a bit of a self-help guru. No one is more surprised by this than Charlotte herself, who has secretly never been more miserable.

Elise Armstrong, Carmen Bradshaw, and DeeDee Davis meet in a yoga class. Though vastly different, these women discover they all have one thing in common: their mothers have recently passed away. Becoming fast friends, the trio makes a pact to help each other sort through the belongings their mothers’ left behind. But when they find old letters and diaries, Elise, Carmen, and DeeDee are astonished to learn that each of their mothers hid secrets - secrets that will transform their own lives.

In the 15 years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer's in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

Her mommy meltdown is seen around the world! When Quinn Barrett’s son refuses to wear his hand-crafted costume to the Little Wonders Preschool Happy Halloween Parade and Dance Party she loses it - complete with stomping, screaming, and costume-destruction galore. Not her best day. And caught on viral video. Yep, “Halloween Mom” is now internet famous. The posting culprit: tattooed, blue-haired, west-coast transplant Daisy McGulch, out of place in the posh New England town and unable to blend with the other perfect mommies of Little Wonders Preschool.

Alexis Gold knows how to put the "work" in working mom. It's the "mom" part that she's been struggling with lately. Since opening her own advertising agency three years ago, Alexis has all but given up on finding a good work/life balance. Instead, she's handed over the household reins to her supportive, loving partner, Tommy. While he's quick to say they divide and conquer, Alexis knows that Tommy does most of the heavy lifting - especially when it comes to their teenage daughter, CeCe. Their world changes in an instant when Tommy receives a terminal cancer diagnosis.

Sylvie Snow knows the pressures of expectations: a woman is supposed to work hard, but never be tired; age gracefully, but always be beautiful; fix the family problems, but always be carefree. Sylvie does the grocery shopping, the laundry, the scheduling, the schlepping, and the PTA-ing, while planning her son’s Bar Mitzvah and cheerfully tending her husband, Paul, who’s been lying on the sofa with a broken ankle.

Francie Meeker and Vi Carothers were sold a bill of goods: Find a man, marry him in a white wedding gown, and live happily ever after. These best friends never expected to be on the train to Reno, those “lies in white dresses” shattered, their marriages over. On board the train, they meet June Samples, who is fleeing an abusive husband with her daughter, and take the vulnerable young mother under their wing. The three decide to wait out the required six weeks together, and then they can toss their wedding bands into the Truckee River and start new lives as divorcees.