Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in Family Life

1999: At the end of the millennium, the Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children than ever before. One evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of an unhoused stranger in the backyard with a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever. 1977: Newly married, Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her hardworking and often-absent husband.

During the turbulent months following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, 21-year-old Emi Kato, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat, is locked behind barbed wire in a Texas internment camp. She feels hopeless until she meets handsome young Christian Lange, whose German-born parents were wrongfully arrested for un-American activities. Together they live as prisoners with thousands of other German and Japanese families but discover that love can bloom in even the bleakest circumstances.

Gillian Weiss has a great job, a gorgeous husband, an adorable daughter, and a secret. On the outside, Gillian is a normal suburban mother until a website she develops takes off, giving her more money than she ever dreamed of, and her life starts falling apart. Suddenly, her husband's becoming distant, her daughter's acting spoiled, her father is dealing with early Alzheimer's, and her mother's barely dealing at all.

Stanford Solomon’s shocking, 30-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.

Cadence didn't sit down one night and decide that downing two bottles of wine was a brilliant idea. Her drinking snuck up on her - as a way to sleep, to help her relax after a long day, to relieve some of the stress of the painful divorce that's left her struggling to make ends meet with her five-year-old son Charlie. It wasn't always like this. Just a few years ago, Cadence seemed to have it all - a successful husband, an adorable son, and a promising career as a freelance journalist.

Emma Walsh has finally worked up the courage to confront her husband James about his drinking. But James never shows up to meet her as planned, and all her righteous words go unsaid. And unsaid they remain, because the next time Emma sees James, his body lies crumpled amidst the wreckage of his flashy car.

Juniper Baker had just graduated from high school and was deep in the throes of a summer romance when Cal and Beth Murphy, a childless couple who lived on a neighboring farm, were brutally murdered. When her younger brother became the prime suspect, June’s world collapsed. She left, promising never to return to tiny Jericho, Iowa. Until now. Officially, she’s back in town to help an ill friend. But really, she’s returned to repair her relationship with her teenage daughter, who’s been raised by Juniper’s mother and stepfather - and to solve the infamous Murphy murders.

Loni Murrow is an accomplished bird artist at the Smithsonian who loves her job. But when she receives a call from her younger brother summoning her back home to help their obstinate mother recover after an accident, Loni’s neat, contained life in Washington, DC, is thrown into chaos, and she finds herself exactly where she does not want to be. Going through her mother’s things, Loni uncovers scraps and snippets of a time in her life she would prefer to forget—a childhood marked by her father Boyd’s death by drowning.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was a 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.

Addie Downs and Valerie Adler will be best friends forever. That’s what Addie believes after Valerie moves across the street when they’re both nine years old. But in their teenage years, Val is swept into the popular crowd. Flash-forward 15 years. Addie Downs lives alone in her parents’ house, caring for a troubled brother and trying to meet Prince Charming on the Internet. she opens her door to find her long-gone best friend standing there, a terrified look on her face and blood on the sleeve of her coat.

Thirty-six-year-old Grace McAllister never longed for children. But when she meets Victor Hansen, a handsome, charismatic divorced restaurateur who is father to Max and Ava, Grace decides that, for the right man, she could learn to be an excellent part-time stepmom. After all, the kids live with their mother, Kelli. How hard could it be?

Following a once-in-a-lifetime invitation, a group of old college friends leap at the chance to bring their husbands for a week's vacation at a private villa in Jamaica to celebrate a former classmates' 35th birthday. All four women are desperate for a break and this seems like a perfect opportunity. Tina is drowning under the demands of mothering four young children. Allie needs to escape from the shattering news about an illness that runs in her family. Savannah is carrying the secret of her husband's infidelity.

Jules Strauss is a Princeton senior with a full scholarship, acquaintances instead of friends, and a family she's ashamed to invite to Parents' Weekend. With the income she'll receive from donating her "pedigree" eggs, she believes she can save her father from addiction.

As soon as Gail and Jon Durbin bring home their adopted baby Maya, she becomes the glue that mends their fractured marriage. But the Durbin’s social worker, Paige, can’t find the teenage birth mother to sign the consent forms. By law, Carli has seventy-two hours to change her mind. Without her signature, the adoption will unravel.

Growing up in the nineties in New York City as the only child of famous parents was both a blessing and a curse for Isabelle Manning. Her beautiful society hostess mother, Claire, and New York Times bestselling author father, Ward, were the city’s intellectual It couple. Ward’s glamorous obligations often took him away from Isabelle, but Claire made sure her childhood was always filled with magic and love. Now an adult, after many false starts and the unexpected death of her mother, she faces her upcoming thirty-fifth birthday alone and on the verge of a breakdown.

The story opens in the shadow of the new World Trade Center, on July 4, 1976, when students George and Anna meet on the weed- and wine-fueled night of the nation’s Bicentennial celebration. George, haunted by his upbringing, instantly falls for the sensual, magnetic Anna. Soon, they couple up, dropping acid, swapping music, exploring the city and each other. Yet their romance is short-lived, and they go their own ways.

Raised in a funeral home, Caroline Connors saw her mother miscarry when she was just a young girl and realized that she had a calling. Unlike her family, who guided souls on their way out, Caro chose to bring them in. As a doula, Caro spent years providing comfort and emotional support to women in labor. But when her best friend, Mary Grace, experiences complications, she makes a quick decision, taking the baby’s life into her hands as her lifelong friend passes away.

In the latest novel from the number-one New York Times best-selling author, four women bound by obligation and opportunity struggle to become a family. With startling tenderness and laugh-out-loud humor, Jennifer Weiner once again takes listeners into the heart of women's lives in an unforgettable, timely tale that interweaves themes of class and entitlement, surrogacy and donorship, the rights of a parent, and the measure of motherhood.

At 23, Ruth Saunders headed west with her 70-year-old grandma in tow, hoping to be hired as a television writer. Four years later, she's hit the jackpot when she gets "The Call": the sitcom she wrote, The Next Big Thing, has gotten the green light, and Ruthie's going to be the show-runner. But her dreams of Hollywood happiness are threatened by demanding actors, number-crunching executives, an unrequited crush on a boss, and her grandmother's impending nuptials.