Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Literary Fiction

Eva Jean Roberts, E.J., has come home to Cullen's Corner. Everyone, especially Gram, is wondering why. People born in Cullen's Corner tend, like Newton's First Law of Motion, to remain inert - to live, work, breathe, marry, and die right here in the Corner. Those who do leave tend to keep going, with no inclination to look back. E.J. belonged to the latter. And now she is back? After 18 years?

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.

Southland brings us a fascinating story of race, love, murder, and history, against the backdrop of an ever-changing Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four African-American boys were killed in the store Frank owned during the Watts Riots of 1965. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, Jackie tries to piece together the story of the boys' deaths.

Two auditors for the US egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night - an entire egg farm's worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland - a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits - assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.

What I wanted more than anything was to be standing beside Schmidt, in concert with Schmidt, at the foot of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss along with Schmidt, hands cupped to the sides of our faces, debating art, transcendence, and the glory of the apocalypse.” Former best friends who built their careers writing about a single work of art meet after a decades-long falling-out. One of them, called to the other’s deathbed for unknown reasons by a “relatively short” nine-page email, spends his flight to Berlin reflecting on Dutch Renaissance painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer.

A brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths. Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, both finding - or failing to find - their powers of recovery, Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.

Amy Stedman arrives in North Carolina to clear the family house of her grandmother's belongings and find clues to her unsolved murder. While she's there, Amy reflects on her own life. Married to a vain man who doesn't love her so much as value her family's lucrative legacy, Amy realizes their relationship strangely echoes her parents' unfortunate marriage. Within this old house, dark recollections of unnatural death permeate the air, adding a premonition of menace to Amy's increasingly troubled thoughts.

Richly complex, darkly comical, and irresistibly charming. Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist is one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, from one of literature's most esteemed craftsmen. Published serially between 1837 and 1839, it secured Dickens' reputation as a writer of exceptional skill and talent.

Born in 1917, Tennessee author Peter Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for this exceptional work of literature. The well-to-do Carver family moves to Memphis from Nashville, where they become embroiled in a domestic dispute over the widower patriarch's decision to remarry.

Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and with his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that's in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner's Dilemma is a story of the power of invalid experience.

In her most chilling challenge yet, Sienna St. James believes she has come face to face with the terrorist responsible for the carnage in her hometown. Taking him on as a client in her therapy practice may be the only way to prove to herself and authorities that her time-tested instincts are right. Complicating matters are her damaged dreams and broken heart and the need to finally confront the one person whose absence from her life changed everything.

As a child growing up in 1920s Paris, Ida Chagall copes with her father Marc Chagall's brilliant artistic mind and overbearing ego and the tight leash he keeps on her. But as Ida blossoms into a young woman, she begins to glimpse freedom and opportunities for herself.

Lily Bart, a beautiful, intelligent, but penniless young woman, lives on the outskirts of New York's high society, craving the luxurious lifestyle of her wealthy contacts. But while Lily possesses the grace, taste, and morality of the ideal turn-of-the-century lady, her delicate innocence threatens her survival in that very world. As she fights to maintain her newfound place among the aristocracy, Lily struggles mightily against what lurks beneath all the glitter and gold - greed, vulgarity, and ruthless competition.

Diane seems to have the perfect life. She is a wife, a mother, and the owner of Happy People Read and Drink Coffee, a cozy literary café in Paris. But when she suddenly loses her beloved husband and daughter in a tragic car accident, the world as she knows it instantly vanishes. Trapped and haunted by her memories, Diane retreats from friends and family, unable and unwilling to move forward.

CBA best-selling author Deeanne Gist, Christy Award winner for The Measure of a Lady, skillfully blends humor and romance in authentic historical settings. Courting Trouble, set in 1894, features a feisty, fun-loving heroine who tires of waiting for a match made in heaven and decides to settle for one made in Texas. So, on her 30th birthday, Essie launches her own secret mission to find a husband.

During the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest, a hobo vampire gang on drugs causes horrific chaos everywhere they go—from trashing supermarket breakrooms to crashing senior center pancake breakfasts. Amidst the danger one girl, who benefits (and suffers) from drug-induced ESP, searches desperately for her foster sister.

Architect Douglas Layton has lost everything. The balcony of one of his beautiful music halls collapsed during a packed performance, killing dozens. Layton knows the flaw was not in his design; someone else must have caused the dreadful catastrophe. But with no proof, Layton finds himself facing a five-year prison sentence. When he is finally freed, Layton starts over with a new name and identity, taking a job as a set painter. But as Layton begins to discover dead bodies hidden within theater halls across London, it soon becomes clear something darker is chasing him.

Rasselas and his companions escape the pleasures of the "happy valley" in order to make their "choice of life". By witnessing the misfortunes and miseries of others they come to understand the nature of happiness and value it more highly. Their travels and enquiries raise important practical and philosophical questions concerning many aspects of the human condition, including the business of a poet, the stability of reason, the immortality of the soul, and how to find contentment.

Rodeo cowboy Joe Willie Wolfchild, riding an explosive bull called See Four and moments away from becoming World Champion, suffers a devastating accident. His parents and grandparents use all their native wisdom to ease him out of his subsequent bitter depression, but without success. Meanwhile, in a distant city, a troubled young kid named Aiden plans a holdup that goes wrong and lands himself in jail.

Eleven-year-old Ellie Sanders is forced to grow up quickly when her pregnant mother develops health problems and her father's attentions become diverted by a teenage produce peddler. To escape, Ellie creates a secret world of her own, where life still seems normal.