Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Literary Fiction

Sixteen-year-old Anne is an uneducated serving girl at the Penny Pot tavern when she first meets the commanding Benjamin Franklin. The time she spends with the brilliant young printer teases her curious mind, and the money he provides keeps her family from starving. But the ambitious Franklin is committed to someone else, a proper but infatuated woman named Deborah Read who becomes his common-law wife.

Mt. Shasta is far from the San Francisco sidewalk on which Harlan Donnally’s life nearly ended in a crossfire - But all too close to a decades - old secret that will force him into another. The former detective swore he’d never play anyone’s postman. But a dying friend’s plea takes Donnally bearing a letter alive with tragedy toward a sister long dead - the victim of the bizarre criminality of a counterculture that had lost its way. Stunned to learn that her killer was never prosecuted, Donnally soon finds himself in battle against a broken justice system....

In Switzerland, a brutally efficient hit squad storms the U.S. embassy, stealing classified files and leaving no witnesses alive. Under intense political pressure to find those behind the attack - with Congressional leaders demanding military action - the CIA turns to the deadliest agent they know: Scorpion. But Scorpion is unwilling to get involved...until he learns his name is at the top of one of the stolen lists.

The New York Times best-selling author of the much-beloved The Saving Graces is back with a warm, winning new novel about daring to love, braving a loss, and learning to live a little.

Will Connor returns to his hometown, a village north of Boston, to care for his injured mother. He’s kept his distance from the town since high school, but once home he finds himself reexamining a horrific incident that took place during one of his mother’s "spirit circles". His mother had embraced the hippie generation’s fascination with New Age and the arcane, but the unexpected death of a close friend put an end to the meetings of the modern-day coven. Or did it?

Wanderlust has taken Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson on numerous adventures, from Mississippi to Washington D.C., Vietnam, London and eventually to Africa, to the fictitious Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, where the young musician hopes to “find himself.” But this small sliver of a country in West Africa, recently freed from British colonial rule, is thrown into turmoil with the discovery of cobanium—a radioactive mineral 500 times more powerful than uranium, making it irresistible for greedy speculators, grifters, and charlatans.

Fifteen years ago, seventeen-year-old Vanessa Moran fell in love and lost her virginity, but not to the same boy. Pregnant, desperate, and humiliated, she fled friends and family and Whisper Beach, New Jersey, never breathing a word about her secret to anyone. Now a professional Manhattan organizer, she returns to the funeral of her best friend's husband. She intends on just paying her respects and leaving—though she can't deny she also wants the town to see how far she's come as a successful business woman. But her plans to make this a short visit fall by the wayside.

For 15 years August Sitwell has worked for the Barclays, a well-to-do White family who plucked him from an orphan asylum and gave him a job. The groundskeeper is part of the household’s all-Black staff, along with “Miss Mamie”, the talented cook, pretty new maid Jennie Williams, and three young kitchen apprentices - the latest orphan boys Mr. Barclay has taken in to "civilize" boys like August.

Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark. The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors.

From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats.

Tras dejar a su esposo infiel, Britt-Marie encuentra trabajo como encargada en el casi clausurado centro cívico de Borg, un abandonado y ruinoso pueblo del que lo único bueno que puede decirse es que tiene una carretera. Esta quisquillosa mujer se verá envuelta en la vida de sus nuevos vecinos, un grupo de malhechores, borrachos y holgazanes que le demostrarán que la vida va más allá de tener un cajón de los cubiertos ordenado.

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.

Set in the waning years of the Cold War, a stunning debut novel about a trio of young Armenians that moves from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Southern California, and at its center, one of the most tragic cataclysms in twentieth-century history - the Armenian Genocide - whose traumatic reverberations will have unexpected consequences on all three lives.

She was a longtime lover of JFK. She was the ex-wife of a CIA chief. She was the sister-in-law of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee. She believed in mind expansion and took LSD with Timothy Leary. She was a painter, a socialite, and a Bohemian in Georgetown during the Cold War. And she ended up dead in an unsolved murder a year after JFK’s assassination. The diary she kept was never found. Until now...

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly 500 stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap.

June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report that an aviator from Idaho witnessed nine pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any aircraft built by humankind. Days later, a desperate Chicago pool hustler, inspired by the news, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream search for a possible extraterrestrial sign. From those he inspires along the way to the Cascades comes a new community - “The Seekers” - devoted to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the past.

When Eliza Poinsett left the elegant world of Charleston for college, she never expected it would take her 10 years to return. Now almost a decade later, she is an art historian in London with a charming Etonian boyfriend who adores her. But the past catches up with her when she runs into Henry, her childhood love, at a wedding in the English countryside.

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.

Una novela de estreno muy divertida y que puede resonar a los lectores de Eleanor Oliphant buenísima: la historia de un hombre al que se le ofrece una segunda oportunidad de vida y amor cuando desarrolla una amistad inesperada: si es capaz de contar la mentira blanca que dijo hace años y que ya se ha convertido algo mucho más complejo.

Over the course of the 20th century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic - as dramatic as Puccini’s legendary opera, Tosca - will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world...until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts.