Showing results by publisher "Hachette Audio" in Literary Fiction

Once a free spirit who refused to be tied down, Anna is a 40-something single mother trying to put her life together after a bitter divorce. She crosses paths with a 20-year-old neighbor who could not be more wrong for her - and her life suddenly has a new focus. She is drawn to his youth, his easy grace, and his freedom from the constraints that rule her existence. Though she resists temptation in every way she can, Anna is soon engaged in a reckless and obsessive affair. The consequences are life changing.

A powerful drama of prejudice and lost innocence, indomitable courage, and the secret corners of a child's heart, Out of the Night that Covers Me is a testament to Pat Cunningham Devoto's extraordinary talent.

After her husband's tragic death, Leigh Kelly arrives on Whidbey Island determined to start over. Yet the tiny town of Chimney Rock is not as peaceful as it seems. Women have been disappearing, and Leigh can't shake the feeling that she's being watched . . . especially at night. Soon, she's experiencing visions she can't explain and fighting her attraction to a handsome stranger who seems to know her most intimate desires.

Thirteen-year-old Natalie Gallagher is trying to escape: from her parents' ugly divorce, and from the vicious cyber-bullying of her former best friend. Adrift, confused, she is a girl trying to find her way in a world that seems to either neglect or despise her. Her salvation arrives in an unlikely form: Bridget O'Connell, an Irish maid working for a wealthy Boston family. The catch? Bridget lives only in the pages of a dusty old 1920s diary Natalie unearthed in her mother's basement.

Nicknamed after the gas mask he and his fellow soldiers will wear as they fight in the Persian Gulf War, Aardvark is a tactical jet crewman headed for combat in this dark comedy. He recounts the days before he is called to fight and the carrier's progress toward its destination in blistering prose. The war is really happening on TV, and everyone on the ship is tuned to CNN. Aardvark wanders the ship with video camera in hand, filming the rule-bound officers, musclehead bunkmates, and porn entrepreneurs in an attempt to tune out reality. But as the ship nears its destination, he is forced to face his growing fears and sense of alienation.

Willie Shakespeare Greenberg is not living up to his name. It's 1986, and instead of finishing his thesis on the Bard, this grad student is saying "yes" to drugs, bedding coeds, and delivering a giant psychedelic mushroom to a mysterious collector. Meanwhile (or rather, back in 1582), would-be playwright William Shakespeare is an 18-year-old Latin teacher whose world is turned upside down when a stranger entrusts him with a sacred relic from Rome.

Forty-five-year-old Donna Koczynski is an ex-punk rocker, a recovering alcoholic, and the mother of two teenagers whose suburban existence detonates when she comes home early from a sales conference in Las Vegas to the surprise of a lifetime. As her world implodes, she sets off on an epic road trip to reclaim everything she believes she's sacrificed since her wild youth: Great friendship, passionate love, and her art. But as she careens across the US from Detroit to New York to Memphis to Nashville, nothing turns out as she imagines.

The beguiling fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She is used to flying under the radar-a sidekick, a third wheel, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent. Luckily, she has a best friend, a similarly undiscovered girl with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed, and character is forged.

Willa's darkness enters Hesper's light late one night in Brooklyn. Theirs is a whirlwind romance until Willa starts to know Hesper too well, to crawl into her hidden spaces, and Hesper shuts her out. She runs, following her fractured family back to her grandfather's hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia, looking for the origin story that he is no longer able to tell. But once in Tbilisi, cracks appear in her grandfather's history - and a massive flood is heading toward Georgia, threatening any hope for repair.

One frigid winter night, Mia and Michael Slate's comfortable world dissolves in an instant when they discover their best friend has cheated them out of their life savings. At the same time, a few doors down, their teenaged son passes out in the snow at a party - a mistake whose consequences will shatter not just their family, but an entire community.

Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand in Montana, has recently lost his mother, leaving him an orphan. His bank account holds less than $100, and he owes back taxes on what remains of the land his parents owned, as well as money for the surgeries that failed to save his mother's life. An unexpected deliverance arrives in the form of seven-year-old Rowdy Burns, the mute and traumatized son of Wendell's incarcerated cousin. When Rowdy is put under his care, what begins as an ordeal for Wendell turns into a powerful bond as he comes to love the boy more than he ever thought possible.

Things have been going pretty badly for Theo Bernstein. An unfortunate accident at work has lost him his job (and his work involved a Very Very Large Hadron Collider, so he's unlikely to get it back). His wife has left him. And he doesn't have any money. Before Theo has time to fully appreciate the pointlessness of his own miserable existence, news arrives that his good friend, a renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, has died. By leaving the apparently worthless contents of his safety deposit box to Theo, however, the professor has set him on a quest of epic proportions.

A book of brilliant entertainments: 39 stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, "a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters" ( Time).

Deep in gambling debt, the celebrated Brazilian writer Beatriz Yagoda is last seen holding a suitcase and a cigar and climbing into an almond tree. She abruptly vanishes. In snowy Pittsburgh, her American translator, Emma, hears the news and, against the wishes of her boyfriend and Beatriz's two grown children, flies immediately to Brazil. There, in the sticky, sugary heat of Rio, Emma and her author's children conspire to solve the mystery of Yagoda's curious disappearance and staunch the colorful demands of her various outstanding affairs.

After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.

The dark secret Kayden has kept hidden for years is finally out. Worse, he's facing charges for battery. The only way to clear his name is for Callie to speak up-something he'll never ask her to do. Instead, he'll do whatever he must to protect her…even if it means letting go of the only girl he's ever loved. Callie knows Kayden is going back to his dark place and desperately wants to save him. But that means facing her greatest fear and admitting her own painful secrets aloud.

Whitney and Will are a perfect couple by all appearances, their relationship rock-solid and their engagement soon to be announced. Before their impending nuptials, however, Whitney suggests a lighthearted experiment: Why not give each other three romantic "free passes" before getting married? On what's meant to be the last night of a romantic Barcelona vacation, they agree to regale one another with details of these harmless trysts. They grin and bear it and fall asleep feeling mostly satisfied and relieved to be firmly together again. But then a volcano erupts overnight....