Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Psychological

A man who married young, and so never had the chance to sow his wild oats, suddenly breaks out when in his mid-30s - and becomes convinced he has stumbled on the secret of happiness.

Cordelia Miller, an endearing, young misfit in a scholarly, cultured family, loves junk food, TV, and the son of the local grocer. Her attempt to escape her stifling background and find her way in the world takes her on a classic journey from innocence to experience. She encounters a varied cast of characters--some comic, some calamitous--and in the end discovers her true vocation.

Tom McCann, a professor of sociology, and his young assistant, Roger, infiltrate a religious cult group based in New York State, deciding it will make excellent study material. But they find it hard to maintain their deception, especially as Verena, the cult's leader, is an attractive woman.

A chance encounter on a train leads painter Christine Ward to wonder whether Orin Pierce, her beloved college friend, believed dead for two decades, may actually be alive. As she begins to track down the man she believes he might be, she finds herself in the grip of a troubling past she thought she had come to terms with. In her search through the tangles of truth and illusion, memory and dream, she questions her roles as lover, mother, artist, and mourner of the dead.

Rosie Mortimer, celebrity gardener with a successful TV show, has a pleasantly uneventful life with her undemanding beau. Her gay son and his partner live nearby. When her estranged daughter Susannah, product of a fractured family, returns to Rosie's Connecticut town with her husband, a former priest, to open a restaurant, the tense relationships among these three build to a near-tragedy.

Dorrie Gilbert, a potter who lives alone, is completely unprepared for motherhood when her oddball, overweight, and orphaned nephew Hugo comes to live with her, demanding to know the truth about his parents and horrified that she doesn't own a television so he can watch the soap opera he's devoted to. As Dorrie and Hugo attempt to work things out, each learns some hard and surprising, but deeply satisfying, truths about real life.

For two first-class years, Joan Freeley had it all: the perfect family, the best art dealer in Manhattan, and the admiration of famous friends. Her adoring husband and two handsome sons attended her first gallery show in matching khakis and blue blazers. "An Interesting Talent Makes Its Debut," declared the New York Times. Then, as if her success were nothing more than a booking error, Joan's life got downgraded. A brutal divorce led to paintings too bitter to sell and a career stuck firmly in coach.

Nine-year-old Janine Stearns and her parents stop at a convenience store to buy ice cream. Moments later, a masked gunman walks in and robs the store, shooting the clerk and kidnapping Janine. What begins as a seemingly random act of violence quickly becomes a world of dark interconnections and horrifying possibilities. Nothing is as it appears. It is left to Ross Stearns, Janine's uncle and guardian, to rescue Janine and end the nightmare of senseless violence.

Andrea Benito’s Sorry For Murdering You is a delirious collection of schizophrenic essays on love, life, time, creative destruction, political theory, Martin Heidegger, getting a job in the modern workplace, concerts, digital technology, Darwinism social justice, and so on. The 18 essays included here often edge on narcissistic psychobabble but still, every sentence seems to be pregnant with shocking new insights into what it means to be a human being.

Two corporate opponents: One, Steve Dern, becomes CEO; the other, Geoff Mann, ends up on the street, where his taste for extreme sports and a chance encounter with a desperate young prostitute show him that murder delivers the best rush of all. Then, Geoff thrusts Steve into a dangerous game with Steve's wife, Lisa, as the prize. To save her, Steve must find a way to make Geoff feel pain. To experience fear. He must scare a man who has just discovered how much he likes to kill.

Volk is Piers Anthony's serious novel of World War II and forbidden love, featuring a romance between a Nazi SS officer and his American friend’s fiancée, a pacifist Quaker lady. Politically incorrect, it covers some hard truths. Not all Nazis were evil, and the allies also kept death camps. The author was in Europe as a child, deported in 1940, and raised as a Quaker, so has some basis to address the subjects.

For Max Schreiber, World War II was an idyll. It is the return home to Connecticut that feels like entering a combat zone. Ridiculed by his wife and daughter, bored by his legal practice, Schreiber spends his evenings drinking and eating alone, hoping that when he goes to sleep he will dream of France and Micheline, the beautiful young woman who may have broken his heart but at least made him feel alive.

Pursuing literary glory, Edward Gunther gives up his job as a copywriter, sells everything he owns, and moves with his wife and three children from Chicago to Venice. But success does not come as quickly or as painlessly as Edward had hoped. During his first month in Italy, he struggles to get his essays published, argues with his wife about the family finances, and embarks on an unsteady affair with Nina Callahan, an American poet who insists on keeping him at arm's length.

Fred Wursup has an enviable existence. Paid to travel around the world "harvesting the annual crop of stars and villains", he has a beautiful geophysicist girlfriend and a friendly relationship with his ex-wife Susannah, whose living room he can see into from the roof of his Lexington Avenue apartment. His latest book, a collective portrait of brilliant but flawed leaders called Down the American Drain, had the good fortune to be published at the height of the Watergate scandal, sending it to the top of the best seller lists.

Carol spends the majority of her vagrant days socializing with her homeless neighbors, arguing with a testy social worker, and wandering the streets with Alphonse, a wayward South African wino and self-professed actor. Alphonse proves to be an inspiring force, and soon Carol is weaning herself off antidepressants as the sifting of her memories - mostly of her upbringing by two aunts in Massachusetts - creates a chance for redemption.

In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg - the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp.

Faithless is a work of experimental fiction weaving through various scenes and memories of being in love, out of love, and abused by love as told and experienced by Grace, a troubled 20-something-year-old struggling with her identity as a bisexual Korean-American. Everything is recounted as experienced - in fragments.

Oliver Vice, 41, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of Queen Mary 2. Troubled by his friend’s possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas’ new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history.

All Owen Patterson wants is an normal life, a happy marriage, and a stable family. But following the brutal and random murder of his brother-in-law, that dream is shattered. A year later, his wife is still in mourning and his in-laws won't talk about anything but their dead son. The murderer, Henry Joseph Raven, has been put in prison, but as far as Owen is concerned, prison isn’t punishment enough. He embarks on a quest to "balance the scales of justice," writing letters to Henry Raven under the pseudonym Lily Hazelton.

On a June night in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, Marit Deym prowls her land, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the van from the Dangerfield Zoo. When it finally comes - hours late - five wolves leap out onto the sprawling wildlife refuge Marit has created. And then one night, the wolves bring a stranger to her door. A poetry instructor at a school for the blind, Gabriel Frankman lives in self-imposed exile after the death of the girl he loved. He visits her grave every weekend. He carries sunflower seeds in his backpack and his friends are the birds.