Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in Women's Fiction

Sidney and Ida Whipple are living the suburban 1950s American dream, complete with two children and a white picket fence, which didn’t seem possible when they first met at the height of WWII in France. Reveling in the present, they can almost convince themselves that their past is behind them. But when their neighbors show off a newly purchased Man Ray photograph, Ida comes face-to-face with the person she loved and lost in the war: Arlette.

Joy Okafor is overwhelmed. Recently divorced, a life coach whose phone won’t stop ringing, and ever the dutiful Nigerian daughter, Joy has planned every aspect of her mother’s seventieth birthday weekend on her own. As the Okafors slowly begin to arrive, Mama Mary goes to take a nap. But when the grandkids go to wake her, they find that she isn’t sleeping after all. Refusing to believe that her sister is gone-gone, Auntie Nancy declares that she has had a premonition that Mama Mary will rise again like Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.

Two years after the death of their mother, Jada and Maddy Battle both navigate unplanned pregnancies. Jada, a thirty-one-year-old psychology PhD student living in Pittsburgh, quietly obtains an abortion without telling her husband, but the secret causes turmoil in her already shaky marriage. Back home in rural Pennsylvania, nineteen-year-old Maddy, who spends her time caring for birds at a wildlife rehabilitation center, is paid off by the man who got her pregnant to get an abortion. But an unsettling visit to a crisis pregnancy center adds to her doubts about whether to go through with it.

For generations, the Olivares women have sought to control their daughters’ destinies, starting with their names. In life, Olvido constantly clashed with her carefree daughter. Then teenage Angustias discovered she was pregnant and left her mother’s home in search of her own. Ten years later, Felicitas finally meets her estranged grandmother and is terribly disappointed when Olvido is nothing like a grandmother should be. She is strict, cold, and…dead. Now, Olvido is convinced the only way her spirit will cross over is if she resolves her unfinished business.

Vega Gopalan is adrift. Still reeling from the death of her sister years earlier, she leaves South India to attend graduate school at Columbia University. In New York, Vega straddles many different worlds, eventually moving in and out of a series of relationships that take her through the striving world of academia, the intellectual isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and, ultimately, the loneliness of single motherhood. But it is the birth of Vega’s daughter that forces the novel’s central question: What does it mean to make a home?

In Dancing with Butterflies, Reyna Grande renders the Mexican immigrant experience in “lyrical and sensual” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) prose through the poignant stories of four women brought together through folklorico dance.

When wealthy, impulsive summer girl Margot meets hardworking and steady local girl Thea in the summer of 1967, the unlikely pair become fast friends, working alongside one another in a record store and spending every spare moment together. But after an unspeakable incident on one devastating August night, they don’t see one another for ten years…until Margot suddenly reappears in Thea’s life, begging for help and harboring more than one dangerous secret. Thea can’t bring herself to refuse her beloved friend—but she also knows she can’t fully trust her either.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, the picturesque mountain village of Poshkarbal is home to lush cherry and apple orchards and a thriving community—one divided by a patrolled border. Aisha and her mother Noorjahan live on the outskirts—two women alone in a world dominated by men. As the village midwife, Noorjahan teaches Aisha how to heal using local herbs and remedies. Isolated but content, Aisha is shocked when Noorjahan decides it is time for her to attend the village school as few girls do.