Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Women's Fiction

A Mouthful of Air is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of Julie Davis, a young wife and mother torn between the love she feels for her family and the voice in her head that insists they’d be better off without her. We meet Julie several weeks after her suicide attempt, on the eve of her son’s first birthday. Grateful to be alive, Julie tries her best to appreciate every moment — “this tree, that passing car, the pretzel guy up ahead on the corner. She has, for whatever reason, been given a second chance” — but her emotional demons are unrelenting.

On the eve of the First World War, sociology student Vandyck Jennings goes on an expedition with two of his friends to search for a society rumored to consist only of women. On the way to what they will name “Herland,” Van and his friends ponder the type of women they hope or expect to see when they get there … but they find no fantasies when they arrive. Herland is an all-female, community-driven utopia. Van and his friends are skeptical of a society that doesn’t even need men to procreate, but women and girls who live there have been raised in a world removed the patriarchy of the world.

Noora’s life is a little off track. She’s an aspiring writer and amateur blogger in New York―which is a nice way of saying that she tutors rich Upper East Side kids and is currently crashing on her sister’s couch. But that’s okay. Noora has Leila, who has always been her rock, and now she has another major influence to lean on: Vinyl magazine. The pages of Vinyl practically raised Noora, teaching her everything from how to properly insert a tampon to which political ideology she subscribes to.

Alice James has been a drifter her whole life, working her way through several foster homes before ending up in Wychwood-on-Lea, feeling anchorless and invisible. When a chance encounter leads to Alice accepting a position as a caretaker and companion to Lady Stokeley, she starts to feel as if she might finally be able to put down some roots and live the way other people do. Then, Lady Stokeley’s nephew, city banker Henry Trent, storms into Willoughby Manor, seeming to find fault with everything, including Alice.

An achingly beautiful work of historical fiction, Send for Me moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present-day Wisconsin, unspooling a thread of love, longing, and the powerful bonds of family.

Listeners will discover lost and forgotten women who wrote horror every bit as effectively as their male contemporaries. They will learn about their lives and careers, the challenges they faced as women working in a male-dominated field, the way they overcame those challenges, and the way they approached the genre - which was often subtler, more psychological, and more disturbing.

Set in Iran, this extraordinary debut novel takes listeners into the everyday lives of the Kurds. Leila dreams of making films to bring the suppressed stories of her people onto the global stage, but obstacles keep piling up. Leila's younger brother Chia, influenced by their father's past torture, imprisonment, and his deep-seated desire for justice, begins to engage with social and political affairs. But his activism grows increasingly risky and one day he disappears in Tehran. Seeking answers about her brother's whereabouts, Leila fears the worst and begins a campaign to save him.

She was a tiny little lamb who claimed my heart with one fearful look. I was her captor, the man responsible for breaking her, for preparing her for auction. She was taken, plucked right off the street, and brought to me to be sold at the next auction. Rescuing her from my men was never part of the deal, and neither was bringing her up to my room. Yet, night after night I did this, refusing to give up the way she made me feel. When I’m with her I feel less like a monster. I can remember the man I used to be before the mob got to me, before all the bad tainted my soul.

Thirty-six-year-old stay-at-home soccer mom Kate Burke is happily married to Matt Parsons, although their marriage looks very different behind closed doors. Kate is no longer interested in having sex with her husband. So, while they still love each other madly, they make an arrangement: Matt can have one-night stands with other women on work trips, but when he returns home, he has to tell Kate about them—every juicy detail.

Willy Cherrymill and his stepdaughter, Lacey, are deeply bruised by a past brimming with unanswered questions. It’s been 30 years since May DuBerry, Willy’s young wife and Lacey’s mother, abandoned them both, leaving Willy to raise Lacey alone. Lacey Cherrymill is smart, stubborn, and focused. She’s also single mother to a young daughter recently diagnosed with a devastating illness. The last thing she needs to think about right now is the betrayal that rocked her childhood. Reluctantly, she has returned to her rural beginnings, a former dairy farm in the Maryland countryside.

When Jennifer Smiley’s grandmother, Ginny, leaves her an old farmhouse on Edgewater Road in seemingly quiet Ross County, Ohio, Jennifer can’t pass up the opportunity for a new beginning. Almost immediately, she meets a group of men who generously help her move in. When she realizes that they work for Lincoln Bennett, her next-door neighbor, she’s intrigued. Lincoln is gorgeous and has dark lapis-blue eyes she could get lost in...but he doesn’t seem all that friendly. She’s torn between getting to know him and sticking with the solitude she knows so well.

In this novel about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian, Amy Belding Brown examines the emotional landscape of love and marriage. Living in the shadow of one of the most famous men of her time, Lidian becomes deeply disappointed by marriage, but consigned to public silence by social conventions and concern for her family’s reputation. Drawn to the erotic energy and intellect of close family friend Henry David Thoreau, she struggles to negotiate the confusing territory between love and friendship while maintaining her moral authority and inner strength.

Miriam Salisbury escapes to Oregon to avoid a boyfriend who won’t take no for an answer, killing her beloved cat to prove it. When her father sends Clay Browning to protect her, she’s certain he’s lost his mind. As far as she’s concerned, Clay’s experience is limited to posing for the camera, charming women, and making fun of her. He’s been teasing her since they were children, and she’s never gotten over the way he threw crawdads at her at church picnics.

I know my brother is dead. But sometimes Mama gets confused. There’s plenty about the grownup world that six-year-old Aoife doesn’t understand. Like what happened to her big brother Theo and why her mama is in the hospital instead of home where she belongs. Uncle Donny says she just needs to be patient, but Aoife’s sure her mama won’t be able to come home until Aoife learns what really happened to her brother. The trouble is no one wants to talk about Theo because he was murdered. But by whom?

Istanbul, 2001. Maya Duran is a single mother struggling to balance a demanding job at Istanbul University with the challenges of raising a teenage son. Her worries increase when she is tasked with looking after the enigmatic Maximilian Wagner, an elderly German-born Harvard professor visiting the city at the university’s invitation. Although he is distant at first, Maya gradually learns of the tragic circumstances that brought him to Istanbul 60 years before, and the dark realities that continue to haunt him.

In 1927, as Natalia Faber travels from Berlin to Prague with her mother, their train is delayed in Saxon Switzerland. In the brief time the train is idle, Natalia learns the truth about her father - who she believed died during her infancy - and meets a remarkable woman named Dr. Magdalena Schaeffer, whose family will become a significant part of her future. Shaken by these events, Natalia arrives at a spa on the shore of Lake Hevíz in Hungary. Here, she meets Count Miklós Andorján, a journalist and adventurer. The following year, they will marry.

When Maggie Bryan works up the nerve to tell her parents she’s pregnant, they immediately disown her. Later that night, her boyfriend is killed. In desperation, she turns to her brother, Sam. Against his wife’s wishes, Sam brings Maggie to his home in rural Pennsylvania. While Maggie awaits the birth of her child and navigates the tension in her new home, she decides to finish high school. There she meets Anne Phillips, a volunteer educator and full-time architect. Over time, Maggie becomes drawn to Anne in ways she doesn’t understand.

In the summer of 1932, Americans are coming to realize that the financial crash of 1929 was only the beginning of hard times. May Marshall has returned from Paris to settle at her family home in rural Keswick, Virginia. She struggles to keep her family farm and market afloat through the economic downturn. May finds herself juggling her marriage with a tempting opportunity to revamp the family business to adapt to changing times.

For the past twenty years, Lola Sheridan has worked tirelessly as a single mother to Audrey and a renowned journalist across the eastern seaboard. Now, she finds herself in a particularly strange and beautiful scenario. She’s fallen in love with the handsome Italian sailor, Tommy Gasbarro, and made a home with him on the Vineyard. But life circumstances are ever-shifting. And when Tommy pops a question Lola never imagined anyone would ask her, she is shocked.

After a blizzard roared across the island in February, Lola Sheridan was forced to postpone her wedding to Tommy Gasbarro, the handsome Italian sailor who stole her heart two summers back. Their June wedding approaches—and the Sheridan women have a surprise party up their sleeves, one that will shock all involved and make Lola question her allegiances.