Showing results by narrator "Suzanne Toren" in All Categories

The elusive lover of Do Not Find Me returns to tell her side of the story in The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard. From her hapless childhood under Nazi occupation to her life as a woman of letters in present-day New York City, Corrine remains scrappy and wise. As a schoolgirl in Paris, she goes her own way, disinterested in most friendships, intensely drawn to the heroines she finds in literature and daring in the favors she is willing to trade with boys. When she is 17, she travels to America to visit her godmother and meets Charles Bernard.

He watches the women from the shadows. He has an understanding with them: as long as they follow his rules, they are safe. But when they sin, he sentences them to death. A woman is found dead in a cemetery, strangled and covered in plastic. Just a few days before her death, the victim had received a flower, an unintelligible note, and a photograph of herself. Detective Inspector Irene Huss and her colleagues on the Violent Crimes Unit in Goteborg, Sweden, have neither clue nor motive to pursue, and when similar murders follow, their search for the killer becomes increasingly desperate.

In the cold winter months that followed Franklin Roosevelt's election in November 1940 to an unprecedented third term in the White House, he confronted a worldwide military and moral catastrophe. Almost all the European democracies had fallen under the ruthless onslaught of the Nazi army and air force. Great Britain stood alone, a fragile bastion between Germany and American immersion in war. In the Pacific world, Japan had extended its tentacles deeper into China. Susan Dunn dramatically brings to life the most vital and transformational period of Roosevelt's presidency.

Old Babushka, known throughout all of Moskva for her beautifully painted eggs, is preparing her eggs for the Easter Festival when she takes in an injured goose. She names the goose Rechenka, and they live happily together until one day when Rechenka accidentally overturns a basket, breaking all of Babushka's lovingly crafted eggs.

When Mary Ellen gets bored with her reading, Grandpa knows a hunt for a bee tree is just what she needs. Half the town joins the exciting chase, but it's not until everyone returns home that Mary Ellen makes a discovery of her own. Sometimes, even the sweetest of things must be worked for.

From the birth of our nation to the recent crushing defeat of the first female presidential candidate, this book highlights women's impact on United States politics and government. It documents the fight for women's right to vote, drawing on historic research, biographies of leaders, and such original sources as documents, posters, ads, and buttons. It presents this often-forgotten struggle in an accessible, conversational, relevant manner for a wide audience.

The daughter of a Torah scholar in eighteenth-century Ukraine, Gittel has always accepted her place in a family steeped in religion. Married at age twelve to a cold and reclusive rabbi, the young bride gives birth to two sons destined to follow their father's path. Finding very little comfort in family life, Gittel shares her dreams, visions, and a close spiritual understanding with her only confidant: her father-in-law, the Maggid of Mezeritch.

Operation Protective Edge, launched in early July 2014, was the third major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in six years. It was also the most deadly. By the conclusion of hostilities some seven weeks later, 2,200 of Gaza's population had been killed, and more than 10,000 injured. In this book, journalist Mohammed Omer, a resident of Gaza who lived through the terror of those days with his wife and then three-month-old son, provides a first-hand account of life on-the-ground during Israel's assault.

This exquisitely imagined novel opens as William rescues Caroline from a life of drudgery in Germany and brings her to England and a world of music making and stargazing. Lina, as Caroline is known, serves as William's assistant and the captain of his exhilaratingly busy household. William is generous, wise, and charismatic, an obsessive genius whom Lina adores and serves with the fervency of a beloved wife. When William suddenly announces that he will be married, Lina watches her world collapse.

It's May, and the snow has hardly melted in Goteborg, Sweden, but things are heating up quickly for Detective Inspector Irene Huss. The staff of the Violent Crimes Unit is stretched thin, with everyone on edge as they race to solve two murders amid the city's ongoing gang violence. Soon Irene and her colleagues are on a hunt that pulls them into the world of anonymous online predators.

By 2050, nearly 115 million people in the world will have Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia. But when our memories fade, what do we become - a shadow of our old selves or somebody new? After losing her grandmother to Alzheimer's, writer Anu Silfverberg travels to see the future of dementia care. In the Netherlands, a new kind of care home lets patients live in their own pasts. Here, you'll find gated gardens and a pub for the demented along with a stylized class system designed by a team of consultants.

As Vanessa watches her aged parents fade, her daughter prepare for childbirth and her much older husband, Asher, struggle in the throes of open-heart surgery, she dreams of reversing time and becoming young again. With her best years as an actress behind her, she's discovering that beginnings are easy, but endings are hard. Could her fountain of youth fantasies be fulfilled on zipless.com, a site inspired by her best friend Isadora Wing's fantasy of encounters with no consequences?

Movies like American Sniper and The Hurt Locker hint at the inner scars our soldiers incur during service in a war zone. The moral dimensions of their psychological injuries - guilt, shame, feeling responsible for doing wrong or being wronged - elude conventional treatment. Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman turns her focus to these moral injuries in Afterwar.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish historian Zosa Szajkowski gathered up tens of thousands of documents from Nazi buildings in Berlin and, later, public archives and private synagogues in France and moved them all, illicitly, to New York. In The Archive Thief, Lisa Moses Leff reconstructs Szajkowski's story in all its ambiguity. Born into poverty in Russian Poland, Szajkowski first made his name in Paris as a communist journalist.

Anne and Alexis grow up together in the Montmartre area of Paris. While she is utterly besotted with him, he sees her merely as a friend's little sister. After World War II begins, the two must part when their families flee France to avoid the German occupation. But when they say good-bye, Alexis vows always to protect Anne.

It's the summer of 1944 in Door County, Wisconsin, where even the lush cherry orchards and green lakeside farms can't escape the ravages of war. With food rationed and money scarce, the Christiansen family struggles to hold on. The family's teenage daughter, Kate, raises rabbits to save money for college while her mother, Charlotte, barters what she can to make ends meet.

Fred and Lorraine Stone met at the famous Woodstock music festival in upstate New York. And as all couples must, they grew up - just not in the same direction. Now in their 40s, Fred has become Frederick, a sell-out accountant whose last vestige of his free-wheeling years is a vegetarian diet. Meanwhile, Lorraine, who now goes by the name Chandra (Sanskrit for changeable), has morphed into a psychology teacher and animal rights activist.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, and - fixed deeply in the collective consciousness - hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free.

Age is the narrative of Rupert and Gemma's lives: their similarities, their differences, and the ways in which the two are irreversibly entwined. Each writes of life's mundane events - social outings, errands, a quiet night at home - that assume wistful meaning when viewed through the lens of memory.