Showing results by narrator "Caroline Shaffer" in All Categories

In a Russia where the Decembrists’ rebellion was successful and the Trans-Siberian railroad was completed before 1854, Sasha Trubetskaya wants nothing more than to have a decent debut ball in St. Petersburg. But her aunt’s feud with the emperor lands Sasha at university, where she becomes one of its first female students - an experiment, she suspects, designed more to prove female unsuitability for such pursuits than offer them education.

Gwendolyn Golden and Armand Leopold have been America's go-to couple for home decorating tips, letting the cameras into their So Perfect house, their So Perfect life, their So Perfect marriage. One problem: It's all an act. Actually, two problems: America just found out it's all an act. When a picture of Armand kissing another man hits the newsstands, everyone knows the jig is up. Both are evicted from their home and eviscerated by the press.

At first, Manhattan financial planner Melanie Banks adores Dan Swain, her pro-football player husband who has a sexy Oklahoma drawl to go with his athletic good looks. But then his career comes to a screeching halt, and he spends the next few years out of a job, seemingly unconcerned about it. Suddenly, she's the one bringing home the bacon and falling out of love with the paycheck-devouring, couch-sitting mooch. Divorce is the answer, she decides - only to learn she has to fork over alimony while he lives like a prince on her income, and she has to share custody of their precious dog.

Master short story writer Ellen Gilchrist, winner of the National Book Award, returns with her first story collection in over eight years. In Acts of God, she has crafted 10 different scenarios in which people dealing with forces beyond their control somehow manage to survive, persevere, and triumph, even if it is only a triumph of the will. For Marie James, a teenager from Fayetteville, Arkansas, the future changes when she joins a group of friends in their effort to find survivors among the debris left when a tornado destroys a neighboring town.

Former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is getting a little bored in Magpie, Montana, where she landed at a small local newspaper after being downsized from her job in Kabul. Then Judith Calf Looking, a local Blackfeet Indian girl missing for several months, turns up dead in a snowbank with a mysterious brand on her forearm. The sheriff - whose romantic relationship with Lola provides Magpie with its most delicious gossip in years - thinks Judith probably froze to death while hitchhiking back to the reservation from wherever she'd been.

Kimmer Reed is a Hunter Agency operative, a street foundling escaped from an abusive family and raised to be code-name Chimera - a fierce, savvy loner with a natural gift for reading people. Now on her first assignment with the one man she trusts - the one man she can't read - she finds herself overseas in the Basque countryside, framed for the theft of the very antiquity she has been sent to guard and doubting her ability to work with a partner at all - never mind the man she loves.

On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers.

It was in New York that he discovered Sarah. As Simon recovers from a professional disaster - and escapes Chicago for New York - he is drawn to the beautiful, exciting, and mysterious Sarah. Even though the forty-year-old Simon has a wife and child, he falls madly in love with Sarah. Devoting themselves with abandon to the pursuit of happiness, the lovers tour New York, Paris, Venice, and beyond. Their journey takes them deep within their emotions, and reveals dangerous secrets in Sarah’s past.

Thirteen authors (fifteen if you count pseudonyms) from the Book View Cafe got together one rainy Saturday afternoon with a big bowl of popcorn and reruns of Buck Rogers. They started comparing short stories and a new anthology took form. Rare reprints, hard-to-find favorites, and new tales all combine in this one-of-a-kind story collection, available exclusively from Book View Press.

Foreign correspondent Lola Wicks is livid. She's been downsized from her Kabul posting. Her editor reassigns her to a stateside suburban beat formerly the province of interns. When she arrives in Montana for some R&R at a friend's cabin, her friend is nowhere in sight. Anger turns to terror when Lola discovers her friend shot dead. She can't get out of Montana fast enough, until she finds that she can't get out at all.

Barcelona and Real Madrid: two of the most powerful and popular clubs in world football, and one of the world's most bitter sporting rivalries. Going far beyond the boundaries of just sport alone, this is a rivalry at the heart of Spanish life, taking in politics and culture and splitting a country in two. El Clasico gets to the heart of that rivalry, investigating the intrigue, the larger-than-life characters, the key flashpoints and their consequences.

Ballerina Lucia del Mar has two great passions: dance, which consumes most of her waking hours, and the Internet, which brings the outside world into her tightly regimented life. These two passions collide when a White House performance and reception leads to an encounter with handsome Moroccan businessman Rashid al-Jazari, creator of a brilliant technology that has set the Internet rumor mill ablaze.

Meeting handsome actor Byron Slater after winning a contest, Miranda Peterson enjoys the attention of the media and the glamour of Byron's world, until she stumbles on the private actor's deadly secrets.

We've all heard the saying "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Luckily, for Jack, this collection offers more than 20 stories filled with the art of sexual play at work to make even Jack more lively. Here the most mundane 9-to-5 job can lead to a rowdy romp that's sure to leave people talking by the water coolers.

Tess Dyer’s husband, Jason, promised to love her forever. That was eleven years ago, before the fights, before the pain, before the bitter divorce. Now he is just another in a long line of people who rejected Tess, from her coldly distant mother to the seemingly endless string of one-night stands from her youth whose names she can’t remember. Desperate to escape the pain of the past, Tess flees her small Maine hometown of Brookfield for the even smaller New Mills. There, she hopes to start over and forget what she left behind…with the help, perhaps, of her handsome new neighbor, Brian.

Forget the French perfume and the boxes of candy, the Hallmark cards and the gift certificates. The birthdays in this collection are observed in more carnal ways, with suitably sexy presents for all. In Simone Harlow's "Happy Birthday", a tough policewoman gets the tables turned when naked Nick arrives to tame her. In Marilyn Jaye Lewis's "The Birthday Party", an unexpected menage a trois in the dark proves the perfect gift.

In the wake of the financial crisis, investors are faced with a stark choice: entrust their hard-earned dollars to the Wall Street casino or settle for anemic interest rates on savings, bonds, and CDs. Meanwhile, small businesses are being starved for the credit and capital they need to grow. There's got to be a better way. In Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit from It, Amy Cortese takes us inside the local investing movement, where solutions to some of the nation's most pressing problems are taking shape.

This groundbreaking anthology presents 40 narratives, both nonfiction and fiction, that together capture the impact and complexity of Alzheimer’s and other dementias on patients, as well as their caregivers and family. Deeply personal, recounting the wrenching course of a disease that kills a loved one twice - first they forget who they are, and then the body succumbs - these stories also show how witnessing the disease and caring for someone with it can be powerfully transformative, calling forth amazing strength and grace.

Plus-sized Rachel Simon has settled into her life. But in a lifetime of not-quite fitting in and battling demon food issues, she has given up on finding love, despite the nagging of her close circle of friends. Now, Rachel has received some big news: a fashion blog, which she secretly wrote on the side, has caught the eye of a major fashion magazine, who not only want her to write a column, but are giving her an award at an upcoming banquet. The problem? She used Lisa’s picture on her bio and believes they expect a tall beautiful blonde to walk through the doors of the magazine.

Professor Emily Cavanaugh has left Windy Corner behind and is back at Bede College on her sabbatical, determined to finish writing her book on Dostoevsky. She is soon reunited with one of her promising students, Daniel Razumov, as well as familiar faces on the teaching staff - her friend, Marguerite Grenier; her half-brother, Oscar Lansing; the abrasive division chair, Richard McClintock; and the predatory Taylor Curzon, known for her relentless pursuit of young male students - and Taylor now has Daniel firmly in her sights.