Showing results by narrator "Julia Whelan" in All Categories

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past: the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletics coach, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online, Bodie prefers-needs-to let sleeping dogs lie.

At the age of 29, Hannah Martin still has no idea what she wants to do with her life. She has lived in six different cities and held countless meaningless jobs since graduating college. On the heels of leaving yet another city, Hannah moves back to her hometown of Los Angeles and takes up residence in her best friend Gabby’s guestroom. Shortly after getting back to town, Hannah goes out to a bar one night with her friend Gabby and meets up with her high school boyfriend, Ethan.

Cassie Forrest has sworn she'll never let the world get the best of her again. She's chosen to believe everything will be all right. But on a journey filled with heartbreak and madness and zombies, Cassie and her friends must struggle to stay alive - and it's hard to believe in a future when survival seems unlikely.

Joanna and Leo seem to have the perfect relationship. Two adorable children, a beautiful house in a chic area of Connecticut - they have the kind of life people envy. Then Piper moves to town. Piper is young, attractive, flirtatious. It’s almost no wonder Leo is tempted away. Devastated, Joanna starts digging into Piper’s past and discovers some very disturbing secrets - not least that Piper’s previous two husbands ended up dead. But Piper dismisses Joanna’s fears for her family as paranoia. Who is telling the truth?

Angela’s reset bought us a new chance, but with the event set to repeat itself, can she and Vaughn save their comrades? In Houston, Director Randal McCree races against the clock as he frantically struggles to save a scrabbled-together team. The survivors will have to join forces if Angela is to enact her plan to take the battle to the enemy.

Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do? Just how well can you ever know the person you love? These are the questions that Nick Dunne must ask himself on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they aren't his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine—she’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s alone for the first time in her life, can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere...but at the age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™. Soon she’s taking up ‘sadness hobbies’ and getting back out there, sex-wise, oversharing in the group chat and drinking with her high-intensity new divorced friend Amy.

As kids, Emily and Chess were inseparable, but their bond has been strained by the demands of their adult lives. So when Chess suggests a girls trip to Italy, Emily jumps at the chance to reconnect with her best friend. Villa Aestas in Orvieto is breath-taking, but it has a dark past: in 1974 it was rented by a notorious rockstar, who was joined by up-and-coming musician Pierce Sheldon and his girlfriend, Mari. By the end of the holiday Pierce is dead, and Mari goes on to write one of the greatest horror novels of all time.

It seems like just another morning. Around the world, people wake up, check the news, open the front door. On every doorstop is a box. Inside that box is the exact number of years that person has left to live. Whether they open it or hide it under their bed, each person must learn to live in this new world: a couple who thought they didn’t have to rush their life together, a doctor who cannot save himself from his own fate, best friends whose dreams are forever entwined, and a politician whose box becomes the powder keg that ultimately changes everything…

Elizabeth Farr never wanted to return to America. During her family’s vacation abroad, she has fallen in love with England, and is despondent when her father refuses to let her stay. Returning to New York means having her debut into society, and that means a swiftly arranged marriage. Elizabeth will never go to college, never learn to be a reporter - as she sees it, her life is over as soon as the Titanic reaches port. Of course, if she’s unlucky, her life will be over far sooner than that.

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets.

Dr Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter’s research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways. From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, this story follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world.

Peter watched his new family drive away, certain it was the last time he'd ever see them. But sometimes plans go awry in the best way. Now, the plan is to get back to them. But sometimes plans go awry in the worst way. Sometimes the only plan is to believe it will be all right, even when it's almost impossible to believe.

This classic tale is a fantastical fable of two dear friends - one of whom goes astray and is literally lost to the north woods, while the other undertakes an epic journey to rescue him. This charming, strange, and wonderful story is a timeless allegory about growing up and the challenges of staying true to one's self, and it served as the wintry inspiration for the blockbuster hit Frozen.

Cassie Forrest could almost believe life at Kingdom Come Farm is perfect, with Adrian and her friends at her side and spring on the way. The spring thaw also means millions of defrosting zombies, however, and if the past year has taught her anything, it's that life in this new world is highly imperfect. When Safe Zones throughout the country begin to disappear and the zombies at the fences grow in number, Cassie clings to the hope that if she has the people she loves most, it will be all right.

The Edgar-winning short story from the author of Gone Girl. A young woman is making a living, faking it as a cut-price psychic working at Spiritual Palms (with some illegal soft-core sex work on the side). She makes a decent wage - mostly by telling people what they want to hear. But then she meets Susan Burke. Susan moved to the city one year ago with her husband and 15-year-old stepson, Miles. They live in a Victorian house called Carterhook Manor, built in 1893.

It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? Our narrator has many of the advantages of life: young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, she lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend.

The Storys are the envy of their neighbours: owners of the largest property on their East Coast island, they are rich, beautiful and close. Until it all falls apart. The four children are suddenly dropped by their mother with a single sentence: you know what you did. They never hear from her again. Years later, when 18-year-old cousins Aubrey, Milly and Jonah Story receive a mysterious invitation to spend the summer at their grandmother's resort, they have no choice but to follow their curiosity and meet the woman who's been such an enigma their entire lives.

In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beautiful mother.

You can spot the girls who will have it easy. I don't even have to describe them for you. You can spot the girls who will get by on smarts. You can spot the girls who will get by because they're tough, or athletic. And then there's me. A deeply moving portrait of a girl in a world that owes her nothing, and has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together. A story you won't be able to look away from.