Showing results by narrator "XE Sands" in All Categories

Three years after Rory Riordan foiled her own murder, she still trusts no one. Not Dr. Z, the eccentric college professor who has taken her under his wing, not Benji, the endearing, attractive classmate who insists on following her around, and certainly not Cy, the beautifully dark and mysterious boy who sits on the first row in Dr. Z’s Astrobiology class and asks far too many questions.

Hannah Stander is a consultant for the FBI - a futurist who helps the agency with cases that feature demonstrations of bleeding-edge technology. It's her job to help them identify unforeseen threats: hackers, AIs, genetic modification, anything that in the wrong hands could harm the homeland. Hannah is in an airport, waiting to board a flight home to see her family, when she receives a call from Agent Hollis Copper. "I've got a cabin full of over a thousand dead bodies," he tells her. Whether those bodies are all human, he doesn't say.

When a fire rips through her studio and burns the seven enormous paintings for her next exhibition, a young, no-name painter is left with an impossible task: re-create her art in just three months - or ruin her fledgling career. Thirty-four, single and homeless, she desperately secures a place at an exclusive upstate retreat. Brimming with creative history and set on a sparkling black lake, Pine City and its founders - a notorious collective of successful artists - is what she's idolised all her life. She's dreamt of the parties, the celebrities, the privilege.

A kid walks into your bookstore and...guess what? He's your son. The one you put up for adoption eighteen years ago. The one you never told anyone about. Surprise! And a huge surprise it is. It's a huge surprise to his adoptive mother, Monica, who thought she had a close relationship with Matthew, her nearly adult son. Until he secretly arranged a vacation to Cape Cod so he could meet his birth mother...without a word to her. It's also a surprise to Harlow, the woman who secretly placed him for adoption so many years ago.

Alone and on the run, betrayed at every turn, Jenna's path takes her from sun-drenched Key West to the alligator-infested Everglades, the streets of Miami, and the Caribbean islands. Along the way brutal criminals, deadly assassins, and the forces of nature conspire to end her life unless she can rise to embrace an impossible destiny and unleash her own lethal potential. Everything Jenna has been told about herself is a lie, and the truth is a secret that may destroy the world--or save it.

Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders - including Eve, who narrates the story - decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.

In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet's now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.

It's the summer of 1922, and 19-year-old Paulien Mertens finds herself in Paris - broke, disowned, and completely alone. Everyone in Belgium, including her own family, believes she stole millions in a sophisticated con game perpetrated by her then-fiance, George Everard. To protect herself from the law and the wrath of those who lost everything, she creates a new identity, a Frenchwoman named Vivienne Gregsby, and sets out to recover her father's art collection, prove her innocence - and exact revenge on George.

On the day of their estranged father's wedding, half-sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It's been years since the two have seen each other - Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle after a failed marriage and a series of dead ends, Livy works refinishing boats - but the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what's theirs. Except: instead of money, their father gives them information - a name - that reveals a stunning family secret. 

Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to listeners. Like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination to be both wife and mother, on the one hand, and teacher and writer on the other, Plath tried simultaneously to fulfill and to fight the conventions that bound women in the 1950s. In this biography, the first to draw on unpublished journals and letters recently made available, Wagner-Martin examines the ironies, contradictions, and achievements of Plath's life.

Dr. Jillian Byers only considered two careers: indie rock sensation or physician. Both dreams led her to Los Angeles. She never plotted a course that led back home. With her father's health declining, Jillian picks up her life and returns to Crystal, Maine. At first, it seems time has stood still in her hometown. It doesn't take long for Jillian to realize nothing is quite the way she remembers.

Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security.

Capucine Benoit works alongside her father to produce fans of rare feathers, beads, and intricate pleating for the haute couture fashion houses. But after the Germans invade Paris in June 1940, Capucine and her father must focus on mere survival - until they are betrayed to the secret police and arrested for his political beliefs. When Capucine saves herself from deportation to Auschwitz by highlighting her connections to Parisian design houses, she is sent to a little-known prison camp located in the heart of Paris, within the Lévitan department store.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

The Turners know in their hearts that they're anything but normal. Jenna is a high schooler dressed in black who is fascinated with breaking into her neighbors' homes, security systems be damned. Everett genuinely believes he loves his wife...he just loves having a continuing stream of mistresses more. JT is a genius kid with Asperger's who moves from one obsession to the next.

Instead of thinking about social justice as a process that starts with changing people's minds, Embodied Activism understands our bodies—how we feel in them and relate to others through them—as the sites of transformation.

Dr. Renee Caisson never expected that her scientific expertise would lead to a role playing interpreter between humans and the demonic-looking Neighbors. When the door between their worlds opened, she was drafted by the government to study the otherworldly beings and was able to prove her theory: the Neighbors had been to Earth before—and now they simply wanted to save their dying planet.

An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she’s a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall–until she’s summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death.

This version of the children's classic, read by Xe Sands, will delight listeners of all ages with its story of wisdom and boundless love.

Tomorrow night, just before you go to bed, creep into the kitchen very, very quietly. Go up to the fridge, and don't make a sound. Once you meet Chilly Billy and hear of his adventures inside the refrigerator, you'll never open the fridge door in quite the same way again. Chilly Billy is a fun and lovable character you won't soon forget.