Showing results by narrator "Christa Lewis" in All Categories

Growing up under Fascist censorship in Nazi Germany, Ruth Rappaport absorbed a forbidden community of ideas in banned books. After fleeing her home in Leipzig at fifteen and losing both parents to the Holocaust, Ruth drifted between vocations, relationships, and countries, searching for belonging and purpose. When she found her calling in librarianship, Ruth became not only a witness to history but an agent for change as well. This epic true story reveals a driven woman who survived persecution, political unrest, and personal trauma through a love of books....

Libbie Havens never fit in. She bought the old Carson place on Cub Creek and moved to the Virginia countryside to prove she could live on her own terms. In the process, she learned some truths about herself and found love - but love, acceptance, and belonging can be easier to find than to keep. While on a trip to Sicily with Libbie, Jim Mitchell must leave suddenly because his son is injured in an accident in California. Now alone, Libbie is surprised by an old friend, Dr. Barry Raymond, but Dr. Raymond is a reminder of her troubled past.

Pastry chef Kate McGuire is loving life on the laid-back island of Coral Cay, Florida. As junior partner in a bakery renowned for luscious desserts - especially her cookies - life is pretty sweet. So when an old friend arrives and announces a spur-of-the-moment beach wedding, that's just the icing on the wedding cake. But the groom vanishes right as a television crew descends on the town to film a hot-new realty show.

Lately, Kate has a lot on her dessert plate. She's launching a cookie-of-the-day challenge in the heart of Coral Cay, providing sweet treats for the reception of the town's handsome new veterinarian - not to mention dealing with tourists in town for a pirate festival and the surprise arrival of her former fiance, Evan, who seems determined to win her back. And if that's not enough, a skeleton has been found - in the backyard behind her best friend Maxi's floral shop. Kate knows Maxi could never hurt a fly.

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, survives by hiding in an apartment in the middle of Nazi-controlled Vienna. But this is no Anne Frank-like existence; teenage Hans passes time in the municipal library and buys standing-room tickets to the Vienna State Opera. Hans never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique story in magnificent reportage.

Christmas is no humbug affair in Lighthouse Bay, Massachusetts. The merry festivities are well underway in the quaint seaside village, and the halls of the posh Castleton Manor literary retreat are decked out in full Victorian décor. This year, the manor is hosting the Charles Dickens Society's annual gala, compete with parlor games and dramatic readings of A Christmas Carol, and culminating in a costume ball. Faith Newberry, Castleton's private librarian and archivist, loves being part of the holiday hustle and bustle while catering to the eccentric guests' bookish whims.

Brilliant, short-lived, incredibly prolific—Schubert is one of the most intriguing figures in music history. While his music attracts a wide audience, much of his private life remains shrouded in mystery, and significant portions of his work have been overlooked. In this major new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into Schubert's life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of thirty-one.

Everyone in town knew Caroline and Charlie just weren't meant for each other. But nobody had figured on Caroline and Charlie getting locked in a storage vault with an automatic timer set for the next morning ...and Caroline and Charlie definitely hadn't figured on the little surprise they got a few months later when they discovered there was a baby on the way!

Park rangers are puzzled when a child is found wandering alone in the middle of a forest near Seattle. Stranger still, he speaks a peculiar language that sounds a little like German and is dressed in clothes people wore in the Middle Ages. With no one having reported him missing, FBI Special Agent Will McCord assembles a dedicated unit to investigate the case, placing Detective Ilona Farris at its head. Their relationship is edgy. They used to be an item. But McCord knows Farris is the best person for the job. Especially when more children turn up in similar circumstances.

In 1672, Sarah Solart Poole Good and Ann Carr Putnam begin life on seemingly equal footing—both daughters of well-off families in colonial Massachusetts. But as the years pass, their fortunes diverge. Sarah’s life spirals into poverty, homelessness, and mental distress. Ann marries into wealth and stability, becoming the wife of Thomas Putnam, the Younger, heir to one of Salem Village’s most powerful families. Yet even privilege cannot shield the Putnams from misfortune. Thomas is disinherited in favor of his younger brother, and Ann’s expected inheritance proves meager.

Trillium Bay, 1889. Alexander Bostwick doesn't believe in ghosts, but the unexpected death of his bride has him feeling haunted. The lingering scent of her perfume—along with her personal possessions popping up in the most peculiar places—has him worried he's lost his senses as well as his wife. With half of Chicago feeling sorry for him and the other half suspecting he had a hand in her demise, Alex escapes to Trillium Bay, hoping peace and quiet might ease his troubled mind.

When over seventy-five pieces of rare and intriguing seventeenth and eighteenth century Delftware are rediscovered in an historic Manhattan townhouse, decorative art advisor and writer Genevieve Wheeler Brown quickly recognizes that, together, these pieces tell an amazing story. What begins as a curatorial exercise quickly evolves not only into an exploration of this colorful, expressive, and sometimes even humorous decorative art, coveted for hundreds of years, but also an unexpected uncovering of forceful female lives yet untold.

Thirty-year-old Charlotte James, better known to her mystery fans as C. J. Barrett, decides to take a break from writing her popular Steve Sheppard mystery series. Leaving New York City, she moves back to her hometown of Austin to wind down, recuperate, and maybe come up with some new ideas for her books.

The story of how English became American—and how it became Southern, Bostonian, Californian, African American, Chicano, elite, working-class, urban, rural, and everything in between.

In 1735, Richard Derby, a ship’s master in colonial Salem, Massachusetts, married Mary Hodges, a merchant’s daughter. The alliance was good business, and Mary Hodges was a willing bride. Richard prospered, retired from the sea, and founded his own merchant house. With one exception, Richard’s sons went to sea. Hasket Derby stayed ashore, learning to manage the trading network his father built.

Swiss equestrian William "Zen" Griegg skyrockets to the top of the European show jumping circuit. As he sets his sights on the 2000 Olympic Games, his beloved horse Tiger is abducted en route to a competition in the United States. Zen's father, Sigmund Griegg, again teams with American Alana Eastwood to solve an international mystery that leads them from a secret tunnel in the Owl Mountains of Poland, through the art galleries of Zürich, to the Hamilton Farm Equestrian Center in Gladstone, New Jersey.

Doctors at War tells the stories of physicians in France working to impede the German war effort and undermine French collaborators during the Occupation from 1940 to 1945. Determined to defeat the Third Reich's incursion, one group of prominent Paris doctors founded a medical network to treat injured Resistance fighters who they then secretly transported to Allied countries to avoid forced labor in Germany. Doctors at War stands as a dramatic, character-driven account of physicians' courage and resilience in the face of evil.

In 1982, amid the nuclear paranoia that engulfed the US and the Soviet Union, Samantha Smith, a fifth grader from Manchester, Maine, wrote a letter to the Kremlin asking the Soviet leader if he was going to start a war. When Pravda, the biggest Soviet newspaper, published her letter—and Samantha received an unprecedented invitation to visit the Soviet Union—her family embarked on a historic journey.

In a world on the brink, US President Dani Mitchell fights to advance her net zero-carbon agenda, battling the cartel—a shadowy assembly of ruthless capitalists controlling global economies and governments. When a Native American elder offers a bold proposition, Dani finds an unexpected ally.

Young Sue Gurwell had always known that her father had been a paratrooper. And then there was the special poem in his roll-top desk she sometimes snuck a peek at, written by a member of Dad's regiment. This poem was a premonition of the sergeant's death. "Yes," her dad told her, "He was right—he died on D-Day." But it's not until 2016, after her parents had both passed away, that Susan Gurwell Talley and her husband Jack L. Talley begin to understand the true extent and significance of the wartime artifacts that had been staples of Sue's childhood.