Showing results by narrator "Kirsten Potter" in All Categories

When you’re named after a 250-year-old tortoise, you grow up believing life is full of possibilities and wonder. But ever since Addie’s family got turned upside down, those things have been harder for her to see. The last thing Addie wants to do is make a new friend, but when her dad’s summer job takes them across the country, she meets Mateo and finds herself caught up in an exciting project. With the help of a virtual reality headset, she’s suddenly scaling castle walls, dodging angry kittens, and seeing the world in whole new ways.

There’s something Constance Middleton’s friends are dying to tell her: her husband is having an affair – with her best friend! Despite their hints, Constance remains ever cool, and seemingly oblivious. Or is she? In this biting comedy of manners, marriages and mistresses, Constance – a not-so-desperate housewife - has some ideas of her own about extra-marital activity that surprise everyone in the end!

It's the middle of the high-flying, go-getting 80s in Maggie Thatcher's England, and Marlene has something to celebrate: she has just been made managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency. But with no friends to speak of, and a past she'd just as soon forget, the guests at Marlene's party are a collection of famous women from history. Soon Marlene discovers that life above the glass ceiling is not all it's cracked up to be. This is a bold, searing comedy from an Olivier Award-winning playwright.

Life is anything but perfect for Hallie Hartley, a young physical therapist who has given up nearly everything - even her love life - for her beautiful blonde stepsister, Shelly. Though Shelly's acting career has never taken off, she has certainly perfected the crocodile tears to get what she wants - which all too often means Hallie's boyfriends. When Hallie arrives home early from work one fateful day, she makes two startling discoveries that will turn her life upside down.

Lanie Coates' life is spinning out of control.

She's piled everything she owns into a U-Haul and driven with her husband, Peter, and their three little boys from their cozy Texas home to a multiflight walkup in the Northeast. She's left behind family, friends, and a comfortable life, all so her husband can realize his dream of becoming a professional musician. But somewhere in the eye of her personal hurricane, it hits Lanie that she once had dreams too.

Surely she'd gone completely mad. Claire Manning can't imagine what she was thinking when she decided to help the escapee from her company's lab, but after seeing him caged like an animal, her humanitarian compulsion could not be overridden - even by the arrogant, scowling 18th-century Highlander Hugh Urquhart turned out to be. His entire life has been taken away from him, and Claire understands the pain and torment of loss.

In Scotland, the Gandiegow quilters are in an uproar when their favorite fictional quilters - the Buttermilk Guild - are killed off by a best-selling mystery author. Diana McKellen is called in by the publisher to fix this PR nightmare. It's said, there's no such thing as bad publicity, but Diana questions this long-standing notion when an editor is murdered at a book signing.

An ambitious novel that spans decades and continents, The Things We Cherished tells the story of Charlotte Gold and Jack Harrington, two fiercely independent attorneys who find themselves slowly falling for one another while working to defend the brother of a Holocaust hero against allegations of World War II-era war crimes. The defendant, wealthy financier Roger Dykmans, mysteriously refuses to help in his own defense, revealing only that proof of his innocence lies within an intricate timepiece last seen in Nazi Germany.

When Vera Bodine, an elderly recluse with an exceptional memory, goes missing, detective duo Lillian Pentecost and her assistant Willowjean "Will" Parker are hired to track her down. But New York City in 1947 is a dangerous place, and there's no shortage of people who want to bury the secrets that Bodine has been keeping. As the clock is ticking to find Bodine alive, circumstances conspire to pull both investigators off the case.

On a Mississippi morning in 1859, Emily Matthews begs her father to save a slave, Nathan, about to be auctioned away from his family. Judge Matthews is an abolitionist who runs an illegal school for his slaves, hoping to eventually set them free. One, a woman named Ginny, has become Emily's companion and often her conscience - and understands all too well the hazards an educated slave must face. Yet even Ginny could not predict the tangled, tragic string of events set in motion as Nathan's family arrives at the Matthews farm.

Jude Deveraux returns to the magnificent, sunny island in For All Time, the second novel in her Nantucket Brides trilogy—this time featuring the next generation of her beloved family of Montgomery-Taggerts.

“One of Mexico’s greatest living writers,” wrote Jonathan Lethem in 2018, “we are just barely beginning to catch up to what she has to offer.” In the years since, Rivera Garza’s work has received widespread recognition: she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant for fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Yet we have still only started to discover the full range of a writer who is at once an incisive voice on migration, borders, and violence against women, as well as a high stylist in the manner of Lispector or Duras.

She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings - doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness.

New York, 1946: The last time Will Parker let a case get personal, she walked away with a broken face, a bruised ego and the solemn promise never again to let her heart get in the way of her job. But she called Hart and Halloway's Travelling Circus and Sideshow home for five years and Ruby Donner, the circus' tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse, the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go.

When her father is injured in an accident, Edinburgh engineer Pippa McDonnell comes home to Gandiegow to take over the family business, the North Sea Valve Company. Now she's working overtime trying to fix NSV's finances and find the cash to get her father proper medical care. One possibility is to accept a partnership with MTech, an American firm desperate to get their hands on her da's innovative valve design.

Public Defender Alex Stone is appointed to represent a homeless veteran who has confessed to the brutal murder of a prostitute. Alex is pressured to railroad the troubled vet straight to death row, but she believes he's innocent, despite his confession, and refuses to back down, putting her career...and her life...in deadly jeopardy.

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.

New York City, 1947. For years, Holly Quick has written gruesome tales of revenge for pulp detective magazines. Now someone is bringing her stories to life and leaving a trail of blood behind. With the threat of another murder looming, and reluctant to go to the police, Holly turns to the renowned detective duo Willowjean "Will" Parker and her boss Lillian Pentecost. Soon they are diving into an underground world of people obsessed with murder.

She went to the past to see history firsthand. She stayed to put the past behind her and truly live for the first time. She wasn't supposed to be there. Weary of her ex-husband's relentless pursuit, Ginny Hughes flees to the one place he can never find her - the past. Captured by a group of retreating Scotsmen, she fights for her freedom only to discover that her very presence in the past has changed history for the worst!

Killer Looks is the definitive story about the long-forgotten practice of providing free nose jobs, face-lifts, breast implants, and other physical alterations to prisoners, the idea being that by remodeling the face you remake the man. From the 1920s up to the mid-1990s, half a million prison inmates across America, Canada, and the UK willingly went under the knife, their tab picked up by the government.