Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Family Life

Aristotle "Aris" Thibodeau is 12 and a half years old and destined for greatness. Ever since her father's death, however, she's been stuck in the small town of Kanuga, Georgia, where she has to manage her mother Diane's floundering love life and dubious commitment to her job as an English professor, not to mention coparenting a little brother who hogs all the therapy money. Luckily Aris has a plan. Following the advice laid out in Write a Novel in Thirty Days!, she sets out to pen a best seller using her charmingly dysfunctional family as material.

Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amid the river of metal and glass, a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son, Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the Internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions, as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create online.

The Barrons like to think of themselves as a typical American family. Never mind the fact that Todd drops bombs on Afghan targets one minute and sits down to dinner with his wife and kids the next. A drone pilot stationed in Nevada, he manages to compartmentalize the conflicting demands of combat and family life - until their son, Max, is diagnosed with autism

When Teresa was a little girl, she dreamed of dark-eyed, fearless heroes on white horses who would sweep her away. But now, as the grown-up Teresa negotiates life and love, she begins to understand that fairytales don't always come true.

The matriarch of a Long Island clan with a stubbornly suicidal son and a defiant, restless granddaughter, Esther has hired a Russian landscaper to watch over the family as well as the grounds of their secluded waterfront estate. But he has been watching Esther, too. And his love for her is growing wild enough to uproot them all.

Bound by tradition, she gives birth to seven children; the last, conceived in a passionate affair, Josephine must give up for adoption. Josephine spends the rest of her life searching for this child, keeping her secret even as her other children, whose stories unfold in surprising ways, go off to war, get married, and make their own mistakes: Her son suffers in World War I. Her daughter struggles to assimilate in the new world of the 1950s American suburbs.

Dr. Julie Walker wakes on a summer morning in San Francisco to find a city in chaos. Today Californians are voting on a controversial ballot initiative that will change history. With the future of the state and the nation uncertain, the streets have erupted into violence. Injured, Julie must make her way across the city by foot to the Veterans Administration Hospital, where her sister, recently returned from Afghanistan, is in labor. At the hospital a brutal scene is unfolding as a man who shares an intimate past with Julie begins to take his revenge.

A young English teacher falls - glass first - into a love affair and the world of wine when he meets a famous and enchanting sommelier. Before Peter Hapworth meets Izzy, he knows the difference between pinot noir and peanut butter, but that's about it. Lonely and frustrated with his academic career - as well as with dating - his life takes a sudden turn one night when he turns on the television. He's transfixed by the woman staring back at him, a glass of wine swirling delicately in her hand - Isabelle Conway, one of the preeminent sommeliers in the world.

After sisters Laure and Marie learn of their parents’ plan to sell the family’s summer retreat, L’Agapanthe, they devise a scheme for attracting a wealthy suitor who can afford to purchase the estate. For the sisters, it has become a necessary part of their character, their lifestyle, and their past. L’Agapanthe is the perfect venue to exercise proper etiquette and intellect, though not all its visitors are socially savvy - especially when it’s a matter of understanding the relationship between old money and the nouveau riche.

Grace Holm-D’Angelo is at her wit’s end, trying to create a new life from broken pieces. Newly divorced, she is navigating suddenly becoming a single mother to her 14-year-old daughter. Emma, resentful about being uprooted from Chicago to Los Angeles and still reeling from the divorce, is generally giving her mother a hard time. Then Grace’s best friend, Leeza, succumbs to breast cancer after a long battle, and Grace realizes you don’t get a second chance at life. She returns to her hometown of New London, Wisconsin, to try to reconcile with her own mother, Lorraine, from whom she’s been estranged for longer than she cares to remember.

This short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature, and the consequences are devastating.

Topanga Canyon es el hogar de dos parejas cuyos destinos están a punto de chocar. El estilo liberal de vida de Delaney y Kyra Mossbacker les permite gozar de una existencia sencilla y placentera en una nueva comunidad privada. El es un escritor amante de la naturaleza, y ella una obsesiva agente de bienes y raices. Cándido y América Rincón son mexicanos ilegales que desesperadamente buscan alcazar el sueño americano mientras luchan por sobrevivir acampando a las orillas de un rio.

Enidina Current and Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest during the early 1900s. This hardscrabble life comes easily to some, like Eddie, but for the deeply religious Mary, farming is at odds with her more cosmopolitan inclinations. Still, Mary creates a clean and orderly home life for her stormy husband, Jack, and her sons, while she adapts to the isolation of a rural town through the inspiration of a local preacher.

Packed with authentic Southern flavor and characters as colorful as an azalea in full bloom, The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes serves up stinging one-liners and earthy wisdom in equal measure.

Eadie Boone, an artist and former beauty queen, tackles everything with gusto and flair. But tailing her wayward husband is proving to be an exasperating chore. Nita Broadwell, a good Southern girl from a good Southern family, is jolted out of complacency when she discovers condoms in her husband's shirt pocket. Meanwhile, she is slipping into a steamy romance with a hunky handyman 13 years her junior.

On an early spring afternoon in rural New Hampshire, two brothers, Ed and Allard, are ice skating when they discover a girl who, with her dogs, has broken through thin ice and is caught in the river's eddy. They are able to rescue her, and as a result, a special bond forms among all three - but particularly between Allard and Sarah. As they grow up, the brothers remain close, creating their own film production company to shoot nature footage in the wild. Sarah, gaining success on her own as a writer, always manages to remain a part of their lives.

Told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, A Beautiful Truth - at times brutal, other times deeply moving - is about the simple truths that transcend species, the meaning of family, the lure of belonging, and the capacity for survival. Looee is forever set apart, a chimp raised by a well-meaning and compassionate human couple in Vermont who cannot conceive a baby of their own. He's not human, but with his peculiar upbringing he is no longer like other chimps. One tragic night Looee's two natures collide, and this unique family is forever changed.

It is a moment in the near future when the threat of terror has cultivated rage, apathy, and panic across the country. For Phil, a dermatologist at the UCLA hospital, it is a time of unease, in contrast to the days when he coasted through life on his good looks and middling charm. In addition to having to deal with his mother, Edith, who's emerging after years of grieving over her late husband, Phil has been recruited for a secret terror-response team. The assignment just may provide an ordinary man a chance at heroism.

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker is obsessed with zombie movies. He attends an all-boys Catholic High School where roving gangs in plaid make his days a living hell. His mother is an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and his father an ex-Marine realtor who disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy navigates it all with a code cobbled together from Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet Terror, Zombieland, and Shaun of the Dead.

Ida grew up with Jackson and James - where there was “I” there was a “J.” She can’t recall a time when she didn’t have them around, whether in their early days camping out in the boys’ room decorated with circus scenes, or later as teenagers when they were drinking on rooftops. While the world outside saw them as neighbors and friends, to each other the three formed a family unit - two brothers and a sister - not drawn from blood but from a deep need to fill a void in their single-parent households.