Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

A mother moves to Geneva with her husband and their two young children. In their beautiful new rented apartment, surrounded by their rented furniture, and several Swiss instructions to maintain quiet, she finds herself totally isolated. Her husband’s job means he is almost never present, and her entire world is caring for her children - making sure they are happy, and fed and comfortable, and that they can be seen as the happy, well-fed, comfortable family they should be. Everything is perfect. But, of course, it’s not....

There are many Marilyns: sex goddess and innocent child, crafty manipulator and dumb blonde, screen legend and Hollywood victim. In this incisive and subtle book, Sarah Churchwell looks at how the stories we tell have trivialised a woman we supposedly adore, and at what they reveal about our attitudes towards sex symbols and icons, to women, death, biography and Marilyn herself.

For 200 years she's been hiding. He gave her immortality. She tried to destroy him. Now he is searching for her. They must not meet. Or there will be a Reckoning.

Part memoir, part travelogue, this is the story of one woman's six years as an outsider in a reindeer-herding village in the Arctic Tundra, forging a life on her own in one of the most unknowable cultures on earth. An ancestry test suggesting she shared some DNA with the Sámi people, the indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic tundra, tapped into Laura Galloway's wanderlust; an affair with a Sámi reindeer herder ultimately led her to leave New York for the tiny town of Kautokeino, Norway.

Bill Fitzgerald is an acclaimed American television foreign correspondent. Exhausted after a long stint in Bosnia, he travels to Venice to meet Francis Xavier Peterson, an old friend. Whilst at the bar of the Gritti Palace Hotel on the Grand Canal with Frankie, Bill is struck by the dark beauty of a young woman seated alone. Vanessa Stewart is a glass designer from New York who is visiting the glass-blowing works in Murano. The three expatriates meet and decide to celebrate Thanksgiving together. And that evening, full of warmth and camaraderie, begins an illicit though fateful love affair.

Jamie MacAfee's life is almost perfect. She's sure she loves her fiancée, even if she hasn't quite worked out why she won't set a wedding date, and she certainly adores her job, working as an architect on her family's home renovation show. Meanwhile, her beloved mother, Caroline, has built up her confidence after a painful divorce, working closely alongside her daughter as the very successful host of Gut It! Everything is going to plan until the lives of both women are changed overnight.

Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence.

In 1887, young Nellie Bly sets out for New York and a career in journalism, determined to make her way as a serious reporter, whatever that may take. But life in the city is tougher than she imagined. Down to her last dime and desperate to prove her worth, she comes up with a dangerous plan: to fake insanity and have herself committed to the asylum that looms on Blackwell's Island. There, she will work undercover to document—and expose—the wretched conditions faced by the patients.

Based on letters and documents - not seen for 70 years - written by the Catholic Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, this audiobook tells the remarkable story of these brave and faithful women and how they served to resist the German forces. In great detail, these letters document the lives of the sisters and convents under the Nazi regime, detailing the hardships of bombings, hunger and the executions of innocents. But they also tell the story of how these brave and faithful women worked to defeat the Nazis.

In this sequel to What Katy Did, Katy Carr has recovered from her long period of paralysis, and is sent, along with her sister Clover, to Hillsover boarding school. The girls fall into friendship with the mischievous Rose Red, and the three of them start a secret club and get into trouble with their teachers. During her time at Hillsover, Katy has a positive influence on the younger girls at the school, while they help her to regain some of her youthfulness, lost as a result of her illness.

When Ava O’Reilly is wrongly accused of stealing from her employer, she has no option but to flee Ireland. The law is after her, and she has only one chance at escape - the Titanic. Aboard the ship of dreams, she runs straight into the arms of Captain 'Buck' Blackthorn, a dashing gentleman gambler who promises to be her protector. He is intrigued by her Irish beauty and manages to disguise her as the maid of his good friend, the lovely Countess of Marbury. Little does he realise, that the Countess is also in love with him.

In this world, Dr Charlotte Stone is an expert psychologist helping to catch serial killers. In the next world, Charlotte's ghostly lover - wrongly executed killer Michael Garland - is facing death yet again: the ultimate annihilation of his soul. Can Charlie prove Michael's innocence and rescue him from total oblivion?

What does it mean to be a “woman” in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement.

Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick", as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have.

Our Deadly Designs is the explosive and action-packed follow up to This Dark Descent, by Kayln Josephson. Steeped in Jewish folklore, it is the epic and swoonworthly conclusion to the duology.

Heather Shumaker has sparked much discussion with her "renegade rules for raising competent and compassionate kids". In this follow-up book, she takes on new hot-button issues like banning homework, technology use, and skipping kindergarten. Shumaker offers broader guidance on how parents can control their own anger and move from an overscheduled life to one of more free play.

An idyllic weekend camping trip is cut short when Reese Wallace's friends are brutally murdered. As the group's only survivor, Reese is the prime suspect, and his story doesn't make much sense. A disembodied voice warning him to leave the campground the night before? A strange, blackened tree that gave him an electric shock when he cut it down for firewood?

Evie, a rebellious young American, leaves New York in search of art and adventure in jazz-age Paris, where her grandmother lives. But on arrival, her grandmother’s sudden death leaves Evie compelled to carry out her dying wish: to find a man from her past called Zhenya. The quest leads Evie deep into the heart of the Russian émigré community of Paris. With Jean, a liberal Russian writer by her side, Evie finally seems to have found the passion and excitement she’s yearned for.

Two species lived in peaceful coexistence on the planet Demoth until a deadly plague wiped out millions of the winged Ooloms while leaving humans untouched, helpless to do more than ease the suffering of their alien friends and neighbors. Faye Smallwood saw the horror firsthand, caring for the plague victims in her fahter's hospital. She was there when he discovered the cure that made him famous. She was also there when a freak accident killed him.

In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas. These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. What Makes an Apple? presents the most revealing of these conversations in English for the first time, painting an illuminating and disarmingly intimate portrait of a towering literary figure.