Showing results by narrator "Andrew Eiden" in All Categories

It was just your typical, run-of-the-mill scout field trip - that is, until Kit spotted an object from space plummeting to Earth.

"I live in a coastal town in the deep south of the Mekong Delta. During the war this was IV Corps, which saw many savage fights. Although the battles might have long been forgotten, some places cannot forget." Thus begins the harrowing yet poignant story of a North Vietnamese communist defector who spends 10 years in a far-flung reform prison after the war, and now, in 1987, a free man again, finds work as caretaker at a roadside inn in the U Minh region. One day new guests arrive at the inn: an elderly American woman and her daughter, an 18-year-old adopted Vietnamese girl....

In rural North Georgia two decades after the Civil War, 13-year-old Lulu Hurst reaches high into her father's bookshelf and pulls out an obscure book, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Deemed gangly and undesirable, Lulu wants more than a lifetime of caring for her disabled baby brother, Leo, with whom she shares a profound and supernatural mental connection.

Laura: a teenage girl struggling to fit into her small, sleepy town in upstate New York, slowly drifting away from reality, into the secret life she inhabits online. Paul: a twentysomething wannabe rock star, back home from NYC, broke and jobless, living with his mother. April: a math teacher with two kids, running her church's vacation Bible school, discontent with another summer planning crafts and regurgitating verses. Ben: a boy stuck at VBS, still adjusting to the presence of his foster brother, DeShawn, a quiet, brooding kid from Brooklyn. Over summer, their paths will collide.

In booming postwar Brooklyn, the Nowak Piano Company is an American success story. There is just one problem: the Nowak’s only son, David. A handsome kid and shy like his mother, David struggles with neuroses. If not for his only friend, Marianne, David’s life would be intolerable. When David inherits the piano company at just 18 and Marianne breaks things off, David sells the company and travels around the world. In Taiwan, his life changes when he meets the daughter of a local madame - beautiful, sharp-tongued Daisy.

Meet Jack Jordan. He’s a smooth-talking con artist with a penchant for the fast life. He’s snuck into Lufkin, Texas, in the dead of night with little more than a beat-up Honda, a hollowed-out King James Bible full of cocaine, and enough emotional baggage to sink a steamship. He’s charming, dedicated, and extremely paranoid.

Thirty years ago, Martin Owenby came to New York City with dreams of becoming a writer. Now his existence revolves around cheap Scotch and weekend flings with equally damaged men. When he learns that his older brother, Leon, has gone missing, he must return to the Owenby farm in Solace Fork, North Carolina, to assist in the search. But that means facing a past filled with regrets, the family that never understood him, the girl whose heart he broke, and the best friend who has faithfully kept the home fires burning.

For better or for worse, Google and social media - “Big Tech”, collectively - have become the new public square. Unfortunately, this public square has a watchful referee standing behind them, ready and waiting to blow the whistle if they veer too far from the preferred narrative. Americans have given these companies enormous power to select the information they read, share and discuss with their neighbors and friends.

In a series of interwoven fictionalized stories, Deborah Noyes gives voice to the marginalized women in P. T. Barnum’s family - and the talented entertainers he built his entertainment empire on. Barnum was a legendary showman, entrepreneur, marketing genius, and one of the most famous nineteenth-century personalities. For those who lived in Barnum’s shadow, however, life was complex.

Elliott is a struggling musician who is trying to piece together enough cash every month to keep his dream of performing alive while also paying his rent. That’s when he discovered the new app TASK LYST. As a service provider, he sets his own hours, his funds are delivered covertly in bitcoin and the rates continue to grow...but so does his suspicion over the type of tasks that he is being asked to complete. Is the anonymous nature of app-based freelance work enough to abate Elliott’s suspicions...and conscience?

Dale Peck’s debut is a tour de force in which Martin and John find each other again and again: in a trailer park, a high-end jewelry store, a Kansas barn, and later, in New York City, living under the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. Though their names remain the same, their identities are constantly shifting, creating a fractured view of loss and desire in the early years of the AIDS crisis. Vaulting through self and history, Martin and John is one of the most remarkable novels to emerge from an America ravaged by disease.

An encompassing, visionary, many-threaded work, Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye is an American novel of great scope and nearly mythological intensity. This is the third volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.

Jedidiah Robbins is a man on a crusade. From town to town, his Gospel train rides the rails of 1920s Appalachia, spreading the Good News with his daughter and a loyal group of roustabouts in tow. But Jedidiah's traveling revival company has a secret: In addition to offering the gifts of the Holy Spirit, it also delivers spirits of another kind. Prohibition is in full swing, but The Sword of the Lord train keeps the speakeasies in the towns it visits in business by providing the best that mountain stills have to offer.

Twin brothers Ethan and Jack Stone have built the ultimate transparency app - Stalker - and it's going to make them rich. But when Ethan's girlfriend dumps him, and his brother bails for their biggest competitor, Ethan is convinced they've run off together. Using Stalker to find out, he tracks them from Silicon Beach to Silicon Valley, and the secret he reveals is even more twisted than he imagined. Between his faith in people and the technology he designed to expose the truth, Ethan is forced to rethink everything he had believed regarding privacy, freedom, and trust.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

River Bend, Michigan, is the kind of small town most can't imagine leaving, but three women couldn't wait to escape. When each must return - Linda Williams, never sure what she wants; her mother, Paula, always too sure; and Beth DeWitt, one of River Bend's only black daughters, now a mother of two who'd planned to raise her own children anywhere else - their paths collide under Beth's father's roof. As one town struggles to contain all of their love affairs and secrets, a local scandal forces Beth to confront her own devastating past.

Newbery Medalist Paul Fleischman reflects on his childhood with his award-winning father, Sid Fleischman, and details his own path to becoming a writer in this memorable audiobook that is part memoir, part travelogue, and part reflection on craft and creativity. Acclaimed author Paul Fleischman considers how growing up with a father who was an award-winning author helped to shape and inspire his own career. Paul and Sid Fleischman are the only father-son Newbery Medalists in history, and life in the Fleischman home was extraordinary.

Black holes, predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity more than a century ago, have long intrigued scientists and the public with their bizarre and fantastical properties. Although Einstein understood that black holes were mathematical solutions to his equations, he never accepted their physical reality - a viewpoint many shared. After introducing the basics of the special and general theories of relativity, this book describes black holes both as astrophysical objects and theoretical "laboratories".

Graduation is fast approaching for straight-A student, Grace Barbour. But all she can think about is mending the fractured friendship trio of her best friend, Isa, and former friend, Everett. The trick is getting them all in the same place at the same time (and trying to ignore the fact that seeing Everett makes her heart skip a beat …). Taking a page from her brother James' playbook, Grace decides that an unsanctioned Senior Skip Day is what they need.

When Bay Bishop’s husband was found in the alley behind their Northern Michigan restaurant, she lost not only the partner in her dreams of establishing the best fine-dining establishment in the area, but the man she thought was the love of her life. Then, she finds out how he had betrayed her. Now, she’s a suspect.