Showing results by narrator "Jane Oppenheimer" in All Categories

Bailey and Vanessa shared everything: laughter, secrets, and packets of Pop Rocks to ward off bad days. But that all changed the night Vanessa left Bailey’s, headed for home, and ended up swerving off a cliff nowhere near her house. Now Bailey, who thought she knew Vanessa better than anyone in the world, is left with a million unanswered questions, and the only person with answers is gone.

It's nothing short of inevitable that Cymbeline, Georgia, hosts an annual Shakespeare festival. But stage-struck Nina Fleet is about to learn that putting on an amateur-theatrical production can be murder. Nina's anticipating showbiz glamour and glitz when a community Shakespearean troupe arrives for a two-week stay at her B&B. But the lights dim when she learns the company's director is her nemesis, struggling actor Harry Westcott - who still claims to be the rightful heir to Nina's elegant Queen Anne home.

It's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day—moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, surprising us by breaking up our routines and reminding us that there's more to life than the everyday.

There is darkness sweeping across the stars. Most know Androma Racella as the Bloody Baroness: a powerful mercenary whose reign of terror stretches across the Mirabel Galaxy. To those aboard her fearsome glass starship, the Marauder, she's just Andi, their captain and protector. When a routine mission goes awry, the all-girl crew's resilience is tested as they find themselves in a most unfamiliar place: at the mercy of a powerful bounty hunter connected to Andi's past and a harrowing betrayal.

Maura Fielder looks like she has the perfect life: every expectation fulfilled. But under the illusory surface of perfection, Maura finds herself blindsided by what she discovers on her husband's computer. She has no emotional cubbyhole into which she can shove this ghost from her husband's past, so instead, Maura upends her life - thrashing her marriage, alienating her daughter, and eroding her own moral center. On the verge of sacrificing everything she holds dear to her own obsession, how does Maura manage to regain her equilibrium and reclaim her life?

"Healing After the Loss of Your Parents: Finding Comfort & Purpose Through This New Life Stage as an Adult Orphan" is a compassionate, insightful, and empowering grief recovery guidebook that helps listeners navigate through grief, cope with the profound changes that follow the death of their parents, and learn new ways to rebuild their life after loss.

France, 1942 Once, Paulette Leblanc spent her days flirting, shopping and drawing elegant dresses in her sketch pad. Then German tanks rolled into France, and a reckless romance turned into deep betrayal. Blaming herself for her mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, Paulette is sent away to begin a new life in Paris, working as apprentice to fashion designer Sabine Ballard. But Maison de Ballard is no ordinary fashion house. While seamstresses create the perfect couture gowns, clandestine deals and secrets take place out of sight.

In 1968 we meet six teens confined at the Good Shepherd—a dark and secretive institution controlled by Sisters of Charity nuns—locked away merely for being gay, pregnant, or simply unruly. Wayward Girls is a haunting but thrilling tale of hope, solidarity, and the enduring strength of young women who find the courage to break free and find redemption...and justice.

Vanished tells the stories of women and girls in upstate New York who are often overlooked or unseen. The characters range from an aging art professor whose students are uninterested in learning what she has to teach, to a young girl who becomes the victim of a cruel prank in a swimming pool, to a television producer who regrets allowing her coworkers into her mother’s bird-filled house to film a show about animal hoarding because it will reveal too much about her family and past. Humorous and empathetic, the collection exposes the adversity in each character’s life.

“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.

When 58-year-old Helen Spencer reviews her life, what she sees are the mistakes. Over the years, things seemed to go sideways incrementally, one little wrong decision at a time. She can even pinpoint where it all started to go awry: a wonderous, romantic night in the woods her senior year of high school with a boy named Cal Crosby. A night she would soon work hard to forget. Forty years, one marriage, three children, and one grandbaby later, suddenly there he is—Cal Crosby!—right in front of her with grandchildren of his own in tow.

When Lise, a pianist, suffers a nervous breakdown early in her marriage, her husband, in a warped act of protection and jealousy, has her piano taken away. With prose that is precise and emotionally affecting, Andrea J. Buchanan vividly renders how Lise's separation from her one source of expression and fulfillment cascades into her relationship with her daughter, leaving a legacy of trauma that echoes through the generations to come.

Coming to terms with advancing dementia, Mary has no choice other than to move into her daughter’s home. Her daughter, Kayla, caught between her cognitively impaired mother and her belligerent teenage son, soon finds caregiving is more challenging than she imagined. Sage, the family’s golden retriever, offers comfort and unconditional love, but she has her own problems, especially when it comes to dealing with Mary’s cat.

Going to Paris had always been a dream for Julia and Kathy, two women who meet at a beginning French class and become fast friends. Julia is an empty nester whose husband is leaving her, and her daughter won't return her texts. Kathy is a type-A workaholic who gave up on love after a painful secret. After both their lives implode, they say, “What the heck, let’s go to Paris!” and finally live out the dream they’ve both been too busy to live out before.

Marie Michaels had a perfect life - a happy marriage to her college sweetheart, mother to two beautiful teenage children, and the owner of a successful business. Her life was everything she had imagined, until the day she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After undergoing several medical treatments, she loses her ability to hear, making communication with her family and friends challenging.

As her stultifying marriage is unravelling, and in the midst of mourning the loss of her creative self, Caro Tanner has a nightmare about Peter, an old love whom she hasn't seen in 20 years. She takes this as a sign he still needs her. With her three children safely off to summer camp, Caro embarks on a pre-Facebook pre-cell phone road trip to recapture who she once was and what she thinks she once had.

Although she vowed never to go back, nurse Siobhan McCormick returns home after two family members have died and her brother’s life is threatened. Her new job introduces her to accident victim Jared Pierce, a man whose casual charm tempts her with the same bad decisions she made in high school. Haunted houses don’t sell, and Jared Pierce’s family sends him from Louisiana to Illinois to make sure there aren’t any ghosts lingering in his great-aunt’s house. An accident on an icy road extends his visit from a few days to a few months.

Undeterred by the handful of hiccups she's had with her bed and breakfast in the small tourist town of Cymbeline, Georgia, Nina Fleet has her pedal to the medal to make her inn the best it can be with her trusty Australian Shepherd, Matilda. Nina takes a booth at the annual Veils and Vanities Bridal Expo, put on by the town's two wedding pros: Virgie Hamilton, retirement-aged dress shop owner, and Roxanna Query, a Gen-X event planner and Nina's new friend. But everything goes wrong when Roxanna comes tumbling out of an oversized prop wedding cake, strangled to death by a scarf.

This is a book about healing your whole self, a book about becoming conscious and discovering the eternal and unbreakable you. The authors take listeners on a journey of discovery, a journey in which listeners will discover tools for their wholeness and personal power.

When a severed finger shows up on her doorstep in a seedy section of Las Vegas, Helen Taylor does not freak out. She’s already crazy, as evidenced by her junk-stuffed house and its ever-growing population of cats. There’s also Bobby, her long-dead husband. Helen talks to him regularly, and Bobby talks back. The finger and the brutal murder it reveals are more than a hoarding cat lady with a phantom husband can ignore. Helen’s a suspect, and she ends up in jail. It takes power beyond the ordinary to bring the truth to light.