Showing results by narrator "Kristen Sieh" in All Categories

Escape to worlds full of adventure and magic in the first-ever Terry Brooks short story collection, featuring both new and fan-favorite stories from all three of his major literary worlds: Shannara, Magic Kingdom, and The Word and the Void.

Intelligent but isolated recent physics graduate Annie Fisk feels an undeniable pull toward space. Her childhood memories dimmed by loss, she has left behind her home, her family, and her first love in pursuit of intellectual fulfillment. When she finally lands a job as a NASA secretary during the Apollo 11 mission, the work is everything she dreamed, and while she feels a budding attraction to one of the engineers, she can’t get distracted. Not now.

Gretch Wolgast still can’t forgive Shaq for abandoning her beloved Orlando Magic, but she is moving on with her life. Two years after she helped foil a plot to destroy her and her fellow OP - the telekinetics born in Orlando in the early 1980s - she's become a federal agent investigating OP-related crime. But her boss really doesn’t seem to like her. And now she’s being forced to attend a dinner on a mysterious billionaire's yacht in South Florida. Gretch barely has time to dive into the appetizers before things get weird. And deadly.

Meet the Bang-Bang Sisters: Brea, Jessie, and Flo. Together, they’re a killer rock band with an unbreakable bond. But that’s only half the story. Offstage, they’re highly skilled vigilantes, traveling the country in their beaten-up tour van to exact justice on criminals who have slipped through the system. Part rock stars, part assassins, they’re a force to be reckoned with.

Melissa Levin, Priya Chowdhury, Tara Taylor, and Suki Hammer were going places when they graduated high school in 1997. Their yearbook superlatives were Most Likely to Win the White House, Cure Cancer, Open a Michelin-Starred Restaurant, and Join the Forbes 400, respectively. Fast forward twenty-five years and nothing has gone according to plan. Reunited at their reunion, the women rethink their younger selves. Is it too late to make their dreams come true?

The Core Four have been friends since college: four men, four women, four couples. They got married around the same time, had kids around the same time, and now, fifteen years later, they’ve started getting divorced around the same time, too. With three of the Core Four unions crumbling to dust around them, Jessica and Mitch Butler take a long, hard look at their own marriage. Can it be saved? Or is divorce, like some fortysomething zombie virus, simply inescapable?

Law student Saraswati “Sara” Bhaduri holds down two jobs in order to make her way through school, but it’s still a struggle. She’s had to do things to pay the bills that most people wouldn’t expect from “a nice Indian girl.” It seems like an ordinary busy Tuesday night at the local dive bar until her boss demands Sara deal with a drunk girl in the bathroom.

Ever since her journalist mother died on assignment, Marin has played it safe, refusing to set foot outside of Tennessee. Her wild-child younger sister, Sadie, has trotted the globe as a photographer, living off of art and adrenaline. When Sadie returns from a tough assignment abroad and looks a little worse for wear, Marin reluctantly agrees to a sisters' spa weekend on the tropical island of Saba. But her lifelong fear of travel is affirmed when Sadie misses the flight, Marin's luggage gets mixed up, and turbulence sends her hurtling into the lap of handsome stranger Lucas Tsai.

In modern-day London, architectural historian and recovering alcoholic Annie Kendall hopes to turn her life around and restart her career by locating several long-missing pieces of ancient Judaica. Geoff Harris, an investigative reporter, is soon drawn into her quest, both by romantic interest and suspicions about the head of the Shalom Foundation, the organization sponsoring her work. He's also a dead ringer for the ghost of a monk Annie believes she has seen at the flat she is subletting in Bristol House.

When a close relative falls ill, Hannah Larson and her young son, Nicky, join him for the summer at Ashton Hall, a historic manor house outside Cambridge, England. A frustrated academic whose ambitions have been subsumed by the challenges of raising her beloved child, Hannah longs to escape her life in New York City, where her marriage has been upended by a recently discovered and devastating betrayal.

A college freshman, flying home, strikes up an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the airplane. A long-lost stepbrother's visit to New York prompts a reckoning with a family's old taboos. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into the gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. A wife, looking at her husband's passwords neatly posted on the wall, realises there are no secrets left in their marriage.

The war of biblical proportions is building to its final battle, and still the pawns don’t see where they stand. Detective Lampani doggedly continues his investigation as the bodies pile up - hoping to close the case before whatever’s wrong with his head kills him. Raphielli Scortini discovers she has a rebellious streak a mile wide. Even in Exile, Giselle finds time to get creative, but her guardians put a damper on her dangerous style. And the architects of the whole plan suddenly discover too late that they’re disappearing one by one.

Part Two of the Venice Trilogy begins three weeks after Salvio Scortini’s rampage through the calles and canals of the floating city...which is indeed floating since the acqua alta season is drenching everyone. The Verona family struggles to keep calm and carry on, but the pressure is building as the secret holding the family members hostage unravels. Raphielli Scortini thinks she’s being watched, and the anxiety of keeping her monstrous husband locked away in a friend’s basement is wearing on her.

Just once, Delia Reese wants to be the one calling the shots — not the one waiting to be called. Despite her stellar resume, hiring managers at the big banks won’t give her a chance. Following yet another failed interview, Delia commiserates with her roommates and drunkenly finds herself wishing she had the advantages that come with being a man. If society wasn't locked into gender roles, she'd be climbing the corporate ladder in designer heels with no apologies. By morning, her mirror reflects a surprising makeover.

Something must be done. Vlad Luxor continues to rule the Timeless Province with a cruel hand, and now he's screaming about Inners and Outers, Others and Us. Then when the meanest boy in school is turned into the stinkiest, weirdest creature ever, Henry, Jo, Apollo, and Pirate Girl are asked to do the impossible. Breaking this spell will force them to go on their most dangerous, frightening adventure yet - through the Wilds, the Forest of Knives, and a lodge in the woods belonging to the most terrible bully of all...Vlad Luxor himself.

The story takes place in a world much like ours, but at the same time not at all like ours, in which Vlad Luxor - capricious, vain, infantile tyrant - rules over a town with an iron fist. He's an emperor with no clothes, but woe is the person who points that out - they could wind up turned into a squirrel or lizard or who knows what! For in this world, the evil leader also has magic, which he uses to punish anyone who speaks out against him. But in every classic tale with a despicable villain, there must also be a truly noble hero - in this case, four of them!

It doesn't take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie, and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone - young best-selling author and erstwhile model - shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.

One summer, a teenager disappears from Deep Valley, Pennsylvania. She is beautiful, intelligent, richer than most in those parts - and black. The cops search for her, but not as hard as they would if she were a white girl. Watching this drama unfold is Cindy, a younger girl from a white trash family. She has idolised Jude for years, yearning for her glamour, her popularity, her loving home and decent chance in life. And so, in the absence of anyone to give a damn where she goes or what becomes of her, Cindy starts to slip out of her own skin and into the space Jude left behind....

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

Abigail has moved to Soap Lake, Washington to assist with her husband’s research. Instead of craft beer and folksy neighbours, she finds a dry, desolate landscape around a town subsisting on its meagre crops. What’s more, her husband has left her there alone for six months to go on a research trip. One day, across the hardpan desert, a boy runs out of the brush literally into Abigail’s arms. He is catatonic, and his clothes are covered with blood. His mother, Esme, lies stabbed to death in a nearby car.