Showing results by narrator "Charlie Thurston" in All Categories

Raised in Florida by an aunt and uncle after his mother’s death when he was four, Joe had a seemingly normal childhood, spending summers at church camp and dreaming of going to college. But nearly fifteen years later, the ground shifted beneath his feet when he discovered a family secret that would impact the rest of his life.

As the tulips bloom and the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or join the camp brothel. On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.

Chance Fortunato may be away at boarding school, but the bad guys haven’t gone anywhere, and they certainly haven’t changed their ways. It falls to Chance’s friends to pick up the slack.

A gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir which explores toxic masculinity and the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged 18, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.

In 1932, Americans’ dreams were simple: a job, food to eat, a place to sleep, and shoes without holes. But for millions of people these simple needs were nothing more than dreams. When he was just 15 years old, Josh had to make his own way through a country of angry and frightened people. This is the story of his struggle to find a life for himself during those turbulent times.

Sebastian Cody did something horrible, something no one - not even Sebastian himself - can forgive. At the age of four, he accidentally shot and killed his infant sister with his father's gun. Now, 10 years later, Sebastian has lived with the guilt and horror for his entire life. With his best friend away for the summer, Sebastian has only a new friend - Aneesa - to distract him from his darkest thoughts.

When I meet Tyler Marino at a wedding, romance is the last thing on my mind. Yes, he's gorgeous. Yes, we have instant chemistry. But this summer is all about convincing my skeptical parents I'm ready to run our family farm. I can't afford to give Tyler's smoldering smile a passing glance. Fine. I glance. And possibly . . . kiss. But then I go home all the way to a different state. Crisis averted. Until Tyler shows up in North Carolina looking for a job. Of course, I give him one. We've already established I'm terrible at resisting his charm.

The rain began nineteen years ago, and it never stopped: more than a foot of rain per day until almost the whole of North America was underwater. Those who survived the first year were forced to take drastic measures, and those who held to the veneer of civilization were few and very far between. Seventeen-year-old Tanner grew up after the rain began. She and her adoptive caretaker, Russell, have long sought a fabled Colorado refuge, a dream that has kept them going through years of brutal trials as they try to stay one step ahead of the “face eaters”.

In a former life, Nick Lutz, sold cars in the Golden State. He had a wife and a young son, and they struggled along until Nick was shot in the head when a potential customer hijacked the car he was demonstrating. The incident sets off a bad-luck domino fall, and he loses an eye, his job, his family, and, eventually, his self-respect. With nothing left, Nick heads for Mexico, where he sheds his former self among an eclectic group of expats and locals, who fondly name him “Pirata” on account of his eye patch.

Germany, 1945. Ever since Anton Kohler first heard the vibrant sound of the violin, he's dreamed of mastering the instrument. But when his father dies, the 15-year-old must give up his passion to support his seven younger siblings. As the Russian army marches closer to his hometown, Anton and his best friend Gerhard are pulled from their families and forced to help defend their home in a last desperate stand. When Anton witnesses the slaughter of concentration camp prisoners, he vows to escape the war and find a way home....

Paul is a top business executive hoping to be the next CEO of Ascendant - a New York-based tech giant. His fast-paced life is interrupted when he travels to Glastonbury, England, to visit friends in a village rich in history and mysticism. When he returns to New York, his wife, Mary, is skeptical. His journey both scares and intrigues her as she watches him struggle to navigate between the business and spiritual worlds. A series of events draws Paul closer to Glastonbury and Christine, compelling him and a reluctant Mary to return, unaware that their lives will never be the same.

A man wakes to find himself below ground in the abandoned subway stations of New York City. He has no idea how he got there, no idea who he is. In his pocket he finds only a wad of blood-stained cash and a deck of playing cards. Once above ground, he rents out a cheap apartment, previously occupied by an enigmatic artist named Max Leider who’d left most everything behind—books, clothes, personal letters. But most peculiar are a series of paintings, each one of a mysterious woman hidden behind a curtain.

Men I've Never Been recounts Michael Sadowski's odyssey as a boy who shuns his own identity - and, ultimately, his sexual orientation - in order to become who he thinks he's supposed to be.

Colt Clemmons is an agent in a specialized division within the Bureau of Investigation - one that hunts down not just mobsters, but also monsters. For reasons that are kept top secret, Colt is the only person who can resist a siren's voice. But he's never had a chance to test this ability. The last siren left in the world mysteriously disappeared years ago. Then one night, with a single word, she reveals herself. It seems too good to be true. And it is. Because nothing about this siren-her past, her powers, or her purpose - is what it seems....

Five years into fatherhood, Calvin Hennick is plagued by self-doubt and full of questions. How can he teach his son to be a man when his own father figures abandoned him? As a white man, what can he possibly teach his biracial son about how to live as a black man in America? And what does it even mean to be a man today, when society's expectations of men seem to change from moment to moment?

A moose walks into a rural Maine town called Oslo. Pierre Roy, a brilliant 12-year-old, loses his memory in an accident. Three families are changed for worse and better as they grapple with trauma, marriage, ambition, and their fraught relationship with the natural world. Oslo, Maine inspects the strengths and limitations of seven average yet extraordinary people as they reckon with their considerable collective failure around Pierre's accident.

Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an "adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer" (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects 10 of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper's.

Set in Queens and Manhattan in the aughts, the book is narrated by Ty, a half-Jewish, half-Catholic 20-something who works for a business consulting firm on Wall Street. He’s in love with Jenny, a fledgling writer from his Queens neighborhood, but she finds ways to keep her distance. He’s also smitten with his co-worker, Krista Kaplan, but she’s his supervisor and skeptical of Ty because of his relationship with Jenny. His mother has recently died, and his father spends most of his time watching movies from the Rocky and Superman franchises....

Nicky Flynn is coming of age in 1970s Brooklyn, riding into his sophomore year at St. Michaels. Nicky is at once sensitive, resilient, exasperated, and keenly observant - especially when it comes to his father, Patrick. Undeniably enigmatic, and coasting on vanity, charm, and desperation, “Himself”, as Nicky calls his father, is given to picking up old car junkers for cheap at NYPD auctions. But as Patrick’s compulsions slide into alcoholism and abuse, Nicky, his mother, and his sisters brace themselves for an inevitable sharp turn in their addled lives.

Brad Johnson is the lone witness to a UFO sighting. The sighting, while odd in itself, is not the only incident that occurs that evening. The incident is followed up with the alien targeting him and his family. The firefight with the alien destroys everything Brad thought he knew about his family and pulls him into an intergalactic battle between two space faring aliens. Brad quickly finds himself leaving Earth struggling to understand his role with the aliens on both sides of the conflict. One group threatens Earth's security, the other group wants something from him.