Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Coming of Age

The cliche in love stories is that the good girl falls for the bad boy who smells of leather and exhaust from his motorcycle, and at the end of the day love conquers all. The stories make it seem so easy. Life, on the other hand, makes it hard. The awful truth is: sometimes love leaves you in ruins. Elias Black may have had a sleeve of tattoos and grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, but he didn't have a true bad bone in his body. I loved him from the moment he kissed me, when I knew I no longer owned my heart, until the world pulled us apart.

While most 17-year-old American girls would refuse to let their parents marry them off to a stranger, Robyn Mason dreams of the mysterious McKale in Ireland, wondering how he'll look and imagining his Irish accent. Prearranged bindings are common for magical families like her own. However, when she travels to the whimsical Emerald Isle, she discovers that there's more to her betrothal and McKale's clan than she'd been led to believe. What starts as an obligatory pairing between Robyn and McKale morphs over time into something they both need.

The members of Sinful Distraction are living their best life as they travel around the country on the heels of 4225 West's sold-out tour. Unfortunately for drummer, Ajay Ballard, that means a stop at the county jail after he's arrested for an outstanding warrant - one he didn't even know about. With an overzealous judge, Ajay's forced to hang out in his hometown longer than anticipated.

When Clara returns home from the convent of her childhood to begin life at a local girls' school, she is at a loss: although she has comparative freedom, she misses the discipline the nuns imposed and worries about keeping her faith in a secular world. Against the background of the First World War, Clara experiences the confusions of adolescence—its promise, its threat of change. She longs for love, yet fears it, and wonders what the future will hold. Then tragedy strikes and her childhood haltingly comes to an end as she realizes that neither parents nor her faith can help her.

The Sugar House is the second in the trilogy sequel to Frost in May, which began with The Lost Traveller and continues in Beyond the Glass. Although each is a complete novel in itself, together they form a brilliant portrait of a young girl's journey to adulthood.

Aurora Keys is heartbroken, struggling to forget the beautiful and enigmatic Jessie Vanderlind, who has told her it is too dangerous for them to be together. And he may be right. Jessie is, after all, a vampire. But that doesn't make forgetting him any easier. Just as Aurora is starting to pull her shattered life back together, Jessie reappears at her window with a warning: There are many vampires who want to see her dead and him locked in a coffin for a hundred years.

Jaymerson Holloway had it all - until one moment. One bad decision. A split second and her life was altered forever. Faced with unimaginable grief and guilt while learning to simply walk again, Jaymerson realizes she will never be the same. Everyone wants her to get back to who she was before. But nothing of her old life feels real to her anymore. The only one who understands what she is going through is someone who has always been cruel to her and someone she hated: the other survivor.

Outspan Foster presents Book 2 in the Crafter series.

Sebastian Tate never imagined his YouTube music video would go viral, sky-rocketing him to acting success in Hollywood. Okay, maybe he did. After all, he's a cocky dude who knows he's hot-as-hell, and it was only a matter of time before his stars aligned. But life in Tinseltown is never what it seems. Spying on his gorgeous and mysterious new neighbor with binoculars seems innocent enough, but quickly escalates into an erotic game between two very unlikely people.

Generations of Sassers have made moonshine in the Brushy Mountains of Wilkes County, North Carolina. Their history is recorded in a leather-bound journal that belongs to Jessie Sasser's daddy, but Jessie wants no part of it. As far as she's concerned, moonshine caused her mother's death a dozen years ago. Her father refuses to speak about her mama, or about the day she died. But Jessie has a gnawing hunger for the truth - one that compels her to seek comfort in food.

Isla Lane is an ambitious violinist, who yearns for the career her grandmother had and had always planned for her. Though determined to make her mark on Manhattan and follow her dreams, she just can't seem to get back on course. Consumed with pain from the loss of her grandmother, Isla thinks that she has found the perfect distraction, but this perfect distraction will challenge her in ways she couldn't have imagined.

I've never really been included. I've never felt like I truly belonged. But then again, how could I? Living on this island, I've seen and heard too many things. Lies. Secrets. Lies I've been forced to tell and secrets I've been forced to keep. They keep me locked to myself. They're the reason I stand on the edge of the horizon and watch from afar. Other people's lives have evolved, but not mine. It's exactly the same. Day after day, the sun rises, and every time its rays penetrate my skin, I'm reminded that no matter how desperately I don't want to be, I'm trapped.

Clara Batchelor is twenty-two. Her brief doomed marriage to Archie over, she returns to live with her parents in the home of her childhood. She hopes for comfort but the devoutly Catholic household confines her and forms a dangerous glass wall of guilt and repression between Clara and the outside world. Clara both longs for and fears what lies beyond, and when she escapes into an exhilarating and passionate love affair her fragile identity cracks.

Jaymerson Holloway thought all her grief and pain were behind her. Unfortunately, life has other ideas. Leaving everything behind to follow her dreams, Jaymerson travels to Italy, where she learns to stand on her own, move on with her life, and open her heart to another. But nothing prepares her for seeing Hunter's life explode over the TV screen and watching his success, which comes with lots of women wanting a piece of The Haze. Crueler is the agony of seeing him fall in love with another.

Jamie O'Neill loves the color red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of certain objects, books with dust jackets, rivers, cats, and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he wants most in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked, and at his new school, despite the daily barrage of bullies and cathedral bells, he meets two teachers who might be able to help him, though each struggles against inertias of their own.

July 1969. While men are walking on the moon, life in London for 16-year-old Jane takes unexpected turns. On the point of falling in love with her best friend Karl, she discovers that there's more to her father's spectacular girlfriend than at first meets the eye. In the sweltering heat of a fast-moving evening, other revelations quickly follow, reconciling Jane with her father but also reopening wounds from the past, laying bare raw emotions kept suppressed for too long.

It should have been simple. Easy come, easy go, and in between, atonement. She was not who I would have chosen. Gwen was delicate and lovely: a former model with a ruined life, living loudly in the quiet of the Smoky Mountains, healing injured bears. When she laid her hands on me, she healed me too. That's how it began. That's where it went wrong. I knew she could never be mine. But I sinned. I sinned.

If you're lucky, you'll fall in love-truly, madly, and deeply in love. Maddy and Reid had that kind of love-the all-encompassing, Earth-shattering, once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. Then life happened. Old wounds that were thought to be long healed and scabbed over are ripped opened, and they are forced to face the possibility that maybe they are not strong enough to fight their demons and embrace the light.

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer—"the starched collar," as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of Mann's genius.

In the spring of 1970, a Pretoria schoolboy, Joe, becomes obsessed with Muhammad Ali. He begins collecting daily newspaper clippings about him, a passion that grows into an archive of scrapbooks. Forty years later, when Joe has become a writer, these scrapbooks become the foundation for a memoir of his childhood. When he calls upon his brother, Branko, for help uncovering their shared past, meaning comes into view in the spaces between then and now, growing up and growing old, speaking out and keeping silent.