Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Literary Fiction

Laidback Reece Donovan likes life simple. No amount of money - or any other temptation Camille can offer - will convince him to give up the one link to his past. Of course, it would be easier without the powerful chemistry raging between them. As a fragile romance begins to grow, can Reece trust Camille with his secrets? And when promises are broken, along with hearts, can the charm of Coral Cove help bring them back together?

Twenty-year-old Ruth Stutzman is a wonderful caregiver - but she has no experience with children. Laid off because of budget cuts from her job at a retirement home, she's relieved to find work - even if it means temporarily watching widower Martin Rhodes's brood of six! Martin has been doing his best since his wife's passing, but he and the children need help. Their house, once full of laughter and light, has been darkened by sadness. .

Mia Galliano is an aspiring filmmaker. Ethan Vance has just played his last game as a collegiate soccer star. They're sharp, hungry for success, and they share a secret. Last night, Ethan and Mia met at a bar, and, well, one thing led to another, which led to them waking up the next morning together. Things turned awkward in a hurry when they found themselves sharing a post-hookup taxi to the same place: Boomerang headquarters.

Not a jump in the car, see the sights kind of ride. He's been taken for everything he has. He's lost his house, his restaurant business, his savings, his car, his best friend, his faith—all to his conniving ex-wife. But that was seven years ago. He picked himself up, left Chicago, and started over in Peoria, Arizona, running the Roundhouse Bar and Grill. He doesn't look back on those bad years; there's no point. Not until two curious cops show up at the Roundhouse.

For years, Matthew Greene and Daniel Rosen have enjoyed a quiet domestic life together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel’s twin brother and sister-in-law have been killed in a bombing in Jerusalem, their lives are suddenly, utterly transformed. In dealing with their families and the need to make a decision about who will raise the deceased couple’s two children, both Matthew and Daniel are confronted with challenges that strike at the heart of their relationship.

It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is teeming with the tensions of the day - segregation, sexual experimentation, the Cold War and Vietnam - but it is also home to some of the country's most influential jazz. Naomi Hill, a singer at the Blue Angel club, has been poised on the brink of stardom for nearly ten years. Sensual and magnetic, Naomi is a fiercely ambitious yet self-destructive woman whose charms tend to hurt those around her, and no one knows this better than her daughter, Sophia.

Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom

In Family Life, Russell Banks' first novel, he transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom. Life inside this kingdom includes the king (dubbed "the Hearty" or "the Bluff"), who squeals angrily as is his wont; the queen, who, while pondering the mirror in her chambers, decides to write a book; three adolescent princes who are, respectively, a superb wrestler, a fanatical sports car driver, and a sullen drunk.

The Relation of My Imprisonment is a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatization of the test of fait all true believers must endure.

Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects. His job is "to recite and minimize" sometimes by just saying them really fast and other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable. The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical. Lloyd has a habit, too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful.

Sixteen-year-old Anne is an uneducated serving girl at the Penny Pot tavern when she first meets the commanding Benjamin Franklin. The time she spends with the brilliant young printer teases her curious mind, and the money he provides keeps her family from starving. But the ambitious Franklin is committed to someone else, a proper but infatuated woman named Deborah Read who becomes his common-law wife.

Now, in this collection of interconnected short stories, Jennifer Haigh returns to the vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. From its heyday during two World Wars through its slow decline, Bakerton is a town that refuses to give up gracefully, binding - sometimes cruelly - succeeding generations to the place that made them. A young woman glimpses a world both strange and familiar when she becomes a live-in maid for a Jewish family in New York City. A long-absent brother makes a sudden and tragic homecoming.

Born to a Russian family of lower nobility, Xenia, an eccentric dreamer who cares little for social conventions, falls in love with Andrei, a charismatic soldier and singer in the Empress's Imperial choir. Though husband and wife adore each other, their happiness is overshadowed by the absurd demands of life at the royal court and by Xenia's growing obsession with having a child - a desperate need that is at last fulfilled with the birth of her daughter. But then a tragic vision comes true, and a shattered Xenia descends into grief, undergoing a profound transformation that alters the course of her life.

Mt. Shasta is far from the San Francisco sidewalk on which Harlan Donnally’s life nearly ended in a crossfire - But all too close to a decades - old secret that will force him into another. The former detective swore he’d never play anyone’s postman. But a dying friend’s plea takes Donnally bearing a letter alive with tragedy toward a sister long dead - the victim of the bizarre criminality of a counterculture that had lost its way. Stunned to learn that her killer was never prosecuted, Donnally soon finds himself in battle against a broken justice system....

At 12, Emily Parmenter is left mostly to herself after her mother disappears and her beloved older brother dies. Emily has built a life around the faded plantation where her remote father and hunting-obsessed brothers raise hunting spaniels. It is a meager, masculine world, but to Emily it has magic. And then comes Lulu Foxworth, troubled daughter of a truly grand plantation, who has run away from her hectic Charleston debutante season.

Attention fans of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood! Here's a lively multigenerational tale of a family of charming, unforgettable Southern women, a story of love and laughter, pain and redemption that you are sure to treasure.

Adventure and calamity strike when a model wife and mother takes an uncharacteristic risk. She joins her daughter and sister for a roadtrip along the San Andreas Fault, just as a major earthquake hits. The quake causes extensive damage and strands the women for days. Best-selling novelist Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Downtown and Colony, charts this remarkable trip that forever transforms these three strong women and their relationships to one another.

The New York Times best-selling author of the much-beloved The Saving Graces is back with a warm, winning new novel about daring to love, braving a loss, and learning to live a little.

Set in the waning years of the Cold War, a stunning debut novel about a trio of young Armenians that moves from the Soviet Union, across Europe, to Southern California, and at its center, one of the most tragic cataclysms in twentieth-century history - the Armenian Genocide - whose traumatic reverberations will have unexpected consequences on all three lives.

June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report that an aviator from Idaho witnessed nine pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any aircraft built by humankind. Days later, a desperate Chicago pool hustler, inspired by the news, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream search for a possible extraterrestrial sign. From those he inspires along the way to the Cascades comes a new community - “The Seekers” - devoted to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the past.