Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in Literary Fiction

Raised in a funeral home, Caroline Connors saw her mother miscarry when she was just a young girl and realized that she had a calling. Unlike her family, who guided souls on their way out, Caro chose to bring them in. As a doula, Caro spent years providing comfort and emotional support to women in labor. But when her best friend, Mary Grace, experiences complications, she makes a quick decision, taking the baby’s life into her hands as her lifelong friend passes away.

More savage than civilized, Noleen is a rare character from a Dublin long forgotten, where Nelson’s Pillar still stands in O’Connell Street - but not for long - and where untamed musicians gather in the O’Feeneys’ kitchen to raise a jar and the roof. Noleen’s father, a successful actor and scoundrel king of the city, does his best to destroy his family, while her mother tries to save it. Noleen schemes to make it through each Dublin day, cadging sweets and growing tough in the midst of chaos.

In the late 19th century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a cauldron of undeclared class warfare where reputations were made and lost in a whirlwind of parties and fancied slights. Sam Driver, railroad mogul and one of the few surviving robber barons of the lawless years after the Civil War, knocks on the door of fabled Newport, along with his daughter, Jenny, who is determined not to be turned away.

When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was a carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.

Meet three extraordinary women: Charlie Kate, a renowned folk healer; Sophia, her spirited daughter; and Margaret, her inquisitive granddaughter. For them, home is the best house in the worst part of town - a sanctuary where life is both celebrated and mourned...and a place where a strong, uncompromising love can hold off the misery that lines up outside the door.

Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate is a woman at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up increasingly aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. On the eve of the Civil War, she secedes from her father's control to marry a distinguished Boston surgeon. But when the war destroys their happy home, Emma Garnet begins the journey of her own reconstruction.

Kaye Gibbons' award-winning novels of Southern family life have won rave reviews coast to coast. Now, she tells the "story of family dislocation and crisis in restrained prose of unflinching clarity, with a honing eye for the small domestic details that conjure a time, place, and emotional atmosphere," according to Publishers Weekly.

Marjolijn van Heemstra has heard about her great-uncle's heroism for as long as she can remember. As a resistance fighter, he was the mastermind of a bombing operation that killed a Dutch man who collaborated with the Nazis and later became a hero to everyone in the family. So, when Marjolijn's grandmother bestows her with her great-uncle's signet ring requesting that she name her future son after him, Marjolijn can't say no. Now pregnant with her firstborn, she embarks on a quest to uncover the true story behind the myth of her late relative.

Long ago, Queen Mirantha vanished. King Karolje claimed she was assassinated by a neighboring ruler, but her people knew the truth: The king had disappeared her himself. Now the queen’s disappearance is hardly a memory - merely one among many horrors the king’s reign has wrought. But when Anza, a young student impassioned by her father’s unjust execution, finds the missing queen’s diary, she is inspired by Mirantha’s words - she joins the resistance group to overthrow the king.

Molly Bit is a great actress. From her first acting classes to her big break she is different from the others struggling to make it. But fame is perilous. She uses - and is used by - the Hollywood system. Her collaborator is an addict. The producer who promises her stardom is ruthless and unhinged by grief. Fans, friends, strangers - they want and want. And one dangerously obsessed fan will take everything.

Exhausted by dead-end forays in the gay dating scene, surrounded constantly by friends but deeply lonely in New York City, and drifting into academic abyss, 20-something graduate student Richard has plenty of sources of anxiety. But at the forefront is his crippling writer’s block, which threatens daily to derail his graduate funding and leave Richard poor, directionless, and desperately single. Enter Anne: his brilliant classmate who offers to “help” Richard write his papers in exchange for his company, despite Richard’s fairly obvious sexual orientation.

There comes a time when offering your life for your child’s doesn’t work, when you realize that it’ll never be enough. The cold needle in his warm vein was a welcome comfort to my son at first. But then it became the monster that kept us apart. Heroin lied, and my son believed. It took him to a world where the last year didn’t happen, to a place where his father was still alive. What Beck didn’t understand was that it couldn’t bring his father back from the dead. It couldn’t take away his pain, not permanently.

Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures on film a boy falling past her window to his death.

Margot is dead. There's a rumor she died because she couldn't take the pressure of being a pledge. You may not ask what happened to her. It's not your business. But it wasn't a suicide, if you're wondering. Spring Fling will not be cancelled. The deposit is nonrefundable. And Margot would have wanted the sisterhood to continue in her absence, if only to protect her sisters' secrets....

To the people of Bend of the River Road, Maggie Barnes is "the Barnes woman with all the problems." To her family, she is the unpredictable wife, elusive mother, and adored daughter-in-law, and to her maid, Pearl, she is the mistress who must be cared for like a child. Between the suicidal lows and delirious highs, young Hattie Barnes struggles to find a place in her mother's heart. She observes her mother's vain attempts at normalcy, and then watches as she is driven off to the hospital psychiatric ward.

The Maxwells and the Popes have been friends forever. The women were college roommates, their husbands are partners in the same law firm, their kids have grown up next door to each other, and the two families share both vacations and holidays.

Barely able to walk and rendered mute by the cancer metastasizing in his throat, Ulysses S. Grant is scratching out words, hour after hour, day after day. Desperate to complete his memoirs before his death so his family might have some financial security and he some redemption, Grant journeys back in time. Moving from blood-stained battlefields to Gilded Age New York, the novel explores how Grant’s own views on race and Reconstruction changed over time.

When Eden was 10 years old she found her father, David, bleeding on the bathroom floor. The suicide attempt led to her parents’ divorce, and David all but vanished from Eden’s life. Twenty years later, Eden runs a successful catering company and dreams of opening a restaurant. Since childhood, she has heard from her father only rarely, just enough to know that he’s been living on the streets and struggling with mental illness.

Two years after the death of their mother, Jada and Maddy Battle both navigate unplanned pregnancies. Jada, a thirty-one-year-old psychology PhD student living in Pittsburgh, quietly obtains an abortion without telling her husband, but the secret causes turmoil in her already shaky marriage. Back home in rural Pennsylvania, nineteen-year-old Maddy, who spends her time caring for birds at a wildlife rehabilitation center, is paid off by the man who got her pregnant to get an abortion. But an unsettling visit to a crisis pregnancy center adds to her doubts about whether to go through with it.