Showing results by narrator "Laurel Lefkow" in All Categories

Fifteen years ago Nora Watts gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Now Bonnie has vanished, and when the police don't seem to care, her desperate parents turn to Nora as a last resort. Nora knows only too well what happens to missing girls, especially when they aren't blonde or white enough. Despite herself, she sets out to find the daughter she's never known protected only by her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.

Meet the courageous Mrs Annie Edson Taylor. The bravest woman you've never heard of and the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel – over a decade before any male daredevil had the balls to do the same! From the author of the bestselling Heather's Picks title Mrs Van Gogh: a gripping historical novel inspired by a true story.

After a lifetime spent living firmly in English, Lauren Collins finds herself adrift in French-speaking Geneva. Having fallen in love with Olivier, a Frenchman, Lauren wakes up one day to the realisation that she is living in a community where she cannot speak the language and that she is married to a man whose name she doesn't dare speak in public, for fear of mispronunciation. A New Yorker journalist skilled at making a living through her writing, Lauren is suddenly no longer able to communicate with the local shop owners, let alone her in-laws.

Mankind has spread out and conquered the galaxy by mastering the fundamental language of the universe. With the right training, the right application of words, truth itself can be rearranged. Language is literally power. Peace reigns now. Order reigns. For if a planet deviates too far from what the authorities plan, an agent is sent out to correct that. To quietly and with great skill, end that world. One such agent is Elyth - a true believer.

An idyllic weekend camping trip is cut short when Reese Wallace's friends are brutally murdered. As the group's only survivor, Reese is the prime suspect, and his story doesn't make much sense. A disembodied voice warning him to leave the campground the night before? A strange, blackened tree that gave him an electric shock when he cut it down for firewood?

Leah Garcés has dedicated her career to fighting for the rights of the animals that end up on our plates. As the former US Executive Director of Compassion in World Farming and the current President of the nonprofit group Mercy for Animals, she has led the fight against the sprawling chicken industry that raises billions of birds in cruel conditions - all to satisfy our appetite for meat.

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.

"My darling girls. You were once so happy in this house. Now I’m gone, all I ask is that you spend one last summer here together on Dune Island. And please forgive me, your Nana, for the secret I’m about to tell you..." Arriving at the honeysuckle-covered beach house inherited from her beloved grandmother, recently heartbroken Jill hopes to convince her two feuding sisters not to sell a place so full of happy childhood memories. But the envelope waiting on the driftwood table changes everything.

Berlin, 1936. The Landau family are at the heart of their community, running a music shop in Berlin and just trying to survive. But their lives are unravelling as Hitler's power increases and the treatment of Jewish families deteriorates. Eldest daughter, Rachel, fears for her sisters' future and will do anything she can to keep them safe. Will she find hope in the darkness? Paris, 1936. As whispers of war travel over from Europe, American debutante Kay escapes her mother's grasp and travels as a reluctant spy from Paris to Berlin.

When a young woman makes a distressing middle-of-the-night call to 911, apparently running for her life in a quiet, exclusive beachside neighbourhood, miles from her home, everything suggests a domestic incident. Except no one has seen her since, and something doesn’t sit right with the officers at Hampstead County PD.

Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough.

In an elaborate house known as the Cloisters, Maud Wainwright rules supreme. The queen of society in the small town of Beverly, she has a table long enough to seat 100, and she keeps an iron grip on the guest list. Her right-hand woman is Pat Abbott, a local girl who is beautiful, innocent, and kind. Pat has no idea how cutthroat high society can be, but she's about to get a deadly first lesson.

A darker force is festering in Enderlain’s underbelly, and Mikira, Ari, Damien, and Reid will need to find a way back to each other — and themselves — before the kingdom is torn apart. Hearts will be broken and new bonds will be forged in this explosive finale to This Dark Descent, where spellbinding fantasy meets Jewish mythology in a cutthroat race for the throne — and Enderlain’s survival.

At the height of the Cold War, words are weapons and secrecy reigns. These are challenging times to be a writer and a wife, as Nell Benjamin knows only too well. One bright November day in 1963, the dazzling young president arrives in Texas and Nell receives a phonecall that overturns the world as she knows it. In the shocking aftermath, whilst America mourns, Nell must come to terms with both a tragedy and a betrayal that shatters every illusion of the man she thought she knew better than anyone else.

On the eve of her wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband to come home, listening for his car along the dark, icy roads. As the night draws on, and he fails to appear, Mary reflects on the true nature of their marriage: the secrets, the silences, and the unmentionable yet inescapable fact that for each loss and disappointment, there has been a corresponding physical gain: the woman she once is now imprisoned in mountainous flesh.

Enjoy the holiday season with three festive mysteries set in coastal Maine. This anthology includes "Yule Log Murder" by Leslie Meier, "Death by Yule Log" by Lee Hollis, and "Logged On" by Barbara Ross.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. Human beings are, in the main, social animals, they like to gather, to herd together, to share experiences. But some do not. Either through choice or exclusion their way forward is difficult. In this volume our authors and their characters share their stories.

For 200 years, painters, poets and musicians have come to the Catskill Mountain village of Arcadia Falls to escape the pressures of modern life and pursue their artistic visions, and Arcadia College was founded with a mission to nurture young artists and writers. When Meg Rosenthal gets an offer to teach at Arcadia College, it seems a godsend - an escape from a life that's fallen apart.

Joanna Smith Rakoff's richly drawn and immensely satisfying first novel details the lives of a group of Oberlin graduates whose ambitions and friendships threaten to unravel as they chase their dreams, shed their youth, and build their lives in Brooklyn during the late 1990s and the turn of the 21st century.

Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, this resource helps parents overcome their residual math anxiety and assists them in showing children how to enjoy the subject and excel at it. Packed with useful information and instruction, the audiobook features proven teaching techniques, games, and other activities. Suitable for home schoolers and other parents of children from preschool to age ten.