“Ofelia—tough, kind, wise and unwise, fond of food, tired of foolish people—is one of the most probable heroines science fiction has ever known.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, multiple-award-winning science fiction author
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- Remnant Population
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Directed by Jayme Mattler
Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 11/03/20
Formats: Digital Audy
For forty years, Colony 3245.12 has been Ofelia’s home. On this planet far away in space and time from the world of her youth, she has lived and loved, weathered the death of her husband, raised her one surviving child, lovingly tended her garden, and grown placidly old. And it is here that she fully expects to finish out her days—until the shifting corporate fortunes of the Sims Bancorp Company dictates that Colony 3245.12 is to be disbanded, its residents shipped off, deep in cryo-sleep, to somewhere new and strange and not of their choosing. But while her fellow colonists grudgingly anticipate a difficult readjustment on some distant world, Ofelia savors the promise of a golden opportunity. Not starting over in the hurly-burly of a new community … but closing out her life in blissful solitude, in the place she has no intention of leaving. A population of one.
With everything she needs to sustain her, and her independent spirit to buoy her, Ofelia actually does start life over–for the first time on her own terms: free of the demands, the judgments, and the petty tyrannies of others. But when a reconnaissance ship returns to her idyllic domain, and its crew is mysteriously slaughtered, Ofelia realizes she is not the sole inhabitant of her paradise after all. And, when the inevitable time of first contact finally arrives, she will find her life changed yet again—in ways she could never have imagined …
- Remnant Population
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Directed by Jayme Mattler
Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 11/03/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Two Worlds and In Between
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 6/30/20
Formats: Digital Audy
Two Worlds and in Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan presents a stunning retrospective of the first ten years of the author’s work. It is a compilation of more than 200,000 words of short fiction, including many of her most acclaimed stories as well as some of the author’s personal favorites; several previously uncollected, hard-to-find pieces; her sci-fi novella, The Dry Salvages; and a rare collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite.
- Two Worlds and In Between
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 6/30/20
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Collected Stories
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By Saul Bellow
Preface by Janis Bellow
Introduction by James Wood
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 7/30/19
Formats: Digital Audy
A collection of treasured stories by the unchallenged master of American fiction
Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America’s greatest writers. For more than sixty years he stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” “Leaving the Yellow House,” and a previously uncollected piece, “By the St. Lawrence.” With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new readers.
- Collected Stories
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By Saul Bellow
Preface by Janis Bellow
Introduction by James Wood
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 7/30/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
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By Jane Yolen
Introduction by Marissa Meyer
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
Fantasy icon Jane Yolen is adored by generations of readers of all ages. Now she triumphantly returns with this inspired gathering of fractured fairy tales and legends. Yolen breaks open the classics to reveal their crystalline secrets: a philosophical bridge that misses its troll, a spinner of straw as a falsely accused moneylender, the villainous wolf adjusting poorly to retirement. Each of these offerings features a new author note and original poem, illuminating tales that are old, new, and brilliantly refined.
- How to Fracture a Fairy Tale
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By Jane Yolen
Introduction by Marissa Meyer
Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 5/28/19
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Truth about Grace
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Read by Suzanne Toren, Bahni Turpin, Janina Edwards, and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/06/18
Formats: Digital Audy
In this sequel to The Pecan Man, Eldred Mims has died in prison after serving time for a crime he did not commit. When Ora Lee Beckworth decides to set the record straight, her confession leaves Blanche Lowery’s daughters, Patrice and Grace, to grapple with the aftermath of a lifetime of lies. Now the sisters must reframe everything they thought they knew about their mother, their brother, and the man they knew as Eddie.
- The Truth about Grace
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Read by Suzanne Toren, Bahni Turpin, Janina Edwards, and Kevin Kenerly
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Release Date: 11/06/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- My Real Name Is Hanna
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 9/15/18
Formats: Digital Audy
Inspired by real Holocaust events, this poignant historical novel is a powerful coming-of-age story.
Hanna Slivka is on the cusp of fourteen when Hitler’s army crosses the border into Soviet-occupied Ukraine. Soon, the Gestapo closes in, determined to make the shtetele she lives in “free of Jews.” Until the German occupation, Hanna spent her time exploring Kwasova with her younger siblings, admiring the drawings of the handsome Leon Stadnick, and helping her neighbor dye decorative pysanky eggs. But now she, Leon, and their families are forced to flee and hide in the forest outside their shtetele—and then in the dark caves beneath the rolling meadows, rumored to harbor evil spirits.
Underground, they battle sickness and starvation, while the hunt continues above. When Hanna’s father disappears, suddenly it’s up to Hanna to find him—and to find a way to keep the rest of her family, and friends, alive.
Sparse, resonant, and lyrical, weaving in tales of Jewish and Ukrainian folklore, My Real Name Is Hanna celebrates the sustaining bonds of family, the beauty of a helping hand, and the tenacity of the human spirit.
- My Real Name Is Hanna
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 9/15/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- We, the Jury
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 7/30/18
Formats: Digital Audy
“We, the Jury has what most legal thrillers lack—total authenticity, which is spellbinding.” —James Patterson
On the day before his twenty-first wedding anniversary, David Sullinger buried an ax in his wife’s skull. Now, eight jurors must retire to the deliberation room and decide whether David committed premeditated murder—or whether he was a battered spouse who killed his wife in self-defense.
Told from the perspective of over a dozen participants in a murder trial, We, the Jury examines how public perception can mask the ghastliest nightmares. As the jurors stagger toward a verdict, they must sift through contradictory testimony from the Sullingers’ children, who disagree on which parent was Satan; sort out conflicting allegations of severe physical abuse, adultery, and incest; and overcome personal animosities and biases that threaten a fair and just verdict. Ultimately, the central figures in We, the Jury must navigate the blurred boundaries between bias and objectivity, fiction and truth.
- We, the Jury
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 7/30/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 5/31/18
Formats: Digital Audy
The elusive lover of Do Not Find Me returns to tell her side of the story in The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard.
From her hapless childhood under Nazi occupation to her life as a woman of letters in present-day New York City, Corrine remains scrappy and wise. As a schoolgirl in Paris, she goes her own way, disinterested in most friendships, intensely drawn to the heroines she finds in literature and daring in the favors she is willing to trade with boys. When she is seventeen, she travels to America to visit her godmother and meets Charles Bernard, whose wealth and ruthlessness will alter the entire course of her life.
In a bold and mesmerizing voice, Corrine details her intense pull toward Charles, her lifelong attraction to the blue-eyed Italian named Gigi Paulo, and her observations of Paris, New York, St. John’s, and London as she roams in exile for decades of her life. Dear Reader, she begins, I have my tales to tell. And so she does in this dark and compelling novel.
Corrine will surprise you, confide in you, and ultimately win you, despite her ferocious and singular ways. The severed heart beats wildly beneath the floor boards. Do you hear it, she asks. By the end of her story, you will, dear reader, you will.
- The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 5/31/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- A Blueprint for War
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By Susan Dunn
Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 4/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
In the cold winter months that followed Franklin Roosevelt’s election in November 1940 to an unprecedented third term in the White House, he confronted a worldwide military and moral catastrophe. Almost all the European democracies had fallen under the ruthless onslaught of the Nazi army and air force. Great Britain stood alone, a fragile bastion between Germany and American immersion in war. In the Pacific world, Japan had extended its tentacles deeper into China.
Susan Dunn dramatically brings to life the most vital and transformational period of Roosevelt’s presidency: the hundred days between December 1940 and March 1941, when he mobilized American industry, mustered the American people, initiated the crucial programs and approved the strategic plans for America’s leadership in World War II. As the nation began its transition into the preeminent military, industrial, and moral power on the planet, FDR laid out the stunning blueprint not only for war but for the American Century.
- A Blueprint for War
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By Susan Dunn
Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 4/17/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Winter Kept Us Warm
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By Anne Raeff
Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 2/13/18
Formats: Digital Audy
Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She’s scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York.
Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives—from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco. A marriage, two children, and yet only one parent—at the core of this novel is the mystery of how this came to be. Not a chronological narrative, it explores the dark corners and lantern slides of these characters’ lives, revealing in pieces and fragments what became of their long-ago love triangle set against the brutality of postwar living.
Winter Kept Us Warm is an evocative story of family, strained by the cruelty of war and its generational repercussions; a novel of the heart, filled to the brim with unforgettable characters stitching together the deep threads of love, friendship, loyalty, and of course, loss.
- Winter Kept Us Warm
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By Anne Raeff
Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 2/13/18
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Nuclear Family
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Performed by a full cast
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Release Date: 7/18/17
Formats: Digital Audy
From filmmaker and New Yorker contributor Susanna Fogel comes a comedic novel about a fractured family of New England Jews and their discontents. Told entirely in letters to a heroine we never meet, we get to know the Fellers through their check-ins with Julie over the course of three decades: their thank-you notes, letters of condolence, family gossip, and good old-fashioned familial passive-aggression.
Together, their missives—some sardonic, others absurd, others heartbreaking—weave a tapestry of a very modern family trying (and often failing) to show one another they care.
The titular “nuclear family” includes, among many others, a narcissistic former-child-prodigy father who has taken up haiku writing in his old age and his new wife, a traditional Chinese woman whose attempts to help her stepdaughter find a man include FedExing her silk gowns from Filene’s Basement; their six-year-old son, Stuart, whose favorite condiment is truffle oil and who wears suits to bed; and Julie’s mother, a psychologist who never remarried but may be in love with her arrogant Rabbi and overshares about everything, including the threesome she had with Dutch grad students in 1972.
- Nuclear Family
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Performed by a full cast
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Release Date: 7/18/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Evensong
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 5/16/17
Formats: Digital Audy
Margaret Maguire, a widow and grandmother home from the hospital in time for Christmas, is no longer able to ignore the consequences of having married an imperious and arrogant man. Despite her efforts to be a good wife and mother in small-town Iowa, her adult children are now strangers to one another, past hope of reconciliation. Margaret’s granddaughter could be the one to break the cycle, but she can’t do it without Margaret’s help. It’s time to take stock, to examine the past—even time for Margaret to call herself to account.
By turns tenacious and tender, contrary and wry, Margaret examines her life’s tragedies and joys, motivations and choices, coming to view herself and the past with compassion, if not entirely with forgiveness. Beautifully rendered and poignantly told, Evensong is a realistic portrait of a woman searching for tranquility at the end of her days.
- Evensong
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 5/16/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Blue Hour
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/14/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The tight-knit residents of Blue Moon Mountain, nestled high in the Colorado Mountains, form an interconnected community of those living off the land, stunned by the beauty and isolation all around them. So when, at the onset of winter, the town veterinarian commits a violent act, the repercussions of that tragedy will be felt all across the mountainside, upending their lives and causing their paths to twist and collide in unexpected ways.
The housecleaner rediscovering her sexual appetite, the farrier who must take in his traumatized niece, the grocer and her daughter, the therapist and the teacher, reaching out to the world in new and surprising ways, and the ragged couple trapped in a cycle of addiction and violence. They will all rise and converge upon the blue hour—the l’heure bleu—the hour of twilight, a time of desire, lust, honesty. The strong, spirited people of Blue Moon Mountain must learn to navigate the line between violence and sex, tenderness and the hard edge of yearning, and the often confusing paths of mourning and lust.
Writing with passion for rural lives and the natural world, Laura Pritchett, who has been called “one of the most accomplished writers of the American West,” graces the land of desire in vivid prose, exploring the lengths these moving, deeply felt characters—some of whom we’ve met in Pritchett’s previous work—will traverse to protect their own.
- The Blue Hour
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Read by various narrators
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Release Date: 2/14/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Distress Signals
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Read by Alan Smyth, Bronson Pinchot, and Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 2/02/17
Formats: Digital Audy
The acclaimed debut thriller from the internationally bestselling author of The Liar’s Girl and 56 Days
The day Adam Dunne’s girlfriend, Sarah, fails to return from a Barcelona business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart. Days later, the arrival of her passport and a note that reads “I’m sorry—S” sets off real alarm bells. He vows to do whatever it takes to find her.
Adam is puzzled when he connects Sarah to a cruise ship called the Celebrate—and to a woman, Estelle, who disappeared from the same ship in eerily similar circumstances almost exactly a year before.
To get answers, Adam must confront some difficult truths about his relationship with Sarah. He must do things of which he never thought himself capable. And he must try to outwit a predator who seems to have found the perfect hunting ground.
- Distress Signals
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Read by Alan Smyth, Bronson Pinchot, and Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 2/02/17
Formats: Digital Audy
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- Illumination Night
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 8/01/14
Formats: Digital Audy
Beginning on the night of the Grand Illumination, a festival of lanterns held each summer on Martha’s Vineyard, this novel is a modern chronicle of a marriage and a bittersweet exploration of an extraordinary passion. Illumination Night follows the lives of a young blond giant who is as beautiful as he is frightening; an old woman at the end of her life whose last mission is to save her granddaughter’s soul; a family torn apart by a wife’s fears and a husband’s unrealized desires; and the high school girl who comes to Martha’s Vineyard against her will, who steals husbands and cars, and who will bring everyone together in a web of yearning, sin, and ultimate redemption. Both riveting and reflective, this is a story that brings to light the talent that has made Alice Hoffman an acclaimed bestselling author.
- Illumination Night
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 8/01/14
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Pecan Man
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 7/01/14
Formats: Digital Audy
The Pecan Man is a beautiful work of Southern fiction whose first chapter was the first-place winner of the 2006 CNW/FFWA Florida State Writing Competition in the unpublished novel category.
In the summer of 1976, recently widowed and childless, Ora Lee Beckworth hires a homeless old black man to mow her lawn. The neighborhood children call him the Pee-can Man; their mothers call them inside whenever he appears. When the police chief's son is found stabbed to death near his camp, the man Ora knows as Eddie is arrested and charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, Ora sets out to tell the truth about the Pecan Man. In narrating her story, Ora discovers more about herself than she could ever have imagined. This novel has been described as To Kill a Mockingbird meets The Help.
- The Pecan Man
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 7/01/14
Formats: Digital Audy
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- One Was a Soldier
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 4/12/11
Formats: Digital Audy
At the Millers Kill community center, five veterans gather to work on adjusting to life after war. Reverend Clare Fergusson has returned from Iraq with a head full of bad memories she's using alcohol to wipe out. And down-on-her-luck Tally McNabb has brought home a secret—a fatal one. Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne just wants Clare to settle down and get married—to him. But when he rules Tally McNabb's death a suicide, Clare sides with the other vets against him. Russ and Clare's unorthodox investigation will uncover a trail of deceit that runs from their tiny Adirondack town to the upper ranks of the Army, and from the waters of the Millers Kill to the unforgiving streets of Baghdad.
- One Was a Soldier
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 4/12/11
Formats: Digital Audy
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- I Shall Not Want
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 6/17/08
Formats: Digital Audy
In the searing conclusion to All Mortal Flesh, Russ's balance between duty and desire was broken by his wife's tragic death. Now, Russ and Episcopal priest Clare Fergusson are separated by a wall of guilt and grief. When a Mexican farmhand stumbles over a Latino man killed with a single shot to the back of his head, Clare is drawn into the investigation. The discovery of two more bodies ignites fears that a serial killer is loose in the rural town while Russ is plagued by the media hysteria, conflict within the police department, and a series of baffling assaults. Throughout the escalating tensions, he and Clare find themselves seeking each other out even as they intend to keep distant.
- I Shall Not Want
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 6/17/08
Formats: Digital Audy
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- The Zookeeper’s Wife
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 1/01/07
Formats: Digital Audy
The New York Times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain.
A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history.
Drawing on Antonina’s diary and other historical sources, bestselling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their “guests”: resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinski’s young son risked his life carrying food to the guests, while also tending to an eccentric array of creatures in the house: pigs, hare, muskrat, foxes, and more. With hidden people having animal names and pet animals having human names, it’s a small wonder the zoo’s code name became “The House under a Crazy Star.” Yet there is more to this story than a colorful cast. With her exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the fascinating and disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.
- The Zookeeper’s Wife
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Read by Suzanne Toren
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Release Date: 1/01/07
Formats: Digital Audy