Showing results by narrator "Cassandra Campbell" in All Categories

In Barbara Quick's luminous novel, 18th-century Venice comes to life in all its splendor and decadence. The Grand Inquisitor's spies lurk everywhere, and yet the city's inhabitants abandon themselves to the revelry and masques of Carnival for half the year. This is the world as seen beyond the barred windows of her cloister by 14-year-old Anna Maria dal Violin, one of the orphan musicians of the Ospedale della Pietà, where Antonio Vivaldi is resident priest and composer.

Faye Longchamp doesn't believe in ghosts. But she's an archaeologist - dead people are her life. While working in Rosebower, a rural New York town founded by spiritualists, Faye is surrounded by people who talk to the dead on a regular basis. When the most influential spiritualist in town, Tilda Armistead, invites Faye and her project assistant to commune with the dead, she can't say no. An hour later, her crystal ball shows Faye things no rational mind can explain. Tilda is dead.

The Sparrow Sisters are as tightly woven into the seaside New England town of Granite Point as the wild sweet peas that climb the stone walls along the harbor. Sorrel, Nettie, and Patience are as colorful as the beach plums on the dunes and as mysterious as the fog that rolls into town at dusk.

Haunted by an unfathomable tragedy in a Michigan copper-mining town, Fenna Vos has learned to focus on her own survival, even as World War II rages on. Now, she performs with an escape artist. Her honed ability to control her surroundings and elude entrapments, physical or otherwise, helps her run from the trauma of her youth. Then, Fenna is recruited by British intelligence.

A happily married woman's perfect life shatters when her husband turns up dead hundreds of miles away from where he should have been, and she suddenly discovers there was a part of him about which she knew nothing.

In 1918, a fearless 22-year-old arrives in bohemian San Francisco from the Northeast, determined to make her own way. Renaming herself Dorothea Lange, she is soon the celebrated owner of the city’s most prestigious and stylish portrait studio. By the early 1930s, determined to expose the horrific conditions of the nation’s poor, she takes to the road with her camera, creating images that inspire, reform, and define the era. And when the US enters World War II, Dorothea chooses to confront another injustice - the incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese Americans.

Since childhood, spending those cherished days with her father in his greenhouse, Rose Fiorni always understood the power of flowers to comfort and uplift a human heart. And now as adult, she needs uplifting bad. Single and unemployed, she’s back living at home with her parents in the old neighborhood along New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her dream airline career is more than grounded. It’s gone for good. At least by moving home she has Vinnie Scorsese, the boy she used to dream of marrying. Her long-time crush on Vinnie is stronger than ever.

Unemployed business major, Penny, has rebelled against her family her whole life – by being the conventional one. Her mother was a member of a South American tribe; her father was a Jewish Shamanist with a psychedelic 'healing centre'. But everything changes when her father dies and Penny inherits his childhood home.

A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the 90s, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace.

An intimate portrait of a celebrated magic life and the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with, played with, and the decades of friendship with everyone from Truman Capote and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, the Bernsteins, Alexander Calder, John Hersey, and Lillian Hellman.

When the four adult sons of recently retired Senator John Bright, and their significant others, join their parents at the family’s Berkshire compound for their mandatory summer vacation, the matriarch Patty decides to hire a documentary filmmaker to memorialize their time together. The Brights, a family of outsized pride, are beautiful, competitive, athletic, and terrible… They have everything they need, except the ability to see themselves clearly. Naturally, they let their guard down.

Emily Covington has turned her life around after a drug addiction, but her family still has trouble trusting her. Though Emily has committed herself to a year-long treatment program and has been sober for almost a year beyond that, even her mother walks on eggshells around her, fearing she’ll relapse. After her behavior during her drug years, Emily realizes she has a lot to prove. When police discover a homemade bomb under Emily’s car, and she then learns the wife of one of her friends was murdered that same morning, she knows things are deadly serious.

Lincoln is a good boy. At the age of four, he is curious, clever and well behaved. He does as his mum says and knows what the rules are. 'The rules are different today. The rules are that we hide and do not let the man with the gun find us.' When an ordinary day at the zoo turns into a nightmare, Joan finds herself trapped with her beloved son. She must summon all her strength, find unexpected courage and protect Lincoln at all costs - even if it means crossing the line between right and wrong.

Gilbert Sinclair is going to marry an heiress. With his latest business venture sunk at the bottom of Lake Superior, he needs money to replace the steamship he lost. He heads to Chicago, where his father's business connections should land him a suitable wife. Like most things in his meticulously planned life, everything goes as expected - until he discovers Rebekah Cummings working as the new cook on his ship.

From the time she is nine years old and discovers a “Private Way” full of the wonderful and creepy creatures of the wild - spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and foxes - Lauren Slater finds in animals a refuge from the troubled life of her suburban home. As she matures, her bond with animals - raccoons, horses, swans, cats, and primarily, dogs - strengthens and grows more complex and compelling. They offer relief from the pain of her mother’s mental illness.

Victoria Donnelly wants to do something right at least once in her lifetime. Her plan to redeem herself requires her to return to her hometown of Eagle Harbor, where forgotten feelings for a man she can never have lie buried. Elijah Cummings has loved Victoria for 15 years. But fishermen's sons don't marry shipping barons' daughters. Resolved to keep his distance from Victoria, Elijah focuses on establishing a much-needed life-saving station...until he learns she's about to make an irreversible decision, one she'll spend the rest of her life regretting.

In Carbide Tipped Pens,over a dozen of today's most creative imaginations explore these frontiers, carrying on the grand tradition of such legendary masters as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and John W. Campbell, while bringing hard science fiction into the 21st century by extrapolating from the latest scientific developments and discoveries.

From the time she was a little girl with a chocolate stand instead of lemonade, Alice Bailey dreamt of opening a chocolate shop. After all, chocolate heals everything, from heartache to woes. If Alice has learned anything recently, it's that life is precious. It’s now or never - carpe diem time. She's ready to put down roots and live her dreams.

When 39-year-old Maria Forssmann wakes up in her 17-year-old body, she doesn’t know how she got there. All she does know is she has to get back: to her home in Bienville, Mississippi, to her job as a successful psychiatrist and, most importantly, to her husband, daughters, and unborn son.

The last thing Rudy expected was to wake up one Saturday morning, a widower at 54 years old. Now, 10 months after the untimely death of his beloved wife, he’s still not sure how to move on from the tragedy - but his new job is helping. After being downsized, Rudy turned to his first love: the piano. Some people might be embarrassed to work as the piano player at Nordstrom, but for Rudy, there’s joy in it. And it doesn’t hurt that Sasha, the Hungarian watch clerk who is finally divorcing her no-good husband, finds time to join him at the bench every now and then.