Audiobooks by Alice LaPlante

Write Yourself Out of a Corner: 100 Exercises to Unlock Creativity

100 imagination-stretching writing exercises inspired by the idea of creative constraints, from the author of The Making of a Story. When you are facing down a blank page (or screen), a constraint-based prompt-for example, 'you must use the words 'cloud' and 'green'' or 'you must set the scene in a crowded grocery store'-can get your brain working in unexpected ways. In this creative writing guide, longtime teacher and novelist Alice LaPlante shares 100 original exercises that will simultaneously push you into a corner and give you the tools to write yourself out of it. LaPlante explains the purpose of each exercise-to sharpen your ear for dialogue, generate surprising images, or access intense emotions-and breaks down student examples to reveal how to achieve these goals. Whether you are looking to jumpstart new ideas or find a fresh angle on a work in progress, and whether you write fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry, Write Yourself Out of a Corner will strengthen your imagination and your craft.

Alice LaPlante (Author), Daniela Acitelli (Narrator)

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Half Moon Bay: A Novel

A smart, haunting tale of psychological suspense from the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind. Jane loses everything when her teenage daughter is killed in a senseless accident. Jane is devastated, but sometime later, she makes one tiny stab at a new life: she moves from San Francisco to the tiny seaside town of Half Moon Bay. She is inconsolable, and yet, as the months go by, she is able to cobble together some version of a job, of friends, of the possibility of peace. And then, children begin to disappear. And soon, Jane sees her own pain reflected in all the parents in the town. She wonders if she will be able to live through the aching loss, the fear all around her. But as the disappearances continue, she begins to see that what her neighbors are wondering is if it is Jane herself who has unleashed the horror of loss. Half Moon Bay is a chilling story about a mother haunted by her past. As Stewart O'Nan said about Turn of Mind—this novel "blindfolds the reader and spins her around."

Alice LaPlante, Alice Laplante (Author), Gabra Zackman (Narrator)

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Turn of Mind

My name is Dr. Jennifer White. I am sixty-four years old. I have dementia. My son, Mark, is twenty-nine. My daughter, Fiona, twenty-four. A caregiver, Magdalena, lives with me. Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind is a spellbinding novel about the disintegration of a strong woman's mind and the unhinging of her family. Dr. Jennifer White, recently widowed and a newly retired orthopedic surgeon, is entering the beginning stages of dementia - where the impossibility of recognizing reality can be both a blessing and a curse. As the story opens, Jennifer's life-long friend and neighbor, Amanda, has been killed, and four fingers surgically removed. Dr. White is the prime suspect in the murder and she herself doesn't know if she did it or not. Narrated in her voice, fractured and eloquent, a picture emerges of the surprisingly intimate, complex alliance between this pair - two proud, forceful women who were at times each other's most formidable adversaries. The women's thirty-year friendship deeply entangled their families, and as the narrative unfolds we see that things were not always as they seemed. Jennifer's deceased husband, James, is clearly not the scion he was thought to be. Her two grown children - Mark, a lawyer, and Fiona, a professor, who now have power over their mother's medical and financial decisions respectively - have agendas of their own. And Magdalena, her brusque live-in caretaker, has a past she hides. As the investigation intensifies, a chilling question persists: is Dr. Jennifer White's shattered memory preventing her from revealing the truth or helping her to hide it? Told through the voice of a woman with a powerful intellect that is maddeningly slipping away, Turn of Mind is not only a suspenseful psychological thriller that pulses with intensity but also a brilliant portrayal of the fragility of consciousness and memory, and of a mind finally turning on itself. "Turn of Mind is bursting with humanity, in full array. Impossible to put down and yet a book not only to be savored, but returned to. A glorious achievement." -Jeffrey Lent

Alice LaPlante (Author), Jean Reed Bahle (Narrator)

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