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Audiobooks Narrated by Debra Monk
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Virginia native Lee Smith has won two O. Henry Awards, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and the Robert Penn Warren Prize for her engaging works. A collection of 14 tales-both new stories and previously published favorites-Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger is sure to delight listeners with its warm humor and unforgettable characters.
The mother of best-selling memoirists Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison, Margaret Robison offers her own version of the events so famously chronicled in her sons' much-talked about works. From one view, Margaret and her husband John's life together began with a sheen of normality: he a successful academic and she an artist, poet, and mother. But when John turns to the bottle, and Margaret sinks farther and farther into mental illness, the cracks in their lives threaten to consume their fragile family.
In Flannery O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, reckless relationships lead to a tragedy that forever alters the town and the author herself.
Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O'Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.
Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies' organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiance, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.
Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to be truly alive, and she seizes it with both hands.
Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses through life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery's observation that "the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
The fiction of Rick Bass has been honored with O. Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Nashville Chrome presents Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed Brown, a family act with a hit record sitting atop 1959's country music charts.
The world at their feet, lives of success seem to spread out before them like an unending highway. But celebrity has its price, and the times ahead will deliver more than their fair share of bumps in the road.
In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilt and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill -- a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine -- where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting and angry God. Behind a facade of false piety, there are sins and secrets in this place that could crush a vibrant yhoung woman's passionate spirit. And here Ellen must find the strength to endure, change, and grow in the all-pervading darkness that threatens to destroy everything she is and everyone she loves.
Juggling a family and a career is never easy—and it's becoming a real challenge for Sheriff Joanna Brady. Coping with the impending delivery of her second child as well as a staff shortage, the last things Joanna needs are two serious crimes.
First, the body of an unidentified man is found in the desert, all of his fingers savagely severed. Following the scant clues, Joanna learns that the victim was an ex-con who had served twenty years in prison after confessing to the murder of his pregnant wife. During his last days he was seen following and photographing a young woman.
Then one of Joanna's officers is brutally attacked while on an unauthorized stakeout. Because the officer is one of it's own, the department throws its resources into finding her attacker. But the murder haunts Joanna. Being a sheriff has become what she is and she'll risk everything to see that justice is done.
Caroline Venable has everything her Southern heritage promised: money, prestige, a rich husband. If she drinks a little too much and her 20-year marriage to successful land developer, Clay, seems a little empty, well, she's doing what she was born to do: be the chatelaine of a magnificent home and hostess to her husband's friends and prospective clients.
Her numbing routine of country-club luncheons, cocktail parties, and increasing isolation is interrupted, however, when Caro finds out that her tycoon husband plans to build a resort on a beautiful untouched island in South Carolina's low country. The island is a quiet haven, rich in lowcountry history and meaningful memories from Caro's youth. But most important to her, his plans will mean the devastation of a band of wild ponies that roam freely across the island. Spurred to action and inspired with new purpose, Caro must confront the life she has been leading and reach deep within herself to save this special place out of her past and, ultimately, make a meaningful life for herself.
Return with New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance to the red-streaked desert of Cochise County, Arizona, in her most memorable and stunning work yetFor Sheriff Joanna Brady and her 12-year old daughter Jenny, an innocent Girl Scout camp-out turns into a lethal game when Jenny and her tentmate, Dora Matthews, discover a murdered Phoenix woman.Back at home, Joanna's main concern is helping her daughter recover from this terrible trauma -- even as she attends to the demands of a new marriage and a possible reelection campaign. But then Dora turns up dead ... and instantly Joanna's concern turns to terror. For if the killer is murdering potential witnesses, Sheriff Brady's beloved daughter may be next.
Smart, attractive, and fiercely independent, Major Holly Barker, the army brat daughter of a master sergeant, has been forced into early retirement at the age of thirty-seven as the result of a scandalous sexual harassment case. With the help of her dad, she makes the move to civilian life, becoming deputy chief of police in Orchid Beach, Florida.
But below the calm, sunny surface of this sleepy, well-to-do coastal island town lies a web of evil and deceit that escalates when a colleague and another associate are brutally gunned down. Alone, an outsider with no clues to go on, finding the killers won't be easy for Holly, and her seemingly low-key new career soon thrusts her into a dangerous game of cat and mouse. Surrounded by a staff of officers she neither knows nor trusts, Holly finds help in a most unexpected source -- Daisy, a Doberman of exceptional intelligence and loyalty who quickly becomes her inseparable companion and protector. The closer she gets to unraveling the mystery of Orchid Beach, however, the nearer Holly comes to a danger darker and more deadly than any she could have ever anticipated.
By the #1 bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Bella Tuscany and In Tuscany, Swan is a haunting novel set in the deep South — a resonant tale of long-buried family secrets and mysteries brought suddenly to light.
In her celebrated memoirs of life in Tuscany, Frances Mayes writes masterfully about people in a powerful and shaping place. In Swan, her first novel, she has created an equally intimate world, rich with striking characters and intriguing twists of fate, that hearkens back to her southern roots.
The Masons are a prominent but now fragmented family who have lived for generations in Swan, an edenic, hidebound small town in Georgia. As Swan opens, a bizarre crime pulls Ginger Mason home from her life as an archeologist in Italy: The body of her mother, Catherine, a suicide nineteen years before, has been mysteriously exhumed. Reunited on new terms with her troubled, isolated brother J.J., who has never ventured far from Swan, the Mason children grapple with the profound effects of their mother’s life and death on their own lives. When a new explanation for Catherine’s death emerges, and other closely guarded family secrets rise to the surface as well, Ginger and J.J. are confronted with startling truths about their family, a particular ordeal in a family and a town that wants to keep the past buried.
Beautifully evoking the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the deep South while telling an utterly compelling story of the complexity of family ties, Swan marks the remarkable fiction debut of one of America’s best-loved writers.
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