Showing results by narrator "Gabra Zackman" in All Categories

Coming-of-age meets coming-of-middle-age in this tender exploration of what it means to reinvent yourself. A teenage girl runs away from a life of boredom and poverty, with dreams of becoming a smoke jumper. A middle-aged mother escapes to the mountains to explore her artistic side. Thanks to a snowstorm, Ivy and Mary Ellen find themselves trapped together in an isolated home in the Poconos. Now lying to each other, and themselves, they must confront what kind of people they want to be and - when a near-fatal accident forces them to face the truth - who they really are.

Norwich, a charming Vermont town of roughly 3,000 residents, has sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past 30 years - and three times that athlete has returned with a medal. How does Norwich do it? To answer this question, New York Times reporter Karen Crouse moved to Vermont, immersing herself in the lives of Norwich Olympians past and present. There she discovered a culture that's the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today's tiger moms and eagle dads.

Charles has been gone for months, and Mimi's not feeling like being a private detective anymore. She's had it with the liars and the cheats. Speaking of liars and cheats, when she takes on a missing person case for a new client, she's thrown into a web of lies and deceit that ends in murder. Come along as, once again, Mimi Capurro butts heads with her homicide detective boyfriend, Nick Christianson, when their cases cross paths. What surprises do her client and employees have in store?

What could possibly go wrong with Charles attending a vintage wine auction preview? This is the Gotcha Detective Agency, after all, and what goes wrong makes Mimi and Charles's head spin. And not from too much wine. Mimi, Charles, and Nick fall into a twisted tale of wine fraud and murder in this latest installment of the Gotcha Detective Agency Mystery series.

Bridgette Connor is a woman on the edge. Her career is in tatters, her relationship is doomed, and after an ill-fated pregnancy she terminates against her better judgement, she does the one thing she's always done best. She runs. Her car careens off the road, leaving her battered, bruised, and beaten. It is then that she meets the woman who will change her life. When the bloodied and broken Bridgette Connor collapses at her door, Alexis does the one thing she's always done best. She helps.

Mimi and Charles take some time off from the detective agency to help Charles's friend, Anthony DeLuca, sell his exclusive line of voodoo dolls at a trade show in San Francisco. Mimi is less than thrilled to find out Charles has invited homicide detective Nick Christianson to come along. But as luck would have it, Mimi finds the body of a dead sales rep. When Anthony is implicated in the suspicious death, Mimi is back on the investigative job, and Nick goes off with his old partner at the SFPD, to find a killer.

A thoughtful collection of soul-soothing writing, O's Little Book of Calm & Comfort is the antidote to life's trying times. Featuring essays and interviews from some of the most celebrated contributors to O, the Oprah Magazine, this heartening collection offers solace, wisdom and connection. Among the highlights: Nora Ephron on the state of rapture that comes from a good book; Maeve Binchy on friends; and a conversation between Oprah and the American Buddhist nun Pema Chodron.

A thoughtful collection of soul-soothing writing, O's Little Book of Calm & Comfort is the antidote to life's trying times. Featuring essays and interviews from some of the most celebrated contributors to O, the Oprah Magazine, this heartening collection offers solace, wisdom, and connection.

After twenty years of the American Dream, this AADD afflicted heroine is suddenly alone, left to review where she went wrong. She has mastered her dread of expressway driving but can't sleep without the radio. She despairs that she cooked seven thousand evening meals but sometimes, she misses that awful deadening life. She thinks aerobics and weight training might be the answer but there has to be something more. She joins an Obesity Study to look for her inner self but it freaks her out.

Pittsburgh has recently (and more than once) been called the most livable city in America; yet the old image of smoky skies and steel mills spewing forth grit has never quite disappeared. Its history as a dirty industrial center is a part of its residents, a part of their toughness. The people of the steel city fight.

State Secrets: Secret Service agent David Goddard never expected to spend his Christmas surveilling the president's cousin. But after weeks of studying her, he finds that Holly Llewellyn's life continues to remain a mystery. Tangled in the controversy swirling around them, David wonders, is it her secrets that fascinate him…or Holly herself? The Five Days of Christmas: Morgan Trayhern's toughest mercenary, Colt Hamlin, is looking to lie low this Christmas, but he may just have a change of heart when his matchmaking boss puts him in the path of Montana's prettiest widow.

Modern stories for modern times, Crash Diet is at once brilliant and bitter, happy and heartbreaking. In 11 stories, acclaimed novelist Jill McCorkle tells the varied tales of today's southern women, the lives they end up leading, and the loves that distract them. Sandra knows that the best revenge is her ex-husband's credit card; Ruthie is stuck owning a motel that the highway has bypassed; Anna is a widow who goes to airports and looks in on other people's lives; Bunny waits eagerly for her absent sister's postcards for advice on how to live.

When Jill McCorkle feels a short story coming on, she goes right ahead and "wastes" wonderful ideas instead of hoarding them for a novel. The result is another extraordinary collection of stories and characters. In "It's a Funeral! RSVP," the storyteller is a woman who takes up self-styled "careers" that suit her circumstances. Now she's stumbled onto one that's so successful that she just can't quit. It's planning funerals, what she calls Going Out Parties, in which the clients are the soon-to-be-deceased themselves.

Coast Guard helicopter pilot Olivia Carver is on a very personal mission. Her twin brother, an undercover officer, was murdered by a drug cartel, and she won't stop until she finds the man responsible for his death. In the course of her own investigation, Olivia meets informant Rico Cortes. He's mysterious and sexy, and despite her reservations, the two share a night of passion. But Rico turns out to be more than a one-night stand....

Starting her junior year, Logan McRae is excited about her internship at CRUSH magazine. But she is not so excited about her new boyfriend Jeremy's travel abroad in Ireland. Logan is in over her head trying to balance school, love, and friends, while trying to solve an astrological mystery the fate of a Gemini is star-crossed. Will Logan find out who is in danger before the CRUSH Halloween costume party? Can she prove to the publisher she deserves her own astrology column?

When Kristin L. Hoganson arrived in Champaign, Illinois, after teaching at Harvard, studying at Yale, and living in the DC metro area with various stints overseas, she expected to find her new home, well, isolated. Even provincial. After all, she had landed in the American heartland, a place where the nation's identity exists in its pristine form. Or so we have been taught to believe.

Acclaimed writer Pam Houston says that “Mandelbaum is wise beyond her years and twice as talented”, and The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals poignantly explores the unique love and tension between mothers and daughters and humans and animals alike. Perceptive and funny, moving and eloquent, and ultimately buoyant, Mandelbaum offers a panoramic view of family and forgiveness and of the meaning of home. Her debut reminds us that love provides refuge and underscores our similarities as human beings, no matter how alone or far apart we may feel.

Set in the hardscrabble landscape of early 1900s Oklahoma, but timeless in its sensibility, Prairie Fever traces the dynamic between two sisters: the pragmatic Lorena and the chimerical Elise. Their connection to each other supersedes all else, until the arrival of a schoolteacher sunders the sisters' relationship as they both begin to fall for him. Expansive and intimate, with poetic intensity and deadpan humor, Prairie Fever tells the story of characters tested as much by life on the prairie as they are by their own churning hearts.

Rosie and Laura are as different as two sisters can be. One is stable and has the perfect family. The other struggles to break free from her troubled past. When Laura disappears after going on a blind date, Rosie takes matters into her own hands. But as Rosie begins to search for her sister, her greatest fears come to the surface. Could Laura be more of a danger than the stranger she meets, or is the night before her last night alive?

In one week, Karen Carmody, 30, manages to lose both her job and sublet. She’s unemployed, broke, and homeless. As with every era, heartless landlords and high rents rule in 1980s Manhattan, landing Karen in the Arcadia, a “Home for Young Ladies”. Among its many eccentricities, the Arcadia is run by the Army of Light and thus off-limits to males - so why has Karen’s secretive roommate, Martha, crammed a teenage boy into their tiny room? And speaking of males, there’s stockbroker and sexy Jury Duty pal Mark Pitofsky to consider.