Showing results by narrator "Carrington MacDuffie" in All Categories

Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a shy 28-year-old who has all but given up on love and happiness when she meets Ernest Hemingway and is captivated by his energy, intensity and burning ambition to write. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for France. But glamorous Jazz Age Paris, full of artists and writers, fuelled by alcohol and gossip, is no place for family life and fidelity.

For years, Alfred Ludens has pursued mathematician and philosopher Marcus Vallar in the belief that he possesses a profound metaphysical formula, a missing link of great significance to mankind. Luden's friends are more sceptical. Jack Sheerwater, painter, thinks Marcus is crazy. Gildas herne, ex-preist, thinks he is evil. Patrick Fenman, poet, is dying because he thinks Marcus has cursed him. Marcus has disappeared and must be found.

Delaney Nichols has settled so comfortably into her new life in Edinburgh that she truly feels it's become more home than her once beloved Kansas. Her job at the Cracked Spine, a bookshop that specializes in rare manuscripts as well as other sundry valuable historical objects, is everything she had dreamed. Her latest task includes a trip to Castle Doune to retrieve a hard-to-find edition of an old Scottish comic, an "Oor Wullie", in a cloak-and-dagger transaction that Edwin has orchestrated.

One Fifth Avenue is THE building - the chicest, the hottest, with all the best people. Within its luxuriously thick walls the lives of New York City's elite play out. There is Schiffer Diamond, an over-40 actress who had given up making movies and moved to Europe, until the call to come home gave her the chance to prove that women of style are truly ageless. And there is spoiled, self-assured Lola, whose mother is determined to launch her darling daughter into society and the arms of the right man by clawing her way into the building.

Tamson House, in modern urban Ottawa, is a rambling, eccentric curiosity of a house - and a place of hidden power. Built at a point where the leylines meet, upon land that was once a sacred site, it is the gateway to a spirit world where Celtic and Native American magic mingle and leak into our own. In the overgrown garden of Tamson House, a Coyote Man waits, green children walk, and music rises to greet the moon. From the garden, a vast and primal wood is just one spirit-step away, and in that wood is something that threatens the very existence of Tamson House.

Whether it is sex, drugs, or infatuation with the occult, Mrs. Manford and her extended family of socialites are determined to escape the pain, boredom, and emptiness of life through whatever form of “twilight sleep” they can devise or procure. Far ahead of its time, this Wharton classic employed modernist techniques such as an ever changing narration among the novel’s characters and a close examination of the characters’ self-identities and relationships with one another to tell a tale rich with irony and wit about the upper crust’s own undoing.

Every town has at least one beloved if misunderstood eccentric, and Beanie Bradsher belongs to Mayhew Junction. Some - LouWanda Crump, for example - would call Beanie a spectacle, but Beanie just marches - and dresses - to the beat of a different drum.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

The second immortal volume in this dark and fantastic series, Fangs is a scintillating and sinister collection of vampire stories and part of the now legendary vampire archives. Including Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many, many, more...Featuring: Bloody fangs, dark and foreboding crypts, mysterious nighttime apparitions, and languid ladies.

A mix-up with their reservations forces Harvey from New York, Mistral from Paris, and Sheng from Shanghai to share a room with the hotel owner's daughter, Elettra. The four kids discover an amazing coincidence - they all have birthdays on February 29, Leap Day. That night, a strange man gives them a briefcase and asks them to take care of it until he returns. Soon afterward, the man is murdered.

In this innovative celebration of diversity and affirmation of individuality in animals and humans, Joan Roughgarden challenges accepted wisdom about gender identity and sexual orientation. A distinguished evolutionary biologist, Roughgarden takes on the medical establishment, the Bible, social science--and even Darwin himself. She leads the reader through a fascinating discussion of diversity in gender and sexuality among fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals, including primates. Evolution's Rainbow explains how this diversity develops from the action of genes and hormones and how people come to differ from each other in all aspects of body and behavior. Roughgarden reconstructs primary science in light of feminist, gay, and transgender criticism and redefines our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. A new preface shows how this witty, playful, and daring book has revolutionized our understanding of sexuality.

Trouble is brewing in the small town of Trafalgar. Constable Smith nearly stumbles over a body, the victim of a murder. The deceased was a highly unpopular newcomer who had big plans for developing a luxury resort outside of town.

What the Animals Taught Me is a collection of stories about rescued farm animals in a shelter in Sonoma County, California, and what these animals can teach us. Each story illuminates how animals can help us see and embrace others as they truly are and reconnect us with the natural world. A deeply inspiring collection, What the Animals Taught Me awakens our hearts and reminds us that our best life teachers sometimes come covered in fur.

Martin Luther King Jr. may be America's most revered political figure, commemorated in statues, celebrations, and street names around the world. But despite his stature, the significance of King's writings and political thought remains underappreciated. In To Shape a New World, Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry state that the marginalization of King's ideas reflects a romantic consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative - an effort not at radical reform but at "living up to" enduring ideals laid down by the nation's founders.

In 1606, the grand city of Prague hides an ugly secret: the emperor’s bastard son, Don Julius, is afflicted with a madness that pushes the prince to unspeakable depravity. Banished to a remote corner of Bohemia, Don Julius comes under the care of a bloodletter who works to purge the vicious humors coursing through the young royal’s veins. When the prince meets the bloodletter’s daughter Marketa, his madness sparks a frenzied - and dangerous - obsession.

Rare-book authenticator Carys Jones wanted nothing more than to be left alone to pursue her obsession with ancient manuscripts. But when her biggest client is committed to an asylum, he gives Carys an offer she cannot refuse. In exchange for his entire library of priceless Dark Age manuscripts, she must track the clues hidden in a previously unknown journal, clues that lead to a tomb that could rewrite the history of Western civilization. But there are people who would do anything to stop her from finding what she seeks - for reasons both noble and evil.

Here is the spellbinding story of Abby Mason - photographer, fiancée, soon-to-be stepmother - and the consequences of her greatest error. Heartbreaking, uplifting, and beautifully told, it is a riveting tale of how life can change in an instant, of the search for the truth behind a child's disappearance, and of one woman's unwavering faith in the redemptive power of love.

Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas are back to amuse you, saying what you don’t expect to hear, just the way you want to hear it. But this time they reveal how they are modifying their favourite bad girl habits and mischievous mind-sets now they are more ‘madame’ than 'mademoiselle’. These iconoclastic, bohemian Parisiennes advise on love, seduction, fashion and dating as well as family, work, living alone and accepting imperfections.

When we think of slavery, most of us think of the American South. We think of back-breaking fieldwork on plantations. We don't think of slavery in the North, nor do we think of the grueling labor of urban and domestic slaves. Rachel May's rich new book explores the far reach of slavery, from New England to the Caribbean, the role it played in the growth of mercantile America, and the bonds between the agrarian South and the industrial North in the antebellum era - all through the discovery of a remarkable quilt.

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio introduces Evelyn Ryan, an enterprising woman who kept poverty at bay with wit, poetry, and perfect prose during the "contest era" of the 1950s and 1960s. Standing up to the church, her alcoholic husband, and antiquated ideas about women, Evelyn turned every financial challenge into an opportunity for innovation, all the while raising her six sons and four daughters with the belief that miracles are an everyday occurrence.