Showing results by narrator "Laurence Bouvard" in All Categories

A comedy/tragedy of manners. The new novel from the Man Booker-short-listed author of The Sisters Brothers. Frances Price - tart widow, possessive mother and Upper East Side force of nature - is in dire straits, beset by scandal. Her adult son, Malcolm, is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there's their cat, whom Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral lawyer whose gruesome tabloid death rendered them social outcasts.

Newlyweds Margaret and Patrick decide to spend a year in Kenya. Patrick practices medicine while Margaret works as a photojournalist. Then a British couple invite them on a climbing expedition to the summit of Mount Kenya. During their ascent an horrific accident occurs. In its aftermath, Margaret struggles to understand what happened on the mountain and how it has transformed her and her marriage, perhaps for ever.

Euridice is bright and ambitious. But this is Brazil in the 1940s, and society expects her to be a loving wife and mother. While Antenor is busy congratulating himself on his excellent catch, Euridice spends her spends her humdrum days ironing his shirts and removing the lumps of onion from his food, dreaming of the success she could have made of herself - as a writer, dressmaker or culinary whiz - in another life.

UN covert negotiator Yael Azoulay has travelled to Europe to help in the investigation of a people-trafficking ring linked to a series of terrorist attacks. Azoulay's boss, UN Secretary General Hussein, asks Yael to broker a secret meeting with the Iranian president in Reykjavic. All parties want the violence to stop. But Azoulay realises that the terrorist chain leads to someone she's met before. Someone for whom terror is just the beginning.

Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country....

Celestial Bodies is set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, where we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era to the crossroads of its complex present.

Amanda Montell, feminist linguist and features editor at online magazine Byrdie, explains why words matter and why it’s imperative that women embrace their unique relationship with language. Drawing on fascinating research, and moving effortlessly between history and pop culture, Montell deconstructs language - from insults and cursing to grammar and pronunciation - to reveal the ways it has been used for centuries to gaslight women and keep them from gaining equality.

On a small isolated island, there's a community that lives by its own rules. Boys grow up knowing they will one day reign inside and outside the home while girls know they will be married and pregnant within moments of hitting womanhood. But before that time comes, there is an island ritual that offers children an exhilarating reprieve. Every summer they are turned out onto their doorsteps to roam wild: they run, they fight, they sleep on the beach and build camps in trees. They are free.

In the mid-19th century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or 'human computers', to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the women turned to studying images of the stars captured on glass photographic plates, making extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim.

Celebrity chef Deacon Rowe is struggling with addiction, depression and not one but two scandals. As summer nears he travels to the idyllic eastern bluff of Nantucket, where he takes his own life. In the wake of Deacon's shocking suicide, his first wife and childhood sweetheart, Laurel Rowe, sets out to gather Deacon's far-flung family - including Deacon and Laurel's son and Deacon's other ex-wives and children - on the island.

J is one of only 26 students, all of whom think of the school's enigmatic founder as their father. J's peers are the only family he has ever had. The students are being trained to be prodigies of art, science, and athletics, and their life at the school is all they know-and all they are allowed to know. But J suspects that there is something out there, beyond the pines, that the founder does not want him to see, and he's beginning to ask questions. What is the real purpose of this place? Why can the students never leave? And what secrets is their father hiding from them?

Pearl Harbor, 1941: On the morning of December 7, Ginny is flying her little yellow plane above the sparkling seas when she spots an unknown aircraft closing in on her. She recognises the red symbol of the Japanese fighter planes almost too late. Somehow, she manages to land unscathed, but the choices she is forced to make in the terrible hours that follow have tragic consequences....

This book distils the most important principles of an MBA into an accessible, informative, and easily digestible guide. It covers the curriculum taught in all the top business schools around the world, including economics, strategy, and marketing, with real-life examples to show the theory in practice.

North Dakota; vast rolling plains of silvery snow, studded with shimmering black pools. A landscape both beautiful and terrible. The landscape that swallowed Colleen’s son. Across town another mother searches for her missing boy. He too went missing from the oilfields where he worked. Alone, these two women will never find out the truth. But if they team up, then maybe this freezing wilderness will give them back their sons.

Alone and scared on the dark streets of Moscow, staid, bespectacled Paige Barnes has no choice but to comply with the handsome stranger's command…. Little does Paige know she's been rescued by Alexei Voronov - a Russian prince "and" her boss's deadliest rival. Now he has Paige unexpectedly in his sights, Alexei is prepared to play emotional Russian roulette to keep her close and discover her true motives.

Wade disappeared on us when I was six, and I never saw him again until I turned twelve, after Mom was buried. She always said he was a loser, even if he was our dad, but it turns out he was much more than that. He was also a thief. Like he was on the day he stole me and my little sister.

Living alone in New York, Frannie teaches creative writing to a motley bunch of students, and secretly compiles a dictionary of street slang: virginia, n., vagina; snapper, n., vagina; brasole, n., vagina. One evening at a bar, she stumbles upon a man, his face in shadow, a tattoo on his wrist, a woman kneeling between his legs. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman's body has been discovered in the park across the street. Soon Frannie is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires.

An alien AI has been sent to the solar system as representative of three advanced species. Its mission is to save the Earth's ecosystem - and the biggest threat to that is humanity. But we are also part of the system, so the AI must make a choice. Should it save mankind or wipe it out? Are we worth it? The AI is all-powerful and might as well be a god. So it sets up some conditions. Violence is now impossible. Large-scale destruction of natural resources is impossible. Food and water will be provided for those who really, truly need them. You can't even bully someone on the Internet anymore.

A gripping gothic page-turner told in a startlingly different and wonderfully captivating voice. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading. Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself in a unique language of her own invention. By night, she sleepwalks the corridors and is troubled by a recurrent dream in which a mysterious woman appears to threaten her younger brother Giles.

A searing, enlightening polemic about the tens of thousands of unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children arriving in the US without papers. Why did you come to the USA? When a child migrant arrives in the US all alone, this is the first question he or she will be asked. It's the beginning of an official interview of 40 questions used by the federal immigration court in New York City.