Showing results by narrator "Cassandra A Campbell" in All Categories

Here they are, the 2000s, and Barbara Ehrenreich's antidotes are as sardonic as they are spot-on: pet insurance for your kids; Salvation Army fashions for those who can no longer afford Wal-Mart; and boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone.

Pru Dunning has everything she ever wanted: a successful boyfriend, a thriving nursing career, and a truly comfortable life. But then the strange voicemails start. Scarletta, the woman calls herself. She seems to know Pru, although Pru certainly doesn't know that name, nor does she recognize the glamorous voice leaving her poisonous messages. Pru begins to carefully investigate. But when she suddenly becomes a person of interest in a murder case, it feels like Scarletta’s toxic voice, lashing out from the shadows, will silence all beauty in Pru’s perfect life, once and for all.

When Jenny, a graduate student in ornithology, is assigned to a birding project in a remote area of Panama, she is given one directive by her superior: Don't piss anyone off. Almost immediately, this proves difficult, for the study site is located near an indigenous village. At first, Jenny finds the Kuna people to be a prickly lot, quick to take offense. But as the weeks pass, she becomes better acquainted with the natives, including Pedro, a man cynical and detached from his own culture.

Venus Black is a straitlaced A student fascinated by the study of astronomy - until the night she commits a shocking crime that tears her family apart and ignites a media firestorm. Venus refuses to talk about what happened or why, except to blame her mother. Adding to the mystery, Venus’ developmentally challenged younger brother, Leo, goes missing. More than five years later, Venus is released from prison with a suitcase of used clothes, a fake identity, and a determination to escape her painful past.

In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama, aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they'd been delivered.

Gardiner Amory’s life is reeling – Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal realm of her mother and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when the pair divorces, Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed in a deluge, and the chasm between all of them widens. As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects her father’s prejudices and embarks on her own life – until Gardiner hits rock bottom.

On the remote island of Isola, seven people have been selected to compete in a 48-hour test for a top-secret intelligence position. One of them is Anna Francis, a workaholic with a nine-year-old daughter she rarely sees and a secret that haunts her. Her assignment is to stage her own death and then observe, from her hiding place inside the walls of the house, how the other candidates react to the news that a murderer is among them. Who will take control? Who will crack under pressure?

The best conversations between friends, family and acquaintances are the ones that touch on real issues. Whether these conversations occur in the lecture theatre, meetings or around the dinner table, ethical quandaries make for a great topic of conversation—and usually a heated debate! From the infamous, ethical questions are always intriguing and ask us to pause and consider: what would you have done? What’s the context? Is there one right answer? And ultimately—can ethics guide us to better answers to all these questions?

Although Sadie King is blessed with the voice of an angel, she never thought that following the song in her heart would take her far beyond the strict boundaries of her Amish faith and away from the only home she’s ever known. But during her rumspringa, one road leads to another and suddenly she’s secretly performing with a band. Now she faces an impossible choice between the music in her heart and the traditions branded upon her soul.

When they meet in the 1930s, Doris and Tup’s love is immediate. They marry quickly and Doris commits to the only life Tup ever wanted: working the Senter family farm. Soon their first child, Sonny, is born and Doris and Tup understand they are blessed. More children arrive - precocious, large-hearted Dodie and quiet, devoted Beston - but Doris and Tup take nothing for granted. When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered.

Caught between the worlds of Light and Dark Fae, Ember Kearney was born with the mark of the Silver Stag. Rejected by both her bloodlines, she's turned her back on her people to become a freelance investigator. Ember and her best friend, Angel, are led into a glittering world of conspiracy and danger when they are recruited to join the Wild Hunt, run by Herne, son of the god Cernunnos and the Faerie goddess Morgana.

A brilliantly nuanced, psychologically astute crime debut that explores the fault-lines of a small community - their hidden desires and their other, secret selves. 13-year-old Emily Houchens doesn't have many friends. She spends her time alone in the woods near her house - her safe place, until she finds the body of a young woman. Susanna Mitchell is searching for her sister, Ronnie, who vanished after leaving a late-night bar. The more she discovers about Ronnie's life, the more she realises that her sister began to disappear long before she went missing.

Each of these eight remarkable stories by Danzy Senna tightrope-walks tantalizingly, sometimes frighteningly, between defined states: life with and without mates and children, the familiar if constraining reference points provided by race, class, and gender. Tensions arise between a biracial couple when their son is admitted to the private school where they'd applied on a lark. A new mother hosts an old friend, still single, and discovers how each of them pities - and envies - the other. A young woman responds to an adoptee in search of her birth mother, knowing it is not she.

Though Frances Mayes is known for her travels, she has always sought a sense of home wherever she goes. In this poetic testament to the power of place in our lives, Mayes reflects on the idea of home, from the earliest imprint of four walls to the startling discoveries of feeling the strange ease of homes abroad, friends’ homes and even momentary homes that spark desires for other lives. Her musings are all the more poignant after so many have spent their long pandemic months at home.

Julia and Joe Ferraro are living the good life in Manhattan now that Joe's finally made it; he's the star of a hit TV show and has just been nominated for a Golden Globe award. After many lean years, they've got a grand Upper West Side apartment and an Amagansett beach house, and their two kids go to elite private schools. Even better, Julia and Joe are still madly in love. Or so Julia thinks.

Emily Bennett works as a therapist in Pennsylvania, helping children overcome their troubled pasts—even as she struggles to forget her own. Once upon a time, Emily was part of a middle school clique called the Harpies—six popular girls who bullied the new girl to her breaking point. The Harpies took a blood oath: never tell a soul what they did to Grace Farmer. Now, fourteen years later, it seems karma has caught up to them when one member of that vicious circle commits suicide.

For the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jane Smiley explore their strong, lifelong personal engagement with Alcott's novel - what it has meant to them and why it still matters. These four voices come together to form a deep, funny, far-ranging meditation on the power of great literature to shape our lives.

After the publication of Little Women, Jo March is shocked to discover her book of scribbles has become a best seller, and her publisher demands a sequel. While pressured into coming up with a story, she goes to New York with her dear friend Laurie. But despite her growing feelings, her desire to remain independent leads her to turn down his heartfelt marriage proposal and sends the boy off to college heartbroken. But when Laurie returns to Concord with a sophisticated new girlfriend, will Jo finally communicate her true heart's desire or lose the love of her life forever?

From childhood, Katherine knows she is different and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she faces the most human of problems - who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? On her quest to conquer the Riemann Hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity and to secrets long buried during World War II.