Showing results by narrator "Kristen Sieh" in All Categories

The Core Four have been friends since college: four men, four women, four couples. They got married around the same time, had kids around the same time, and now, fifteen years later, they’ve started getting divorced around the same time, too. With three of the Core Four unions crumbling to dust around them, Jessica and Mitch Butler take a long, hard look at their own marriage. Can it be saved? Or is divorce, like some fortysomething zombie virus, simply inescapable?

Where does one go, you might ask, when the world falls apart? When the immutable facts of your life—the mundane, the trivial, the take-for-granted minutiae that once filled every second of every day—suddenly disappear? Where does one go in such dire and unexpected circumstances? I went home, of course.

After a college party, two boys drive a girl home: drunk and passed out in the back seat. Rumours spread about what they did to her, but later they'll tell the police a different version of events. Alice will never remember what truly happened. Her fracture runs deep, hidden beneath cleverness and wry humour. Nick - a sensitive, misguided boy who stood by - will never forget. That's just the beginning of this extraordinary journey into memory, fear and self-portrayal.

In modern-day London, architectural historian and recovering alcoholic Annie Kendall hopes to turn her life around and restart her career by locating several long-missing pieces of ancient Judaica. Geoff Harris, an investigative reporter, is soon drawn into her quest, both by romantic interest and suspicions about the head of the Shalom Foundation, the organization sponsoring her work. He's also a dead ringer for the ghost of a monk Annie believes she has seen at the flat she is subletting in Bristol House.

When a close relative falls ill, Hannah Larson and her young son, Nicky, join him for the summer at Ashton Hall, a historic manor house outside Cambridge, England. A frustrated academic whose ambitions have been subsumed by the challenges of raising her beloved child, Hannah longs to escape her life in New York City, where her marriage has been upended by a recently discovered and devastating betrayal.

Brynn Larson owes a lot to reality television and professional athletes. Her bar hit new heights of success after becoming a local haunt for the Denver Mustangs players and their WAGs. But although she’s grateful, that doesn’t mean she’s crazy. And that’s exactly what she would be to ever consider dating a professional athlete. Even if it’s Maxwell Lewis, whose shy smile makes her wonder what going on behind those beautiful brown eyes.

Estranged for a decade, sisters Leslie and Robin must reunite if they are to claim the fortune their father left them. Leslie desperately needs that money, but when she arrives at her sister's apartment, she finds her body instead. Leslie needs another plan. Without Robin, she won't see a penny. Mary, an aspiring actress, spends her nights slinging beers at a seedy restaurant. She'd do anything to start her life over. When Leslie offers her a huge sum of money and the chance to be someone else - to be Robin - she takes it.

It doesn't take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie, and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone - young best-selling author and erstwhile model - shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.

Dawn isn't a bad person - she's just made some bad choices: wrong guy, wrong friends, wrong everything. But she wasn't expecting her parents to pay a boatload of money to ship her off to Out of the Wild, a wilderness boot camp with a bunch of other messed up kids to learn important "life lessons". It's true that Dawn and the other cubs will learn a lot - but it's not what any of them expect.

In Other People We Married, Straub creates characters as recognizable as a best friend, and follows them through moments of triumph and transformation with wit, vulnerability, and dazzling insight.

Melissa Levin, Priya Chowdhury, Tara Taylor, and Suki Hammer were going places when they graduated high school in 1997. Their yearbook superlatives were Most Likely to Win the White House, Cure Cancer, Open a Michelin-Starred Restaurant, and Join the Forbes 400, respectively. Fast forward twenty-five years and nothing has gone according to plan. Reunited at their reunion, the women rethink their younger selves. Is it too late to make their dreams come true?

Scoring an invitation for membership to the exclusive Legacy Club in New York City is more than an honor. It gives you a lifetime of access to power and wealth beyond any prep school doors and guaranteed safety and security. So it’s not surprising when Excelsior Prep seniors Bernie Kaplan, Isobel Rothcroft, and Skyler Hawkins are nominated as Legacies; their family pedigrees have assured their membership since birth—even if they're all keeping secrets that could destroy their reputations. But scholarship kid from Queens Tori Tasso? She’s a surprise nominee.

Law student Saraswati “Sara” Bhaduri holds down two jobs in order to make her way through school, but it’s still a struggle. She’s had to do things to pay the bills that most people wouldn’t expect from “a nice Indian girl.” It seems like an ordinary busy Tuesday night at the local dive bar until her boss demands Sara deal with a drunk girl in the bathroom.

Ever since her journalist mother died on assignment, Marin has played it safe, refusing to set foot outside of Tennessee. Her wild-child younger sister, Sadie, has trotted the globe as a photographer, living off of art and adrenaline. When Sadie returns from a tough assignment abroad and looks a little worse for wear, Marin reluctantly agrees to a sisters' spa weekend on the tropical island of Saba. But her lifelong fear of travel is affirmed when Sadie misses the flight, Marin's luggage gets mixed up, and turbulence sends her hurtling into the lap of handsome stranger Lucas Tsai.

April, May, June, and July Barber don’t have much in common anymore. An upcoming family wedding will place the four siblings in the same room for the first time in years. But shortly before, when April spots their father, who went missing while serving overseas a decade ago, their reunion becomes entirely more complicated. While the siblings’ search for the truth about their father forces them back into each other’s lives, it also intensifies their private dramas.

Nothing is what it appears to be in this lush destination thriller that takes listeners behind the ornate doors of the most secretive palazzos in Venice, romantic chateaus in France and the Vatican’s halls of power. Contessa Giselle Verona - the art world’s current "It Girl" is happily absorbed in her creation of dangerous sculptures that have gotten her banned from museums, but have collectors reaching for their checkbooks.

In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.

Sixteen-year-old Honor Augustine never set out to become a felon. As an academic all-star, avid recycler, and dedicated daughter to her PTSD-afflicted father, she's always been the literal embodiment of her name. Coloring inside the lines is what keeps Honor's chaotic existence orderly. But when she discovers her father's VA benefits drying up, coupled with a terrifying bank letter threatening the family's greenhouse business--Honor vows to find a solution. She just doesn't expect to spot it on the dry erase board of English lit--"Nature's first green is gold."

The war of biblical proportions is building to its final battle, and still the pawns don’t see where they stand. Detective Lampani doggedly continues his investigation as the bodies pile up - hoping to close the case before whatever’s wrong with his head kills him. Raphielli Scortini discovers she has a rebellious streak a mile wide. Even in Exile, Giselle finds time to get creative, but her guardians put a damper on her dangerous style. And the architects of the whole plan suddenly discover too late that they’re disappearing one by one.

Part Two of the Venice Trilogy begins three weeks after Salvio Scortini’s rampage through the calles and canals of the floating city...which is indeed floating since the acqua alta season is drenching everyone. The Verona family struggles to keep calm and carry on, but the pressure is building as the secret holding the family members hostage unravels. Raphielli Scortini thinks she’s being watched, and the anxiety of keeping her monstrous husband locked away in a friend’s basement is wearing on her.