Showing results by narrator "Amy Landon" in All Categories

I've always wanted a family of my own, but never dreamed I could have one. Now Parker's ready to make my dream our reality. But sometimes our dreams are haunted by our deepest fears. Fears of failure, having a child, and in our case...death. How do I help the person I love get over his fear when I'm still trying to overcome that same fear myself?

In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. Startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies, both in myth and in practice.

In a desolate future built on virtual reality, Ginn is a romantic who yearns for something real. She designs environments for people who play at being Vikings. But when her project goes awry, she's stranded in the actual 10th century, on a storybook farm in Viking Iceland. Heirik is the young leader of his family, honored by the men and women who live on his land. But he is feared and isolated because of a terrible curse. Ginn and Heirik are two people who never thought they would find a home in someone else's heart.

Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

Jane Worthing’s claim to fame is that she was one first viral internet sensations, dubbed #bagbaby—discovered as a one-year-old in an oversized Gucci bag by her adopted father in a Poughkeepsie train station. Now in her senior year of high school, Janey is questioning whether she wants to look for her bio family due to a loving, but deeply misguided push from her best friend Algie, while also navigating an all-consuming crush on his cousin, the beautiful, way-out-of-her-league Gwen Fairfax.

Aurora was raised to lead, with the expectation that she will one day become ruler of the Mer of Triste Island. There’s just one problem. Nobody’s bothered to ask Aurora if she wants to be queen. Chafing at the confines of her role, Aurora risks everything for a chance at a new life. Ready for adventure, Aurora washes up on Siren Island at the feet of one very bewildered video-game designer. The clock is ticking before the Royal guards find her, and Aurora is determined to experience everything that life on Siren Island can offer.

Budapest is a city of secrets, a place where everything is opaque and nothing is as it seems. It is to this enigmatic city that a young American couple, Annie and Will, move with their infant son, shortly after the fall of the Communist regime. Annie hopes to escape the ghosts from her past; Will wants to take his chance as an entrepreneur in Hungary's newly developing economy. But only a few months after moving there, they receive a secretive request from friends in the US to check up on an elderly stranger who also has recently arrived in Budapest.

This collection of 22 short stories by the author of Daughter of Hounds and Alabaster firmly established Caitlín R. Kiernan as one of the preeminent voices in dark fantasy today. Through a cycle of interconnected narratives, Kiernan unflinchingly explores a surreal world where the fantastic and the mundane are never separated by more than the insubstantial thickness of a shadow.

This book spotlights female scientist Temple Grandin, whose experience being on the autism spectrum has informed her advocacy and her work as an animal behaviorist. Temple Grandin's pride in being different and how it shaped her world is celebrated in this biography.

Yubin knows she's different than the other girls in the pop group SIITY. Yes, they all got sucked into the same machine, giving up schooling and signing ridiculously long contracts with no guarantee of success, but that's how Korean stars are made. Yubin is supposed to be thankful for that, but she isn't. She doesn't even like the girls she performs with. She's more connected to her former schoolmate Jieun, even though all they ever do is text. Over the last two months, Jieun has become her confidant and best friend, connecting Yubin to the real world in a way she desperately needs. Now that SIITY is going to appear on the reality show Incredible Race: Asia, Yubin will need that connection more than ever, which is why she's devastated to discover Jieun has been dead five years and is actually haunting her.

Lindsay Christianson seemingly has it all, until one phone call changes everything and forces her to choose between her perfect life and her professional dreams. The choice seems clear when the opportunity to propel her career abruptly sends her across the country, leaving everything she loves behind. Navigating a new city with a broken heart and a job where her colleagues will do anything to sabotage her, the pressure quickly becomes too great.

At once intimate and sweeping, Bottomland - the anticipated second novel from Michelle Hoover - follows the Hess family in the years after World War I as they attempt to rid themselves of the anti-German sentiment that left a stain on their name. But when the youngest two daughters vanish in the middle of the night, the family must piece together what happened while struggling to maintain their life on the unforgiving Iowa plains.

The first message is found in a playground. A few feet away, a pair of human ears hang from the monkey bars. Deputy sheriff Brynn Callahan isn’t sure what to make of this grisly scene. Do the ears belong to a murder victim? And if so, where is the body? One thing Brynn is sure of: the earring on one of the earlobes belongs to a man she met at a party the previous night. The second message is discovered next to a human tongue on a park pavilion. Once again, no body is found. Brynn can’t help but wonder if the crimes are rooted in the town’s long-simmering tensions.

When Dr. Ryan Wallace retreats to the Alaskan wilderness to find peace with his past, the last thing he expects is to stumble across a broken woman barely clinging to life. As he watches her fight her way back from hell, his own problems begin to pale in comparison. When she returns to her world, he finally understands - there are some things you just can't live without.

Adalyn Stalling's clients convinced her to be a contestant on their reality TV show, The One. Adi appeared on the show twice - once as a potential love match for the bachelor, once as the bachelorette. As much as she wanted to stay professionally removed, she ended up giving her heart to both Adam and Connor. Both times, the men broke it off. Now America's most famous "loser at love", Adalyn is trying to pick up the pieces of her life. Given the media frenzy and the paparazzi that chase her, she's finding it difficult.

Feyland is the most immersive sim-game ever designed, and Jennet Carter is the first to play the prototype. But she doesn't suspect the virtual world is close enough to touch - or that she'll be battling for her life against the Dark Queen of the faeries. Tam Linn is the perfect hero - in-game. Too bad the rest of his life is seriously flawed. The last thing he needs is rich-girl Jennet prying into his secrets, insisting he's the only one who can help her.

Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate US - an alternate timeline - she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram's copy of The Pyronauts - a science-fiction masterwork in her world.

The interstellar Consortium of Planets forsakes the irredeemably violent Earth, condemning the planet to economic and ecological chaos. Given one last chance to halt Earth's annihilation, women freedom fighters discover a way to rid Earth of men's brutality - but it may have come too late. In the stunning conclusion to the Native Trilogy, female linguists must once again come forward and fight for the future of humanity.

As children, Lexie and Annie were incredibly close. Bonded by the death of their father and their mother's swift remarriage, they weathered the storms of life together. When Lexie leaves home to follow her dream, Annie is forced to turn to her leather-bound journal to confide her deepest secrets and fears. As adults, sisters Lexie and Annie could not be more different. Lexie is a successful doctor and happily married. Annie is addicted to heroin - a thief, a liar, and unable to remain clean despite being pregnant.

Emmy Quinn is West Texas through and through: her roots run deep in the sleepy small town of Steinbeck, where God sees all and football is king. She loves her community, but she knows that when she comes out as a lesbian, she may not be able to call Steinbeck—which is steeped in the Southern Baptist tradition—home anymore. After a disastrous conversation with her dad, Emmy meets Cameron, a charismatic, whip-smart grad student from Massachusetts who hates everything Texas. But Texas is in Emmy's blood. Can she build a future with a woman who can't accept the things that make Emmy who she is?