Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Pickens" in All Categories

Owen falls ill with food poisoning, leaving Julie to attend a neighborhood holiday party alone. When she wakes up, half-naked in her neighbor's bathtub, Julie doesn't know how to tell Owen, the police, her friends—anyone—that she has been sexually assaulted. So she keeps it secret until she realizes that she's pregnant with her assailant's baby.

Throughout history and infinite dimensions, there exists a secret group of supernatural investigators operating on the fringes of society, lurking in the shadows, working strange cases with little reward. They are hardboiled zombies and ghosts, mythological creatures, ass-kicking vampires, tortured humans, and uncanny sleuths whose normal is the bizarre and weird.

From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit, Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandfather who raised her dies alone while she is traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering people peacefully through their end-of-life process. Clover spends so much time with the dying that she has no life of her own, until the final wishes of a feisty old woman send Clover on a trip across the country to uncover a forgotten love story.

Cordelia knows her mother is . . . unusual. Their house doesn’t have any doors between rooms—there are no secrets in this house—and her mother doesn't allow Cordelia to have a single friend. Unless you count Falada, her mother's beautiful white horse. The only time Cordelia feels truly free is on her daily rides with him. But more than simple eccentricity sets her mother apart. Other mothers don’t force their daughters to be silent and motionless for hours, sometimes days, on end. Other mothers aren’t sorcerers.

A girl suffering from paralyzing night terrors finds a missing poster hanging from the door of her apartment building. On that poster is a photograph of a frighteningly familiar face. It's her. Only, she's never seen this photo before and something about its grin scares her. How its eyes seem to follow her no matter where she finds herself in the room.

Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.

“I’m leaving.” Two shocking words, torching a marriage of over 20 years. Totally blindsided, Shannon, a middle-aged stay-at-home mom, is traded in for a newer model. One of the few possessions her cheating ex didn’t swipe was the mountain resort she inherited from her dear Aunt Maeve. With limited funds and bleak job prospects, the decrepit resort is a lifeline! Shannon discovers a wishing well in her forest and learns that magic is real. Who has time for bitterness when there’s a world of magical witchcraft to learn?

It’s been fourteen years since Greer Dunning’s older sister, Eliza, was murdered, and Greer’s family has never been the same. And now there’s been a similar killing in Greer’s small Kansas hometown. A copycat, according to the authorities, but Greer is convinced there is more to the story. That Eliza’s murderer had help all those years ago. So Greer returns home after more than a decade away, desperate to answer the questions that have haunted her for years

To be a bookseller or librarian… You have to play detective. Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. An advocate. A visionary. A person who creates “book joy” by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, “You’ve got to read this. You’re going to love it.” Step inside The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians and enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, find whatever you want or require. This place has the magic of rainbows and unicorns, but it's also a business. The book business.

In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world. Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Helene, for whom he feels an uncanny trust.

Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of grief: before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir. Haunting in its quiet spaces, Followed by the Lark is a novel of meditations—on loss, on change, on the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world.

Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things she cared about. Describing the ups and downs of beekeeping from one springtime to the next, A Country Year transports listeners to a different, simpler place.

The Velkwood Vicinity was the topic of occult theorists, tabloid one-hour documentaries, and even some pseudo-scientific investigations as the block of homes disappeared behind a near-impenetrable veil that only three survivors could enter—and only one has in the past twenty years, until now.

Single mom Cynthia Pace has her hands full with her uniquely gifted child. She has no idea how or why Maddie does the things she does, and neither does her daughter. But there is an answer, discovered by mother and child only after tragedy strikes.

Being suddenly thrust into the world of parental grief is like being transported to a foreign land where you don't speak the language. With that in mind, Claire Aagaard has written When a Child Dies in a simple, straightforward manner, offering information, comfort, and hope for those who believe that none is possible.

Harley Granger has a gift for seeing things that others miss. He wasn't much of a novelist, but his work as a true crime author and podcaster has earned him fame and wealth—and some serious criticism for his various unethical practices. Still, visiting Little Valley to be closer to his dying father has caused him to look into a case that many people think is closed—and some want reopened.

A beautiful forest. A terrifying legend. It’s 1986. Two strangers, hundreds of miles apart, grapple with disturbing incidents in a one-of-a-kind quaking aspen forest.

On your journey toward a more health-conscious life, you’ve likely been bombarded by an overwhelming amount of information Over the past decade, Colleen and Jason Wachob, co-founders of mindbodygreen, have cultivated a leading wellness lifestyle media brand for everyone seeking to cut through the noise, and live a happier, healthier, and greener lifestyle. The Joy of Well-Being is a distillation of almost fifteen years of this experience on the forefront of the well-being conversation: they’ve done the legwork so you don’t have to.

Clover Brooks has always felt a stronger connection with those at the end of their life than in the middle of it. She dedicates herself to ushering people peacefully though their final days, working as a death doula in New York City. Her client's last words are collected in three treasured notebooks, neatly labelled: ADVICE, CONFESSIONS and REGRETS. Then she meets Claudia: a woman who has had the kind of life that Clover hasn't dared imagine for herself.

When Deputy US Marshal Danielle "Danny" Martin was told she'd gotten a promotion, she expected to be leading her own fugitive retrieval team. Instead, she got transferred to Pontian, Florida, of all places, and assigned to a Superhero support detail for Focus, a seemingly immortal superhero who is also one of the most famous lesbian icons on the planet. Bad enough she's got to spend every day working with a woman she's had a crush on since she was five years old, but when she arrives at her new post, things start getting weird.