Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Psychological

Here, in Enon, Harding follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with a shattering personal tragedy. Grandson of George Crosby (the protagonist of Tinkers), Charlie inhabits the same dynamic landscape of New England, its seasons mirroring his turbulent emotional odyssey.

In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream. Each story radiates with sharp humor, mystery, wonder, and startling compassion. Among the Missing lingers in the mind through its subtle grace and power of language.

Innocence is lost to unforgettable experience in these brilliant stories by E. L. Doctorow, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. In "The Writer in the Family", a young man learns the difference between lying and literature after he is induced into deceiving a relative through letters. In "Wili", an early-20th-century idyll is destroyed by infidelity. In "The Foreign Legation", a girl and an act of political anarchy collide with devastating results. These and other stories flow into the novella "Lives of the Poets".

The gentle, off-beat narrator of The Circus is perfectly content with his quiet life. By day, he works in a bakery, and by night, he obsessively organizes and reorganizes his record collection: It’s all just the way he likes it. But when his childhood friend, Magnus, comes calling out of the blue, the contours of our narrator’s familiar world begin to shift. On a visit to the circus together, Magnus volunteers to participate in the magician’s disappearing act, and midway through the routine, he vanishes. Is this part of the act? What’s happened to Magnus?

John Updike’s twentieth novel, like his first, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), takes place in one day, a day that contains much conversation and some rain. The seventy-eight-year-old painter Hope Chafetz, who in the course of her eventful life has been Hope Ouderkirk, Hope McCoy, and Hope Holloway, answers questions put to her by a New York interviewer named Kathryn, and recapitulates, through the story of her own career, the triumphant, poignant saga of postwar American art.

To all appearances, Zachary King is a man with luck on his side. A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free Manhattan apartment, and Hope, his stunning, blue-blooded fiancée: smart, sexy, and completely out of his league. But as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier–and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind. Then Norm–Zack’s freewheeling, Viagra-popping father–resurfaces after a twenty-year absence, looking to make amends.

In the late 1950s, in a small New England town, Reverend Tyler Caskey has suffered a terrible loss and finds it hard to be the person he once was. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family’s tragedy. Tyler’s usually patient and kind congregation now questions his leadership and propriety, and accusations are born out of anger and gossip.

Two haunted men and their families are engulfed by the emotions surrounding an unexpected and horrendous death. Ethan, a respected professor of literature at a small New England college, is wracked by an obsession with revenge that threatens to tear his family apart. Dwight, a man at once fleeing his crime and hoping to get caught, wrestles with overwhelming guilt and his sense of obligation to his son.

Gracie Mueller is a proud mother of two and devoted wife, living with her husband Randy in upstate New York. Her life is complicated by the usual tedium and stressors and she’s settled down comfortably enough. But when Randy’s failing career as a real estate agent makes finances tight, their home goes into foreclosure, and Gracie feels she has no choice but to return to the creatively illegal and high-stakes lifestyle of her past in order to keep all that she’s worked so hard to have. Gracie has a lot to hide about where she’s from, who she is, and who she’s been.

Eve Lattimore’s family is like every other on their suburban street, with one exception. Her son Tyler has a rare medical condition that makes him fatally sensitive to light, which means heavy curtains and deadlocked doors protect him during the day and he can never leave the house except at night. For Eve, only constant vigilance stands between an increasingly restless teenage son and the dangers of the outside world.

For young Peony, betrothed to a suitor she has never met, lyrics from The Peony Pavilion mirror her own longings. In the garden of the Chen Family Villa, amid the scent of ginger, green tea, and jasmine, a small theatrical troupe is performing scenes from this epic opera, a live spectacle few females have ever seen. Like the heroine in the drama, Peony is the cloistered daughter of a wealthy family, trapped like a good-luck cricket in a bamboo-and-lacquer cage.

When the slightly retarded 15-year-old daughter of a diplomat is murdered in cold blood on school field trip in the Santa Monica Mountains, her father adamantly denies the possibility of a political motive. The Los Angeles Police Department's Detective Milo Sturgis and his longtime friend, psychologist Alex Delaware, pose the question: Why?

Everything Danny has ever done, every sacrifice his family has ever made, has been in pursuit of this dream. But what happens when the talent that makes you special fails you? When the goal that you've been pursuing for as long as you can remember ends in humiliation and loss? Twenty years later, Dan is in Scotland, terrified to tell his partner about his past, afraid that revealing what he has done will make him unlovable.

Noa P. Singleton speaks not a word in her own defense throughout a brief trial that ends with a jury finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Ten years later, a woman who will never know middle age, she sits on death row in a maximum security penitentiary, just six months away from her execution date. Seemingly out of the blue, she is visited by Marlene Dixon, a high-powered Philadelphia attorney who is also the heartbroken mother of the woman Noa was imprisoned for killing....

When Nick Beron and Hannah Rampe decide to move from New York City to the tiny upstate town of Hibernia, they aren't exactly running away, but they need a change. Hannah takes a job as live-in director of the Wright Historic House, a museum dedicated to an obscure 19th-century philosopher, and she and Nick swiftly move into their new home. At first, life in this old, creaky house feels cozy. But as summer turns to fall, Hannah begins to have trouble sleeping and she hears whispers in the night. One morning, Nick wakes up to find Hannah gone.

In this daring, propulsive literary thriller, Yasmina Khadra takes listeners to the margins of Europe's glittering capitals, through neighborhoods isolated by government neglect and popular apathy, if not outright racism. And he brings to life an unusual protagonist, a young man struggling with family, religion, and politics who makes fateful choices, and in doing so dramatizes powerful questions about society and human nature.

As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel. A young nurse fresh out of school, Kerstin has been hired for a position with the Cosway family, residents of the Hall for generations. She is soon introduced to her "charge", John Cosway, a 39-year-old man whose strange behavior is vaguely explained by his mother and sisters as part of the madness that runs in the family.

For most of her life, Lauren Mahdian has been certain of two things: that her mother is dead, and that her father is a murderer. Before the horrific tragedy, Lauren led a sheltered life in a wealthy corner of America, in a town outside Manhattan on the banks of Long Island Sound, a haven of luxurious homes, manicured lawns, and seemingly perfect families. Here Lauren and her older brother, Alex, thought they were safe. But one morning, six-year-old Lauren and eight-year-old Alex awoke to discover their mother's body....

Out of prison, Blake wants to retreat. With few options, she chooses the only place she ever felt safe—a town in northern Maine where now dead grandparents have left her a derelict cottage with a view of the sea—this choice forces Blake to confront the legacy of abuse and complex frictions a dynamic she has tried to outrun all her entire life.

Talk show host Matthew Miller has made his fame by shining a spotlight on the most unlikely and bizarre secrets of society, exposing them on live television in front of millions of gawking viewers. However, the man behind The Mattie M Show remains a mystery - both to his enormous audience and to those who work alongside him every day. But when the high school students responsible for a mass shooting are found to be devoted fans, Mattie is thrust into the glare of public scrutiny, seen as the wry, detached herald of a culture going downhill and going way too far.