Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Women's Fiction

Eadie Boone, an artist and former beauty queen, tackles everything with gusto and flair. But tailing her wayward husband is proving to be an exasperating chore. Nita Broadwell, a good Southern girl from a good Southern family, is jolted out of complacency when she discovers condoms in her husband's shirt pocket. Meanwhile, she is slipping into a steamy romance with a hunky handyman 13 years her junior.

Still Water Saints chronicles a momentous year in the life of Agua Mansa, a largely Latino town beyond the fringes of Los Angeles. Agua Mansa is home to the Botanica Oshun, where people come seeking charms, herbs, candles, and above all, the guidance of the shop's owner, Perla Portillo. Perla has served the community for years, arming her clients with the tools to overcome all manner of crises, large and small.

Schoolteacher Barbara Covett has led a bitter, lonely life as a self-made careerist. Sheba Hart is an ethereal, inexperienced new pottery teacher. When Barbara hears of Sheba's problems in the classroom, a maternal pity arises in her that soon leads to friendship and confidence. But Barbara is unprepared for the secret she will learn: that Sheba has begun a passionate affair with an underage male student. Barbara's confusion, disapproval, and jealousy are helpless to prevent the coming disaster.

Some twins communicate in a secret language all their own. For Whiskey and Charlie Ferns, the two-way alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta) whispered back and forth over their crackly walkie-talkies is the best they can do. But as the brothers grow up, they grow apart. Whiskey is everything Charlie is not - bold, daring, carefree - and Charlie blames his brother for always stealing the limelight, always striving ahead while seeming to push Charlie back.

Town physician Rose Anderson hides a well of sadness behind her cheerful and capable professionalism. Heartbreak has only reinforced her belief that marriage and children aren't in her future. Yet she's a woman with a pulse - and when sexy, brooding artist Hunt Cicero shows up at her office with his young nephew, the sheer physical attraction he ignites in her is both exciting and unsettling.

Ever since the earthquake, things have been going from bad to worse in Molena Point, usually the most tranquil little town on the North California coast. It started with that suspicious "accident" on Hellhag Hill. The police might write it off to the night fog, but Joe Grey knows a cut brake line when he sees it - he may be a cat, but he's already solved more murders than your average police detective!

Mary Dell Templeton prefers the quiet charms of Too Much to the bright lights of Dallas any day. She's relieved to be moving back to her hometown - and bringing her cable TV show, Quintessential Quilting, with her. There are just a couple of wrinkles in her plan. Her son, Howard, who is her talented cohost and color consultant, and who happens to have Down syndrome, wants to stay in Dallas and become more independent. Meanwhile, Mary Dell's new boss hopes to attract a different demographic - by bringing in a younger cohost.

This fierce and beautiful story charts the histories of two women: Rae, young, unmarried, and far from home, awaits the birth of her first child. Lila, a fortune-teller with no interest in the future, lost her own daughter more than a quarter of a century earlier in New York. When these two women meet in Southern California, it's earthquake weather - the time when unexpected things happen.

Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (aka Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks - even though her best friend, Mel, says she's the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she's afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend, China, does her makeup: She knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose weight. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses.

As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer - his "Keltjin potatoes" are justifiably famous - has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.

Ria Parkar is Bollywood's favorite ice princess - beautiful, poised, and scandal-proof - until one impulsive act threatens to expose her destructive past. Traveling home to Chicago for her cousin's wedding offers a chance to defuse the coming media storm and find solace in family, food, and outsized celebrations that are like one of her vibrant movies come to life. But it also means confronting Vikram Jathar.

Peel back the glamour of the fabled Hamptons and you'll find a beautiful place filled with ugly secrets. This is Sam Acquillo's world. Moving effortlessly across the social divide with wry pal Jackie Swaitkowski and rich guy Burton Lewis, the ex-boxer, ex-corporate infighter seems doomed to straddle the thin red line between envy and love, hate and forgiveness, goodness and greed - and sometimes, life and death.

Sawyer Walker has never had an issue with women. The female population tends to swarm toward him, in fact, and he's never had a complaint. But there's one woman Sawyer has always had his eye on - one woman who won't give him the time of day. In recent months, it would seem that Kennedy Endsley is opening up to Sawyer, but she's got a few surprises in store for him. As hard as she finds it to resist the handsome Walker brother, she's not willing to give in easily. Not when her heart is on the line.

In Brooklyn Bones, a crime of the past comes much too close to home when Erica Donato’s teenage daughter, Chris, finds a skeleton behind a wall in their crumbling Park Slope home. Erica - a young widow, overage history PhD candidate, and product of blue-collar Brooklyn - is drawn into the mystery when she learns that the skeleton is of an unknown teenage girl and that it was hidden there within living memory. Erica and Chris are both touched and disturbed by the mysterious tragedy in their own home.

Gustavo "Highway" Sanchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the "notorious infamous", like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli's own literary influences.

A group of young girls descends on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. Filled with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore traces these five girls through and beyond this fateful trip.

In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent - her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error" - Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity.

Juliet’s been in hiding - from her family, from her broken life, but most of all from the fact that Ben’s not around anymore. Her mother, Diane, has run out of advice. But then she insists Juliet look after her elderly Labrador and it becomes apparent that Coco the dog might actually be the one who can rescue her daughter. Especially when it leads to her walking dogs for a few other locals too, including a spaniel, Damson, who belongs to a very attractive man.... Before she knows it, Juliet realizes she has somehow become the town’s unofficial pet-sitter.

Claire "Neely" O'Neil is pastry chef of extraordinary talent. Every great chef can taste shimmering, elusive flavors that most of us miss, but Neely can "taste" feelings - cinnamon makes you remember, plum is pleased with itself, orange is a wake-up call. When flavor and feeling give Neely a glimpse of someone's inner self, she can customize her creations to help that person celebrate love, overcome fear, even mourn a devastating loss.

Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures - European, post-Independence Indian, and American - is never more acute.