Showing results by narrator "Anna Fields" in All Categories

No one knows better than Sally Quinn how to make parties work. She has thrown some of the most talked-about parties and has attended most of the others. Here, she turns her trademark sharp wit on the Washington social scene and offers an irreverent look at what goes on at the parties you read about in the columns. From seating debacles to real-life scandals, she reveals her firsthand experiences as a member of the Washington power elite to illustrate how to entertain for any occasion.

This last great work by one of the century’s great writers is a large and original novel of betrayal and self-delusion, madness and consuming passions, that recreates to chilling effect the political turbulence of the American Left and the clamor and menace of the McCarthy Right. Not since her classic The Man Who Loved Children has Stead fashioned such willful and memorable characters as Emily Wilks and Stephen Howard.

In the entire canon of tough-girl sleuths, gumshoes, PIs, detectives, and investigators, there's no one quite like Fritillary Quilter. A New York arson investigator, a sassy, fresh spirit with a nose for arson and an eye for dubious burn patterns, "Tilly" pushes the envelope of the traditional female investigator with a young, hip outlook and indefatigable zeal.

Troubles begin for sports reporter A.B. Berkowitz when she is assigned to cover the Washington Senators, who are having a lousy season. When A.B. points out the team's ineptitude, the players refuse to talk to her, except to attempt to gross her out as often as possible. Into this mix come the team's televangelist owner, her hard-core editor, a two-timing boyfriend, and an aging All-Star catcher who is becoming romantic.

Monica Crowley served as a personal assistant to former president Richard M. Nixon from July 1990 until his death in April 1994. This remarkable story of his final public and private years is based on full reconstructions of the conversations she had with him at the time.

Haunted by a horrible memory from the war, and alone since his grown children moved out, Vietnam vet Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam after the war. Ada and her brother, Jon, follow their missing father to Vietnam. Their search for him tears them apart in ways they never could have guessed, and Vietnam finds its way in. Shifting between Charles' and Ada's points of view, their journeys become increasingly colorful and complex.

In their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.

Nona Conrad is boldly building a new life in picturesque Home, Arkansas. When a mysterious stranger arrives in town and tries to abduct her sister, Nona must find the courage to uncover the truth and the strength of heart to accept help. She turns to Simon Wright, the owner of the fishing camp where she works. Although she is attracted to him, there is something about him she doesn't trust - especially when he tells her that her half-brother Harold has absconded with jewels and funds from the bank in her hometown.

Of Charles Dickens, Jane Smiley says that "his novels shaped his life as much as his life shaped his novels". Smiley's Charles Dickens is at once a sensitive profile of the great master and a fascinating meditation on the writing life. Smiley evokes Dickens as he might have seemed to his contemporaries: convivial, astute, boundlessly energetic, and lionized.

Clipped by a speeding car as she crosses her street in Boston's South End, Regina Cutter gratefully accepts the help of her new upstairs tenant, Steven Damelin, a single young financial analyst. Reggie is surprised to learn from him that her late Aunt Jo, who was also a psychic, was involved in a "deal" with Steven shortly before her death.

The mystery of how a wealthy New York socialite became a major American novelist is brilliantly explored in this fascinating critical biography, widely considered to be the most perceptive introduction to Edith Wharton's life and work.

This is the delightfully intimate story of the tenth-century Byzantine princess, Theophano, wife of Otto II, the Holy Roman Emperor. When her husband was killed in battle, Theophano became Regent for her infant son, Otto III, and ruled the Holy Roman Empire for a decade. The novel's rousing climax is one of the great Dark Ages wars of succession, when Theophano's son became a pawn in the hands of the Frankish king.

Oh no, I'm turning into my mother! Every woman is familiar with the poignant, funny, baffling, or horrifying echoes that resonate at that moment when she first hears her own mother's voice coming out of her mouth. But this moment of recognition is more than ironic: It's at the root of how we see ourselves, and how we plot and follow the arc that goes from childhood to motherhood.

Alice Brill wakes up one day with a vague but nagging sensation of unease in her chest that signals trouble. Is it her marriage - drifting along for years on autopilot - that's so troubling? Her unrealized aspirations as a writer? Her unsettled younger son? Or is it something about her father, once a prominent surgeon but now slipping deeper into senility in a nursing home? There is also the matter of the writer whose book she's editing in her new profession as a "book doctor".

Regina Cutter is the mother of two grown children and the victim of her husband's midlife crisis. Out of a marriage, an income, and a place to live, she has relocated to Boston's Back Bay where her psychic aunt bequeathed her a townhouse...and some paranormal ability.

Here's a compulsively listenable, hilarious novel told through the e-mail messages of Martin Lukes. Martin Lukes is a man who is good at taking credit where it isn't due; a man who works hard at personal growth but consistently lets down everyone around him; a man who communicates with his sons by e-mail and fails to notice how smart his wife, Jenny, really is; a man - in short - who loves jargon but totally lacks understanding.

Doris Lessing broke the rules. Born in Iran and raised in Rhodesia, she moved to Britain with little more than an unpublished novel in her suitcase. Once an ardent Communist, she distanced herself from the movement long before it's attraction faded for others. Always prolific, Lessing continued to explore uncharted territory with her series of science-fiction novels. Based on numerous interviews and sources, this book is a timely portrait of a fascinating woman.

Elizabeth "Bette" Leigh Black comes of age in the years before WWII. Although money is scarce in the aftermath of the Depression, her home with her mother, Chloe, and her stepfather is happy. But as the war taints their sheltered world, Bette begins to realize life is sometimes cruel, and not everyone has the happiness she does. She finishes school and briefly becomes involved in anti-Nazi espionage until she marries.

Carly Leigh Sinclair grew up in the last decades of the 20th century in the home of her independent, ambitious mother, Leigh. Scarred by a childhood trauma, Carly finds that hiding her fears from her mother only causes them to mount. In an attempt to face them head on, Carly decides to join the Army.

Linda Leigh Sinclair is born in the aftermath of WWII. Raised near Ivy Manor, enveloped in the love of her family, Leigh has everything she could possibly need, but not everything she wants. Her overwhelming need for freedom for herself and others leads her into the modern civil-rights movement.