Showing results by narrator "Natasha Soudek" in All Categories

Self-care is the practice of taking an active role in protecting one's own well-being and happiness. In order to do so, we must get in touch with who we are at our core. Only then can we realize how we need to show up in the world—how we want to express, without any apologies, our most authentic selves. Lessons from the Empress focuses on what the tarot can teach us about ourselves and provides exercises to strengthen our confidence in our own creative expression.

Apprentice Flick remembers everything, except the first five years of her life. And for as long as she can remember, Flick has wanted to enter the Elite Academy - home to the best, brightest, and most loyal members of the Love Collective government. Flick's uncanny memory might get her there, too...even if it is the very thing that marks her as a freak. But frightening hallucinations start intruding into her days and threaten to bring down all she has worked so hard to accomplish.

Nan and Heath Duncan, siblings abandoned by their papa and abused by their guardian, have no choice but to survive on the London streets. When a kind gentleman rescues Nan from such a life, the siblings are separated and raised in two vastly different social worlds. Just when both are beginning to flourish and years have healed some of their wounds, their long-awaited papa returns and reunites them—bringing demands with him. Nan is expected to marry a rich suitor she's never liked, and Heath is expected to forsake his gentle spirit and become the hardened man his father always was.

A Is for Alien is award-winning author Caitlín R. Kiernan’s first collection devoted entirely to her science-fiction work. It includes the critically acclaimed novelette Riding the White Bull, along with seven other tales of a less-than-utopian future. Ranging from the wastelands and mountains of Mars to the streets of a late 21st-century Manhattan, from the moons of Europa and Saturn to an iceless Antarctica, these tales bring Kiernan’s trademark brand of the eco-gothic to bear on what it means to be human and the paths and decisions that may face mankind....

A one-night stand with a handsome stranger wasn't a problem - until he tries to steal her company. Ambitious, high-powered CEO Lauren Bradley is one press release away from catapulting her company to new heights. Rival CEO Antonio Forte is arrogant, controlling, and sexy. She should know, since Antonio's a one-night stand she thought she'd never see again. Antonio wants to take over more than her company, he wants her as part of the acquisition. Let the games begin....

For more than four decades, between 1969 and 2010, the remote former mining town of Trinidad, Colorado, was the unlikely crossroads for approximately 6,000 medical pilgrims who came looking for relief from the pain of gender dysphoria. The surgical skill and nonjudgmental compassion of surgeons Stanley Biber and his transgender protege Marci Bowers made the phrase "going to Trinidad" a euphemism for gender confirmation surgery in the worldwide transgender community.

It is 1940. For the past decade, Walter Benjamin - the German-Jewish critic and philosopher - has been writing his masterpiece in a library in Paris, a city he loves. Now Nazi tanks have overrun the suburbs, and Benjamin is forced to flee. With a battered briefcase that contains his precious manuscript of a thousand handwritten pages, he sets off for the border and is led by chance to a young anti-Nazi who is taking Jews and other refugees over the Pyrenees into Spain, where they may (with luck) make their way to freedom in Portugal or South America.

After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine - and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin.

Midnight, June 13, 1942: Peter Burger stands on a foggy beach, ears primed as a submarine hull scrapes the sandy sea bottom. He has endured seventeen months in a Gestapo prison and seventeen days on a Nazi U-boat only to have landed on American shores with six boxes of explosives and no escape. After slipping into New York City, Peter finds himself at a massive military parade where he meets Grete Baum, a German-Jewish refugee grappling with loneliness and loss. Grete is drawn to Peter’s brooding vulnerability, and the pair instantly bond.

With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look on Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain or the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor.

A struggling single mother. Rianna Cutter strips to survive. It's the best paying gig for a young woman with little education and puts a roof over her child's head and food on the table. Working toward a better life for her son, she has no time or energy for love. A tough criminal businessman. Jonah Wyatt is ready to make a big change, moving away from his successful pot growing business into a legitimate enterprise. He's all business all the time and has no interest in finding love he doubts even exists.

The neighborhood of the Little East is a collision of cultures, languages, and traditions, hidden away in the city of Maradaine. A set of streets to be avoided or ignored. When a foreign dignitary is murdered, solving the crime falls to the most unpopular inspectors in the Maradaine Constabulary: exposed fraud Satrine Rainey, and Uncircled mage Minox Welling.

Prudence Landon has always done exactly as she should. She's obeyed her parents' every word, lived by society's every dictate, and even agreed to marry a man more than twice her age simply because it was expected of her. In the fortnight before her wedding, she decides it's high time to bend a few rules before life as she knows it is over. Viscount Ashby leads a charmed life. Betrothed since the age of seven, he is perfectly content to allow his off-the-market status to keep the marriage-minded mamas at bay.

In the 1990s, Megan Margulies' Upper West Side neighborhood was marked by addicts shooting up in subway stations, frequent burglaries, and the "Wild Man of 96th Street", who set fires under cars and heaved rocks through stained glass church windows. The world inside her parents' tiny one-bedroom apartment was hardly a respite, with a family of five - including some loud personalities - eventually occupying the 550-square-foot space.

Only last year, Fannie O’Brien was considered a beauty with a brain, and her future shone bright, despite the war in Europe. With her father’s sudden death and her brothers overseas, Fannie must now do the work of three men on their 200-acre farm—until eight German prisoners arrive and, just as Fannie feared, trouble comes too. Someone seems intent on causing “accidents,” and Fannie is certain the culprit is one of the two handsome older Germans—or possibly both. Can she manage the farm, keep the prisoners in line, and hold her family together through these turbulent times?

A mother is a dissident, a refusenik, and a prisoner in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and '80s. Her daughter, eleven years old, is left without a family. A grandmother is in the USA, waiting for her daughter and granddaughter and not knowing if she'll ever see them again. "I am fine," the three of them write to each other in their letters. How can you be "fine" when you have to fight to survive? When you must be silent? When the place that you love turns against you?

In small-town Michigan, Abby Graven leads a solitary life. Once a bright student on the cusp of a promising art career, she now languishes in her childhood home, trudging to and from her job as a supermarket cashier. Each day she is taunted from the magazine racks by the success of her former best friend, Elise, a rising Hollywood starlet whose life in pictures Abby obsessively scrapbooks. When Abby encounters Elise again at their high school reunion, Elise’s unexpected faith in Abby reignites in her a dormant hunger.

A successful historical mystery writer, Chloe Whitfield comes to Ca’ d’Zan to research her next novel. Chloe’s fascination with the circus is rooted in family stories of her great-grandmother Lucinda Conroy, who reportedly was a trapeze artist of some renown. She’s heard hints of scandal—and perhaps larceny, but no details. Chloe’s grandmother—rumored to be Lucinda’s only offspring—was raised in an orphanage and never knew her mother. Intrigued as she is, Chloe has no intent of writing about Lucinda until she sees a poster featuring Lucinda as the star performer in May of 1936.

When Dani Sango’s art forger father passes away, Dani inherits his home. Among his effects is a book of Native American drawings, which leads her to seek the help of museum curator Brad Osgood to decipher the ledger art. Why would her father have this book? Is it just another forgery? Brad Osgood’s four-year-old niece, Brynn, needs a safe home, and Brad longs to provide it. The last thing he needs is more drama, especially from a forger’s daughter. But when the two meet “accidentally” at St. Augustine’s 350-year-old Spanish fort, Castillo de San Marcos, he can’t refuse the intriguing woman.

They were sent to investigate the first extraterrestrial signal. What they found was beyond anything they could have imagined - or feared. On a voyage to a mysterious moon in the Alpha Centauri system, the UEA Centaurus meets with disaster. Only the quick thinking of the flight engineer, Rachel Terman, saves some of the crew. Crash-landing on the moon, trillions of kilometers from Earth, they struggle to carry out their mission and try to survive. But nothing has prepared them for what they will face.