検索キーワード： ナレーター "Allyson Ryan" すべてのカテゴリー

Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. “Grand Stand-In” is narrated by an employee of the Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider—a company that supplies “stand-ins” for families with deceased, ill, or plain mean grandparents. And in “Blowing Up On the Spot,” a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. These wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the ways we try to cope with both.

At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at Christie's in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. Dressed in couture YSL, drinking the finest champagne at trendy Balthazar, Reba, as she's known, is the picture of a wealthy art collector. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she's a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make.

Tristan Lyons, Mel Stokes, and their fellow outcasts from the Department of Diachronic Operations (D.O.D.O.) fight to stop the powerful Irish witch Gráinne from using time travel to reverse the evolution of all modern technology. Chief amongst Gráinne’s plots: to encrypt cataclysmic spells into Shakespeare’s “cursed” play, Macbeth. When her fellow rogue agents fall victim to Gráinne’s schemes, Melisande Stokes is forced to send Tristan’s untested, wayward sister Robin back in time to 1606 London.

The fascinating stories featured in Inventing the Abbotts explore the treacherously shifting ground of erotic and family relationships. In the title story, a young man takes up successively with three daughters of the most fashionable family in town. Others concern a young girl in the first blush of sexual curiosity, and a stricken dowager whose seizures release a brutal and sometimes obscene candor. In story after story, Sue Miller presents a remarkable gallery of characters, offering insight into contemporary men and women with their hungry hearts and dismayed consciences.

Nobody knows the people of Wooster, Ohio, better than switchboard operator Vivian Dalton, and she’d be the first to tell you that. She calls it intuition. Her teenage daughter, Charlotte, calls it eavesdropping. Vivian and the other women who work at Bell on East Liberty Street connect lines and lives. They aren’t supposed to listen in on conversations, but they do, and they all have opinions on what they hear - especially Vivian.

Blending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise. Standing nearly 500 stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap.

June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report that an aviator from Idaho witnessed nine pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any aircraft built by humankind. Days later, a desperate Chicago pool hustler, inspired by the news, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream search for a possible extraterrestrial sign. From those he inspires along the way to the Cascades comes a new community - “The Seekers” - devoted to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the past.  

It begins with a drowning. One day Mr. Arcilla, the romance language teacher at Briarfield, an all-girls boarding school, is found dead at the bottom of Reed Pond. Young and handsome, the object of much fantasy and fascination, he was adored by his students. For Lilith and Romy, Evie and Claire, Nellie and Grace, he was their first love and their first true loss. 

The White Elephant looms large over the quaint suburban town of Willard Park: a gaudy, newly constructed behemoth of a home, it soars over the neighborhood, dwarfing the houses that surround it. When owner Nick Cox cuts down Allison and Ted Millers’ precious red maple - in an effort to make his unsightly property more appealing to buyers - their once serene town becomes a battleground. While tensions between Ted and Nick escalate, other dysfunctions abound: Allison finds herself compulsively drawn to the man who is threatening to upend her quietly organized life. 

Molly Barlow isn’t that girl anymore. A business major at her college in Boston, she’s reinvented herself after everything that went down a year ago...after all the people she hurt and the family she tore apart. Slowly, life is getting back to normal. Molly has just said "I love you" to her new boyfriend, Ian, and they are off on a romantic European vacation together, starting with scenic London. But there on a tube platform, the past catches up to her in the form of Gabe, her ex, traveling on his own parallel vacation with new girlfriend Sadie. 

A natural born trapper and hunter raised in the Alaskan wilderness, Tracy Petrikoff spends her days tracking animals and running with her dogs in the remote forests surrounding her family's home. Though she feels safe in this untamed land, Tracy still follows her late mother's rules: Never Lose Sight of the House. Never Come Home with Dirty Hands. And, above all else, Never Make a Person Bleed. But these precautions aren't enough to protect Tracy when a stranger attacks her in the woods and knocks her unconscious.

Isabel, Anna, Beth, and Maggie are women who aren't afraid to take it all. Whether spearheading a pregnancy lingerie company, conspiring to return a husband to his ex-wife, lusting after an old lover while in a satisfying marriage, or trying to balance motherhood and work - they are sexy, determined, and not looking for a simple happily ever after. Through punchy, hilarious, and insightful storytelling, The End of Men shatters the confines of society and, more importantly, those we impose upon ourselves.

"We shall never tell." Spurred by the cryptic phrase in a centuries-old letter, Emerson Mundy travels to her ancestral hometown to trace her past. In Mundy's Landing, she connects with long lost relatives - and a closet full of skeletons going back centuries. In the year since former NYPD Detective Sullivan Leary solved the historic Sleeping Beauty Murders, she - like the village itself - has made a fresh start.

From elite marathoner and Olympic hopeful Becky Wade comes the story of her yearlong exploration of diverse global running communities from England to Ethiopia - nine countries, 72 host families, and over 3,500 miles of running - investigating unique cultural approaches to the sport and revealing the secrets to the success of runners all over the world.

Lexie James escaped: After being abandoned by her alcoholic father and kicked out of the apartment to make room for her mother's boyfriend, Lexie made it on her own. She earned a master's degree, conquered terrifying panic attacks, got engaged to the nicest guy she'd ever met, and landed a counseling job at the prestigious Ruxton Academy, a prep school for the moneyed children of the elite. But as her wedding date nears, Lexie has doubts. Yes, she's created the stable life she craved as a child, but is stability really what she wants?

Hair neatly braided, hands serenely clasped, eyes closed, the young woman appeared to be sound asleep. But the peaceful tableau was a madman's handiwork. Beneath the covers her white nightgown was spattered with blood. At daybreak a horrified family would discover her corpse tucked in to their guest room. The cunning killer would strike again...and again...before vanishing into the mists of time.

On Halloween 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, and disappears. Three days later he's found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand - a discovery that sends tremors through this conservative community, already unnerved by growing rumors of Satanic worship in the region.

Molly Barlow is facing one long, hot summer - 99 days - with the boy whose heart she broke and the boy she broke it for...his brother. Day 1: Julia Donnelly eggs my house my first night back in Star Lake, and that's how I know everyone still remembers everything. She has every right to hate me, of course: I broke Patrick Donnelly's heart the night everything happened with his brother, Gabe. Now I'm serving out my summer like a jail sentence: Just 99 days till I can leave for college and be done.

Newly divorced Gaby Duran isn't really expecting to find her soul mate on a dating site like InTune. She just needs a distraction from pining over her ex-husband, Ben, and the happy marriage they once had. And she's wise enough to know that online, the truth doesn't always match the profile. Almost everyone lies a little - or a lot.

Lucy's life by the pond has always been full. She has water and friends, laughter and the love of her adoptive mother, Lynn, who has made sure that Lucy's childhood was very different from her own. Yet it seems Lucy's future is settled already - a house, a man, children, and a water source - and anything more than life by the pond is beyond reach. When disease burns through their community, the once life-saving water of the pond might be the source of what's killing them now.