Showing results by narrator "Judith West" in All Categories

This year, a modern-day Scrooge learns the true meaning of Christmas with the help of a suddenly sexy old friend. A down-on-his-luck baseball star finds a beautiful new beginning with a hometown girl. And a prim-and-proper teacher is determined to bring out the holiday spirit in a grumpy tree farmer. Settle in for the season with this collection of very merry short fiction.

This lyrical narrative brings the listener into the mind of an unforgettable character and into a corner of rural Washington State at a time when its residents are trying to secede from the country. It's a fascinating, little-known slice of history woven seamlessly with the everyday eeriness of an isolated family farm.

Hearing an old lover’s song on the radio while she’s taking her daughter to kindergarten carries the narrator back to her complicated affair with the singer, and to a meditation on what is, what was, and what might have been.

Janet works as a telephone operator in 1950s Richmond, Va. When she patches through a call for help from a child reporting an intruder at an isolated farm, she realizes she knows the family. Enlisting the help of the man she desires, she makes an emergency trip to help someone in danger - or is it, really, to help herself?

Eileen Connor hopes that a demanding bilingual job at an ad agency in Geneva will help her forget the man who broke her heart in New York. Instead, she falls in love with architect Matt Edwards - all too likely to be another disastrous choice.

Almost everyone prays: believers, unbelievers, wannabe believers, and might-have-been believers. It assures us all in our many parts and many moods that everything is going to be okay, despite any evidence to the contrary. When people say, “I don’t know how to pray,” what they often mean is “I don’t believe.” Or perhaps they are struggling with disappointment or anger with God and have taken a break from their prayer life.

From the introduction by James Thompson: Finland, the myths and truths. Internationally, it has a reputation as perhaps the best place in the world to live. A great economy. A low crime rate. Good and nearly cost-free health care. The needy are provided for by the state and live in reasonable comfort. Finns: peaceful and quiet people, living in the perfect example of a social democracy functioning as it should. A tourist, or even a person who has lived here for a length of time, might well view Finland as such.

Just because you’re not guilty doesn’t mean you’re innocent. Jessie Dancing got away, but she can’t escape her past. She works at a call center, for roadside emergency assistance. One night, she gets a call from Darren Markson, who sounds like he is being murdered. After telling the local police, Jessie starts her own investigation into the possible crime, finding Markson's family, discovering that Markson is still alive.

In 1941, with America at war, Ann Pollock falls in love. Handsome, charming attorney Phillip Coulter is everything she could want in a man and mate. But soon after they marry, Phillip leaves to fight for his country. When he comes home, he's a stranger, his body and spirit broken in a Japanese POW camp. It is only Ann's indomitable will and determination to succeed against all odds that keeps her family together.

The American women’s movement has been shrouded in myths, argue three leading scholars in this bold and revisionist history. Eschewing the conventional wisdom that places the origins of the American women’s movement in the nostalgic glow of the late 1960s, Feminism Unfinished traces the beginnings of this seminal American social movement to the 1920s, in the process creating an expanded, historical narrative that dramatically rewrites a century of American women’s history.

In the Year Without a Summer, a group of mad geniuses descended on Geneva. In an attempt to save the body and mind of George Byron, they performed a dreadful and forbidden experiment that forever changed history - and tore their own lives apart.Years later, Byron’s daughter Ada has inherited her father’s genius.

The unimpeachable Elenora Villars is the pride of New Orleans. Her magnificent auburn hair is her crowning glory and her benevolence is the talk of the town. Once a nurse to injured Americans in Niagara, Elenora has become famous for her compassionate works. The widow of a Spanish nobleman, Elenora has secured herself a respected place in high society. But she has a secret that could destroy her good name. Colonel Grant Farrell is the only man who knows what Elenora really is and the secrets she is hiding, but he doesn't care.

Raising four strong-willed younger siblings after her mother’s death and her father’s imprisonment, seventeen-year-old Lanie Freeman never knows what new adventure will roll into view—such as her brother’s wild idea to turn the family’s old truck into a traveling store.The Freeman...

Lanie Freeman and her siblings have survived the Great Depression without their father. They are convinced that he has been unjustly imprisoned.Lanie’s strong-willed sister, Maeva, runs away to Los Angeles to find the one woman in a city of thousands who can prove their father’s innocence...

Lanie Freeman had to grow up fast. Her mother died when she was just fourteen and now her father is in prison. The oldest of five children, seventeen-year-old Lanie has transformed into a surrogate mother … and a beautiful young woman. Not only must she keep her family together, but lately she...

Lanie took out her journal and dated it April 12, 1928. She started the habit of writing down everything that happened to her when she was no more than eight years old, and now she had six journals completely full. She thought about the prize at school, almost prayed to win, but somehow she...

When Delia Byrd packs up her old Datsun and her daughter Cissy and gets on the Santa Monica Freeway heading south and east, she is leaving everything she has known for 10 years: the tinsel glitter of the rock 'n' roll world; her dreams of singing and songwriting; and a life lived on credit cards and whiskey with a man who made promises he couldn't keep. Delia Byrd is going back to Cayro, Georgia, to reclaim her life - and the two daughters she left behind.