Showing results by narrator "Catherine Ho" in All Categories

Like all good Chinese children, Andrea Tang is doing her best to fulfil all her mother’s plans for her life: she’s on track to become partner at a top law firm in Singapore, she has a beautiful apartment in the right postcode and a perfect boyfriend who is practically made of husband material. Except that those plans are unravelling fast: there’s an unfairly attractive new lawyer out to steal her promotion, she has credit-card debt up to her eyeballs, her perfect boyfriend is now her perfect ex-boyfriend....

Set during the Gold Rush, in a re-imagined American West, Lucy and Sam, 12 and 11, are newly orphaned siblings. With their father's body on their backs, they roam an unforgiving landscape dotted with buffalo bones and tiger paw prints, searching for a place to give him a proper burial. The siblings must battle with their own memories, the illusion of the American Dream and each other.

Born under the crumbling towers of her kingdom, Queen Talyien was the shining jewel and legacy of the bloody War of the Wolves. It nearly tore her nation apart. But her arranged marriage to the son of a rival clan heralds peace. However, he suddenly disappears before their reign can begin, and the kingdom is fractured beyond repair.

A joyful collection of the most popular, provocative and unforgettable essays from the New York Times 'Modern Love' column. A young woman goes through the five stages of ghosting grief. A man's promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her 70s looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships. 

With The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 3, award-winning editor Neil Clarke provides a year-in-review and 27 of the best stories published by both new and established authors in 2017. 

Everything’s for hire - even magic. If you need something done, they’re the best: a tough, resourceful mage, a lab-created genderless hacker, and a cyborg with a big gun. But when they’re hired by a virtual construct to destroy the other copies of himself, and the down payment is a new magical skill, Cloke knows this job is going to be a league harder than anything they’ve ever done.

Keeping up-to-date with the most buzzworthy and cutting-edge science fiction requires sifting through countless magazines, e-zines, websites, blogs, original anthologies, single-author collections, and more - a task accomplishable by only the most determined and voracious readers. For everyone else, Night Shade Books is proud to introduce the latest volume of The Best Science Fiction of the Year, collecting the finest that the genre has to offer, from the biggest names in the field to the most exciting new writers.

The best of the year's science fiction and fantasy stories as selected by the multiple award-winning editor Jonathan Strahan. Distant worlds, time travel, epic adventure, unseen wonders, and much more! The best, most original and brightest science fiction and fantasy stories from around the globe from the past 12 months are brought together in one collection by multiple award winning editor Jonathan Strahan.

Lacey Chu has always dreamed of working as an engineer for MONCHA, the biggest tech firm in the world and the company behind the "baku" - a customizable "pet" with all the capabilities of a smartphone. But when Lacey is rejected by the elite academy that promises that future, she's crushed. One night, Lacey comes across the broken form of a highly advanced baku. After she repairs it, the cat-shaped baku she calls Jinx opens its eyes and somehow gets her into her dream school. But Jinx is different than any other baku she's ever seen.... He seems real.

Celia Sand and her best friend, Anya Burtoni, are inklings for the esteemed religion of Profeta. Using magic, they tattoo followers with beautiful images that represent the Divine's will and guide the actions of the recipients. But 10 years into their servitude Celia and Anya know the truth: Profeta is built on lies, the tattooed orders strip away freedom, and the revered temple is actually a brutal prison. Their opportunity to escape arrives with the Rabble Mob, a traveling theater troupe. But they're being followed: The Divine they never believed in is very real - and very angry.

Inside a century-old row house in Brooklyn, renegade Sister Evelyn and her fellow nuns preside over a safe haven for the abused and abandoned. Gruff and indomitable on the surface, warm and wry underneath, little daunts Evelyn, until she receives word that Mercy House will be investigated by Bishop Hawkins, a man with whom she shares a dark history. In order to protect everything they’ve built, the nuns must conceal many of their methods, which are forbidden by the Catholic Church.

The spiral to madness begins with a single push. Abandoned by her people, Queen Talyien's quest takes a turn for the worst as she stumbles upon a plot deeper and more sinister than she could have ever imagined, one that will displace her king and see her son dead. The road home beckons, strewn with a tangled web of deceit and impossible horrors that unearth the nation's true troubles - creatures from the dark, mad dragons, and men with hearts hungry for power. 

Getting through some bad days require nothing more than a hot shower or a long walk. But others require us to be curious and courageous. In The Handbook for Bad Days, Helmink offers listeners more than 70 proven strategies to find that lightness when things feel sideways. Her compassionate, no-bullshit approach teaches listeners what it truly means to care for themselves, and she explores topics including the benefits of a good cry; why, sometimes, it’s okay to give up; and why a fuzzy pink cardigan and some Celine Dion is just as good as a Sanskrit mantra.

Erin Craig "delivers" on a story about a new girl in town and the cute pizza delivery boy, Auriane Desombre captures our hearts with teens communicating through window signs, and Bill Konigsberg takes us along on daily walks with every step bringing us closer to love. There's flirting and romance from Rachael Lippincott, a tale of a determined girl with a mask-making business from Erin Hahn, and a music-inspired love connection from Sajni Patel. Brittney Morris turns enemies to lovers with the help of a balcony herb garden.

Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war. Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories is designed to speak to the others, contesting assumptions and illuminating the complicated ways we experience, interpret, and pass on our personal and shared histories. 

Amy Wong is an up-and-coming designer in the New York fashion industry; she is young, beautiful, and has it all. But she finds herself at odds with rival designers in a world rife with chauvinism and prejudice. In her personal life, she struggles with marriage and motherhood, finding that her choices often fall short of her traditional family's expectations. Derailed again and again, Amy must confront her own limitations to succeed as the designer and person she wants to be.

Before Carl Linnaeus began classifying organisms, before John James Audubon drew birds from the wild, before Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, there lived a 13-year-old girl named Maria Merian who loved to draw bugs. With no formal training or university education, Maria Merian took on the role of artist, adventurer, and scientist in 17th-century Europe - a time when women were rarely allowed responsibilities outside the home, and unusual interests led to accusations of witchcraft.  

Gemma Huang is a recent transplant to Los Angeles from Illinois, having abandoned plans for college to pursue a career in acting, much to the dismay of her parents. Now she's living with three roommates in a two-bedroom hovel, auditioning for bit roles that hardly cover rent. Gemma's big break comes when she's asked to play a lead role in an update of M. Butterfly filming for the summer in Beijing. When she arrives, she's stopped by paparazzi at the airport. She quickly realizes she may as well be the twin of one of the most notorious young socialites in Beijing.

These stories contain a cross section of narratives, people, and places: an unusual couple requests to be flown to a remote island near Alaska; a series of beached whales vex a US military officer in Vietnam and cause unrest in a local village; an ecoterrorist’s bomb at an upscale ski resort has unintended consequences; and mysterious killings thought to be the work of a monster in Japan turn out to be something much more real. 

When pirates attacked her town and the captain took a liking to her, she saw a way out. Zheng Yi Sao agreed to marry him only if she got an equal share of his business. When her husband died six years later, she took command of the fleet. Over the next decade, the pirate queen built a fleet of over 1,800 ships and 70,000 men. On land and sea, Zheng Yi Sao's power rivaled the emperor himself. Time and again, her ships triumphed over the emperor's ships.