Showing results by narrator "Xe Sands" in All Categories

Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they’d be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully curated futures have turned out to be dead ends.

In today's fast-paced, competitive business environment, everyone needs to communicate clearly and use time productively. E-Mail: A Write It Well Guide is a user-friendly audiobook that is filled with guidelines, tips, and tools. Discover how to write professional email that gets results, makes better use of email time, and avoids problems that can be costly. The updated version includes a section on using instant messaging and handheld devices. Used by individuals, corporations, and trainers, this is a must-have for anyone who writes emails at work. 

1941. A talented flier, Jessie Lovelace yearns for a career in aviation. When the civilian flight school in her small Texas town begins to clandestinely train British pilots for the RAF, she fights to become an instructor. But the task isn’t without its perils of near-misses and death. Faced with the weight of her responsibilities, she finds solace with a British officer who knows firsthand the heavy price paid in war . . . until he returns to the battles he never truly left behind.

Grayson Ford and Emma Kinglsey - close since they were kids, opposites in every way. He's the stuff high school crushes are made of, Mister Popular, and captain of every team. She's artsy, cute, and not in his league, though fully aware of Summerland's "I Dream of Dating Grayson Ford" support group.

Consider this glowing debut from Paige Lewis a menagerie of near-extinction. Space Struck explores the wonders and cruelties occurring within the realms of nature, science, and religion, with the acuity of a sage, the deftness of a hunter, and a hilarious sensibility for the absurd. The universe is seen as an endless arrow “...and it asks only one question: How dare you?” The poems are physically and psychologically tied to the animal world.

"The Year of Birmingham", 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young Black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with Black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative....

It's 1969, and 16-year-old Lucy is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy's default caretaker for most of their lives, Charlotte's youth has been marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy's dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare.

Consie is home for a funeral when she stumbles upon a family letter sent from Germany in 1945, which contains staggering news: Consie's great-uncle Hermann, who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and three daughters, might have escaped. This seems improbable to Consie. Did people escape from Auschwitz? Could her great-uncle have been among them? What happened to Hermann? Did anyone know? These questions are at the root of Consie's excavation of her family's history as she seeks, 70 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, to discover what happened to Hermann. 

A kid walks into your bookstore and...guess what? He's your son. The one you put up for adoption eighteen years ago. The one you never told anyone about. Surprise! And a huge surprise it is. It's a huge surprise to his adoptive mother, Monica, who thought she had a close relationship with Matthew, her nearly adult son. Until he secretly arranged a vacation to Cape Cod so he could meet his birth mother...without a word to her. It's also a surprise to Harlow, the woman who secretly placed him for adoption so many years ago.

In the near year and a half following her tragic ordeal in She Dreams of Fire, Agatha “Aggy” Grae and her allies have been hunting the remnants of the Umbra coven. By fighting back against the corrupt witches who imprisoned and killed the Fae for their blood, Aggy and her friends have become beacons of hope. But inner turmoil plagues the team, as the price for freedom is a weight upon their souls.

In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ammonite Violin & Others, one of contemporary dark fantasy’s most bewitching and distinctive voices is back with another banquet of the weird and unexpected. Within this book, you’ll discover a dazzling suite of stories situated on the borderlands between the unspeakable and the erotic, the grotesque and the sublime.

An irreverent and deeply moving comedy set in New York about friendship, fertility and fighting for one's sanity in a toxic workplace. Jen has reached her early 30s and has all but abandoned a once-promising painting career when, spurred by the economic crisis, she takes a poorly defined job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation's aim is to empower women, but staffers spend all their time devising acronyms for imaginary programs, ruthlessly undermining one another and stroking the ego of their boss, the larger-than-life celebrity philanthropist Leora Infinitas.

For centuries the Warders' Circle on the neutral islands of Twaa-Fei has given the countries of the sky a way to avoid war, settling their disputes through formal, magical duels. But the Circle's ability to maintain peace is fading: The Mertikan Empire is preparing for conquest, and the trade nation of Quloo is sinking, stripped of the aerstone that keeps both ships and island a-sky. When Kris Denn tries to win their island a seat in the Warder’s Circle and Oda no Michiko discovers that her conquered nation's past is not what she's been told, they upset the balance of power.

When Mimi finds out her favorite words - simple words, like apricot, blackberry, buttercup - are disappearing from the English language, she elects her granddaughter Brook as their Keeper. And did you know? The only way to save words is to know them.

In New York City, a girl called Leonora vanishes without a trace. Years earlier and miles upstate, Goldie, a wild, negligent mother, searches for a man to help raise her precocious son, Paul, who later discovers that the only way to save his soul is to run away. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, we find deeper interconnections between these stories and growing clues about Leonora – this missing girl whose face looks out from telephone poles and billboards – whom one character will give anything to save.

From the outside, criminal psychiatrist Dr. Madeline Pine’s life appears picture-perfect—she has a beautiful family, a successful mental health practice and a growing reputation as an expert in female violence. But when she's called to help investigate a mysterious death at a boarding school for troubled girls, Madeline hesitates. She’s been through tragic cases before, and the one she was entangled in last year nearly destroyed her… Yet she can’t turn away when she hears about Charley Ridley.

A collection of sweet, tender, poetic, beautiful, heart-wrenching, sensual love stories.   

This version of the children's classic, read by Xe Sands, will delight listeners of all ages with its story of wisdom and boundless love.

Puente del Norte was the last place on earth Maddy Lambert had expected to find herself. Yet here she was in the middle of Central America in an embattled guerilla camp on a mission impossible. She’d come to get her dying father, whose ideals had carried him far away from home and won him the title of El Patron - the Saint. She’d crossed a country at war only to be told that he didn’t recognize her as his daughter...to find him guarded by the infamous Jake Murphy - the man who’d stolen her girlish heart and still had the power to stir her deepest passions.

In 2006, vaquita, a diminutive porpoise making its home in the Upper Gulf of California, inherited the dubious title of world's most endangered marine mammal. When international crime cartels discovered a lucrative trade in the swim bladders of totoaba, illegal gillnetting went rampant, and now the lives of the few remaining vaquitas hang in the balance. Author Brooke Bessesen takes us on a journey to Mexico's Upper Gulf region to uncover the story. She interviewed townspeople, fishermen, scientists, and activists, teasing apart a complex story filled with villains and heroes.