This is an audiobook of short stories of everyday human emotional experiences. Stories of profound loss, of great friendships, of growing old with a dog, of going to war, and of course, stories of deep romantic love. I hope the stories encourage the listener to do some introspection on what it means to be human. I believe the poems, like all art, will mean more to some than to others.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle - and people in general - has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands.

There is a starship in trouble, lost in the void, with no one awake to hear the alarms. A thousand specially selected people left a troubled and unsustainable Earth for another world. Their dream was a new start on a virgin planet 30 years away. Their ship was state-of-the-art and entirely automatic, it's passengers safely sleeping through the journey - but something has gone wrong, something unexpected.

Alex Tinsdill never thought a simple DNA test would lead to a $250 million inheritance and Cove Point Manor, a massive estate built during the Gilded Age on the Gold Coast of Long Island, New York. Alex's inheritance doesn't come without a cost however, as two greedy relatives soon show up, determined to separate Alex from his new found riches. Cove Point Manor has a dark past, and a sinister secret which is about to be revealed!

Nikolai, a bodyguard in the prestigious Centurion Personal Protection agency, is injured in the line of duty. While recovering from his injuries, he is assigned to a new client. An easy case, his boss tells him. Nikolai travels to a small quiet town north of Siberia to provide protection for a young woman, on her dad’s request. At first, both Nikolai and his boss see the assignment as a whim of a rich overprotective father.

Harmony House is more than a “special place for special people.” It’s a think tank where high-functioning autistic savants harness their unique abilities for the benefit of society. Resident Eddie Parks’s contribution: an “echo box” that can re-create never-recorded sounds using acoustic archeology. All Eddie wants is to hear his late mother’s voice. But what he’s created is inadvertently posing a threat to national security. To Harmony House’s shadowy government backers and radical extremists, the echo box is the ultimate intelligence asset - an end to the very concept of secrecy.

They are just children when they first meet: Charlotte, daughter of the French ambassador, and Hiroshi, a laundress’s son. One day in the playground, Hiroshi declares that he has an idea that will change the world. An idea that will sweep away all differences between rich and poor. When Hiroshi runs into Charlotte several years later, he is trying to build a brighter future through robotics.

A hyper-fast quantum computer is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb: whoever possesses one will be able to shred any encryption in existence, effectively owning the digital world. The question is: Who will build it first, the United States or China? The latest of David Ignatius' timely, sharp-eyed espionage novels follows CIA agent Harris Chang into a quantum research lab compromised by a suspected Chinese informant. The breach provokes a mole hunt that is obsessive, destructive, and - above all - uncertain.

Nicholas Spencer, charismatic head of a company involved in the development of an anticancer vaccine, suddenly disappears. His private plane crashes en route to Puerto Rico, but his body is not found. Early results of the vaccine seemed highly promising. Yet, coinciding with Nicholas Spencer's disappearance comes news that the FDA is denying approval. Then follows the shocking revelation that Spencer had looted huge sums of money - including the lifetime savings of people who had risked everything.

David Ryan is the designer of ELOPe, an email language optimization program, that if successful, will make his career. But when the project is suddenly in danger of being canceled, David embeds a hidden directive in the software accidentally creating a runaway artificial intelligence. David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers.

Modern-day Rome: Two American archaeologists suddenly die in an underground passageway in the Roman Forum leading to the buried rooms of Emperor Nero's Golden Palace. The Italian authorities conclude the deaths were caused by a devastating and highly contagious virus. Tom Stewart, an NYU forensic archaeologist who was present when the deaths occurred, becomes entangled in the race to find the supply of the virus - a race involving many powerful players desperately seeking the deadly contagion.

The story follows the trail of government research past the Manhattan Project and pulls that team of famous physicists to work on Project Rainbow, an outgrowth of secret research during World War II. Real history and real science make this story compelling and not easily dismissed even by UFO reports' most cynical critics. The evidence eventually leads to answer the big questions: what brought the visitors, why have they stayed, what do they want?

Hollywood producer Hopwood DePree had been told as a boy that an ancestor—who he was named for—had left his family’s English castle in the 1700s to come to America. One night after some wine and a visit to Ancestry.com, Hopwood discovered a photograph of a magnificent English estate with a familiar name: Hopwood Hall, a 60-room, 600-year-old grand manor on 5,000 acres. And with that, Hopwood DePree’s life took an almost fairytale turn.

In Tehran, while hiding out from the Iranian secret police, CIA officer, Titus Ray, finds shelter with a group of Iranian Christians. Compelled by their unwavering faith, the battle-hardened agent becomes a believer shortly before they smuggle him out of Iran to freedom in Turkey. Returning to the States, he discovers his Iranian mission failed because of political infighting within the Agency. After delivering a scathing indictment against the Deputy Director of Operations, he's forced to take a year's medical leave in Oklahoma.

Deadly radiation from a passing comet is about to destroy life on Earth. In desperation, the US government constructs a series of underground shelters to protect as many people as possible. They are expected to be underground for 20 years before returning back to the surface. But can they survive their time within the confines of the underground shelter? And what will they find when they finally emerge?