Showing results by narrator "Jeff Woodman" in All Categories

Darek is envious when his older brother Clep returns from a quest wearing dragon claws for a necklace. His brother has killed a Great Blue, the largest and most feared of all dragons. The next day the village will hold a great celebration, and Clep will be the guest of honor. Unable to sleep that night, Darek sneaks outside. He hears something whimpering and realizes that the slain dragon has left behind a newborn dragonling that nobody noticed.

Grasshoppers, waterstriders, and fireflies light up the pages of this rib-tickling book of poetry for two voices. Written as spirited duets, the poems ring with the love songs of book lice, the serenades of moths, and a choir of cicadas. Each one is a treat, filled with busy insect life. In addition to the voices of these frisky critters, there are also fascinating tidbits about their lives and habits.

It's the second decade of the 21st century, and terrorism has escalated almost beyond control. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem has been blown to bits by extremists, and, in retaliation, thousands have died in another major attack on the United States. The War on Terror has reached a deadly stalemate. Now the FBI has been dispatched to deal with a new menace: a plague targeted to ethnic groups, Jews or Muslims or both, has the potential to wipe out entire populations.

When the Devil comes to take him, Wakefield, a motivational speaker and architecture buff, isn't ready. He plies the Dark One with scotch and strikes a bargain: He, Wakefield, will take a year to search for an alternative life.

Nine-year-old Louis Drax lies in a coma in a hospital bed, re-living the events that led to his near-fatal fall into a ravine. Despite being attracted to the boy's mother Natalie Drax, Louis' doctor, Pascal Dannachet, begins reluctantly to question her version of Louis' accident and the apparent culpability of her missing husband. As the boy struggles to communicate from within his coma, the chilling truth emerges....

An impeccable ear for language, an eye for the smallest shifts in the cultural landscape, and a preternatural understanding of motivation and behavior, Ann Beattie's renowned storytelling abilities are on dazzling display in The Doctor's House. The novel opens with Nina's account of her brother's sexual appetites and betrayals, and leads into her mother's narrative.

A trip to the French Riviera should be a nice vacation for high school super-sleuth P.C. Hawke and his best friend Mackenzie. But when a woman is murdered at their hotel, P.C. and Mac can't just sit around and wait for the cops solve the crime.

Bobbie always spends her summers breaking horses and rounding up stray cattle on Grandpa’s ranch. But this year is different. Alex, her cousin from Los Angeles, is visiting. And Bobbie doesn’t want to ruin her summer teaching a “city greenhorn” what to do. While saddling up their horses to search for cattle, the two girls start a vicious feud. But when they run into the horrible Bledsoe boys and a wild bull, they must depend on each other to survive!

Continuing the story begun in Under the Blood-Red Sun, House of the Red Fish returns to Honolulu one year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Thirteen-year-old Japanese American Tomi Nakaji must struggle to support his family after the arrest of his father and grandfather.

Jack Trout, one of the most respected marketing gurus in the world, shows why some of today's biggest brands are having trouble and how to avoid repeating their mistakes. With the help of in-depth case studies chronicling the events leading up to the falls from grace of Sears, Miller Brewing, Xerox, Crest, Burger King, and other past market leaders, he identifies the ten most common mistakes...

Born in a bookstore in a blighted 1960's Boston neighborhood, Firmin the rat miraculously learns how to read by digesting his nest of books. Alienated from his family and unable to communicate with the humans he loves, Firmin quickly realizes that a literate rat is a lonely rat. Following a harrowing misunderstanding with his hero, the bookseller, Firmin begins to risk the dangers of Scollay Square, finding solace in the Lovelies of the burlesque cinema. Finally adopted by a down-on-his-luck science fiction writer, the tide begins to turn.

Prostitution has been legal in Rhode Island for more than a decade; Liam Mulligan, an old-school investigative reporter at dying Providence newspaper, suspects the governor has been taking payoffs to keep it that way. But this isn’t the only story making headlines… a child’s severed arm is discovered in a pile of garbage at a pig farm. Then the body of an internet pornographer is found sprawled on the rocks at the base of Newport’s famous Cliff Walk.

It’s the week before Christmas, and Eric is already bored with his vacation. His parents have to work, his friends are out of town, and the city is snowed under. Then he opens his apartment door for an exterminator, and is dragged into the adventure of his life. Anje Gabrail carries a crossbow and lives for his work. When he discovers a rat in the basement of Eric’s apartment building, he asks the boy to help him kill it. At first Eric agrees, after all, he doesn’t have anything better to do. But as the week progresses, Eric finds himself in a fight to save not only the rat but himself as well.

A singular life often circles around a singular moment, an occasion when one's life in the world is defined forever and the emotional vocabulary set. For the extraordinary writer James Salter, recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, this moment was contained in the fighter planes over Korea where, during his young manhood, he flew more than one hundred missions.

Winner of the National Book Award for her collection of stories Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has become one of our most admired and beloved writers. In this magnificent new book, she unfolds five pivotal moments in the lives of her characters and in the history of knowledge. In these brilliant fictions rich with fact, Barrett explores the thrill and sense of loss that come with scientific progress and the personal passions and impersonal politics that shape all human knowledge.

Acclaimed journalist Daniel J. Sharfstein cuts through centuries of myth to deliver this groundbreaking work. Defining their identities first as people of color and later as whites, three American families provide a lens for understanding how people thought about and experienced race and how these ideas and experiences evolved—how the definitions of black and white changed over time.

Darek and his family and friends are returning from their dragonquest with something different: Zantor, a live baby dragon. The villagers are surprised that it is nothing like the fierce creatures the Zorians have grown up believing dragons to be. This exciting sequel to The Dragonling continues the exciting story of Darek and Zantor.

In the captivating stories that make up The Empty Family, Colm Tibn delineates with a tender and unique sensibility, lives of unspoken or unconscious longing, of individuals often willingly cast adrift from their history. From the young Pakistani immigrant who seeks some kind of permanence in a strange town, to the Irish woman reluctantly returning to Dublin and discovering a city that refuses to acknowledge her long absence, each of Tibn's stories manage to contain whole worlds.

For Tel Aviv Noir, Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron have masterfully assembled some of Israel's top contemporary writers into a compulsively readable collection. Featuring brand-new stories by: Etgar Keret, Gadi Taub, Lavie Tidhar, Deakla Keydar, Matan Hermoni, Julia Fermentto, Gon Ben Ari, Shimon Adaf, Alex Epstein, Antonio Ungar, Gai Ad, Assaf Gavron, Silje Bekeng, and Yoav Katz.

Diana Gabaldon, number one New York Times best-selling author of the celebrated Outlander series, delivers three mesmerizing tales of war, intrigue, and espionage that feature one of her most popular characters: Lord John Grey.