Showing results by narrator "Marin Ireland" in All Categories

In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent, and while they sleep they go to another place....

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night cleaner shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. Ever since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat over thirty years ago, keeping busy has helped her cope. One night she meets Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium who sees everything, but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

My husband is dead. I attended his funeral. I watched his casket be lowered six feet into the ground. (Actually, it may have been only five feet, but that still seems like more than enough.) And then we ate an array of finger sandwiches and deviled eggs and miniature beef wellingtons that cost more than my first car. My point is, Grant is gone. And so are all his many, many deep, dark secrets which I never really ever bothered to ask him about. He is never coming back.

In Argus, North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to all of his problems; Kismet can't even imagine her future, let alone the kind of future Gary might offer. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say 'no' and so the die is cast. Hugo has been in love with Kismet for years. He has been her friend, confidante and occasionally her lover - and now she is marrying Gary, Hugo is determined to steal her back.

Blythe Connor doesn't want history to repeat itself. Violet is her first child and she will give her daughter all the love she deserves. All the love that her own mother withheld. But firstborns are never easy. And Violet is demanding and fretful. She never smiles. Soon Blythe believes she can do no right - that something's very wrong. Either with her daughter, or herself. Her husband, Fox, says she's imagining it. But Violet's different with him. And he can't understand what Blythe suffered as a child. No one can. Blythe wants to be a good mother.

Emmett returns home to pick up his little brother Billy, tie up his late father's estate and get out of town for good. Since leaving the Kansas youth facility where he served time, Emmett has wanted one thing: to give them both a fresh start - and that means heading out to the sparkling west. Young, precocious Billy has plans of his own - to get to San Francisco, where he believes their long-estranged mother is waiting for them.

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France, a group of women determined to rebuild devastated French communities just miles from the front. Upon arrival, Jessie strives to establish something that the French have never seen - children's libraries. She turns ambulances into bookmobiles and trains the first French female librarians. Then she disappears.

Marissa and Mathew Bishop seem like the golden couple, until Marissa cheats. She wants to repair things–both because she loves her husband, and for the sake of their eight-year-old son. After a friend forwards an article about Avery, Marissa takes a chance on this maverick therapist, who lost her licence due to controversial methods. If Avery Chambers can’t fix you in ten sessions, she won’t take you on as a client. She helps people overcome everything, from anxiety to domineering parents. Her successes almost help her absorb the emptiness she feels since her husband’s death.

Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully-guarded Stockton family, has never had to worry about money. Darley followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. And Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't (and really shouldn't) have, and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.

In a small town in Sweden it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you'll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank. Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation - and the offender is refusing to communicate their demands to the police. Inside the building, fear quickly turns to irritation for the seven strangers trapped inside. But as the minutes tick by, they begin to suspect that the criminal mastermind holding them hostage might be more in need of rescuing than they are.

Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there’s something about this place that prevents it. The residents continue to grapple with life’s big questions: What is a family? What is a community? And what, if anything, are we willing to sacrifice in order to protect them? As the locals of Beartown struggle to overcome the past, great change is on the horizon. Someone is coming home after a long time away.

Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: 13-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril.

Alice Stern isn't ready to turn 40. She thought she'd have more time to figure it all out. Above all, she thought she'd have more time with her father, Leonard Stern, an eccentric novelist—but he's lying in a hospital bed and Alice isn't sure if she'll hear his voice again. When she falls asleep outside their old apartment on the night before her birthday, she's surprised to be greeted the next morning by a much younger Leonard, with a 16th birthday card for a teenage Alice who, far from clinging to her youth, is hurtling towards adulthood.

The international number one best seller. All Lina wanted was to be desired. How did she end up in a marriage with two children and a husband who wouldn’t touch her? All Maggie wanted was to be understood. How did she end up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court, a hated pariah in her small town? All Sloane wanted was to be admired. How did she end up a sexual object of men, including her husband, who liked to watch her have sex with other men and women?

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter.

Newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter are ready to begin their lives together in a small town in upstate New York. Whilst Annie spends most of her time alone, Sam, her therapist husband, works long hours in his home office, tending to the egos of his mostly female clientele. Little does Sam know that through a vent in the ceiling, every word of his sessions can be heard from the room upstairs. The pharmacist's wife, contemplating a divorce. The well-known painter whose boyfriend doesn't satisfy her in bed. Who could resist eavesdropping?

Ten people have been carefully selected to Beta test a ground-breaking piece of spyware. Pioneered by tech-wunderkind Cy Baxter, FUSION can track anyone wherever they are on earth. But does it work? Each participant is given two hours to 'Go Zero' – to go off-grid and disappear - and then thirty days to elude the highly sophisticated Capture Teams sent to find them. Any Zero that beats FUSION will receive $3million in cash. If Cy's system prevails, he wins a $90 billion-dollar contract with the CIA to develop FUSION and revolutionize surveillance forever.

When Gwendy Peterson was 12, a stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its seven coloured buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box re-entered Gwendy's life. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once more forced to deal with the temptations that the box represented - an amazing sense of well-being, balanced by a terrifyingly dark urge towards disaster.

Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than 20 years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring - the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five.

Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood to see his novel be adapted for the screen, but why does he get the feeling that the film project is a smokescreen for something else? Does Cassidy Carter, the troubled starlet due to play the lead, know something he doesn’t? And what is the truth about WAT-R, the synthetic water everyone drinks in LA?