Showing results by narrator "Julia Whelan" in All Categories

Vera Bellington has beauty, pedigree, and a penthouse at The Angelus - the most coveted address on Park Avenue. But behind the sparkling social whirl, Vera is living a life of quiet desperation. Her days are an unbroken loop of empty, champagne-soaked socializing while her nights are silent and cold, spent waiting alone in her cavernous apartment for a husband who seldom comes home.

Originally produced as a one-act play starring Grace Experience and K.K. Glick, Wingspan is the story of a young flight attendant with a fear of flying who is about to work her first transatlantic trip. When a veteran coworker tries to help her through the turbulent crossing, she discovers that a fear of flying is the least of the young woman's secrets.

Alice Pearse is a mostly happily married mother of three, an attentive daughter, an ambivalent dog owner, a part-time editor, a loyal neighbor, and a Zen commuter. She is not: a cook, a craftswoman, a decorator, an active PTA member, a natural caretaker, or the breadwinner. But, when her husband makes a radical career change, Alice is ready to lean in - and she knows exactly how lucky she is to land a job at Scroll, a hip, young start-up that promises to be the future of reading.

Lucy Wakefield is a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: She takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It's a secret she manages to keep for over two decades - from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy's now-grown daughter, Mia, discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her.

Just because Mel lives in New Whitby, a city founded by vampires, doesn't mean she knows any of the blood-drinking undead personally. They stay in their part of town; she says in hers. Until the day a vampire shows up at her high school. Worse yet, her best friend, Cathy, seems to be falling in love with him. It's up to Mel to save Cathy from a mistake she might regret for all eternity! On top of trying to help Cathy (whether she wants it or not), Mel is investigating a mysterious disappearance for another friend and discovering the attractions of a certain vampire wannabe.

It is said there are 99 Arabic words for love. Bea, an American exchange student, has learned them all: in search of deep feeling, she travels to a Middle Eastern country known to hold "The Astonishing Text", an ancient, original manuscript of a famous Arabic love story that is said to move its best readers to tears. But once in this foreign country, Bea finds that instead of intensely reading Arabic she is entwined in her host family's complicated lives - as they lock the doors and whisper anxiously about impending revolution.

The girls of Devonairre Street have always been told they're cursed. Any boy they love is certain to die too soon. But this is Brooklyn in 2008, and the curse is less a terror and more a lifestyle accessory - something funky and quaint that makes the girls from the shortest street in Brooklyn special. They wear their hair long and keys around their necks. People give them a second look and whisper "Devonairre" to their friends. But it's not real. It won't affect their futures. Then Jack - their Jack, the one boy everyone loves - dies suddenly and violently.

When Cora Holman’s mother dies, she assumes the inevitable: that her mother overdosed on the painkillers she’d been taking for years. So she’s shocked to learn that her mother and a neighbor both died of a brain aneurysm the same night. When Cora and other neighborhood teens become ill with a mysterious flu, and government-type strangers arrive in her small town, they all fear the unthinkable - a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, a world away in Pakistan, a 16-year-old computer genius named Shahzad is working as a virtual spy....

Dana Nolan was a promising young TV reporter until she was kidnapped by a notorious serial killer. A year has passed since she defeated her attacker, but Dana is still physically, emotionally, and psychologically scarred by her ordeal, with aftereffects including PTSD and memory loss. In an attempt to put herself back together after surviving the unthinkable, Dana returns to her hometown. But it doesn't provide the comfort she expects.

Tess da Costa is a saint - a hand-to-god miracle-producing saint. At least that's what the people in her hometown of New Avon, Massachusetts, seem to believe. And when Tess suddenly and tragically passes away, her small city begins feverishly petitioning the Pope to make Tess' sainthood official. Tess' mother is ecstatic over the fervor while her sister Callie, the one who knew Tess best, is disgusted - overcome with the feeling that her sister is being stolen from her all over again.

In the title story, a white aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic - she has a handgun stowed away in her purse, just in case. But when she turns to confront her black male shadow, the situation isn't what she expects. In "The Rescuer" a promising graduate student detours to inner-city Trenton, New Jersey, to save her brother from a downward spiral. But she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers.

Running from a hazy past, mother and daughter tread lightly, checking in and out of hotel rooms, leaving all luggage and collected mementos behind when the mother knows they must run again. They make friends with no one and enemies with some. They are singular — a “Moon Unit”. Hotel workers place bets on whether the strange chain-smoking lady stole that beautiful girl away from her real mother, but to the Moon Unit the hotel people don’t matter.

Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves nestled in domesticity in New York, running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters - Natasha, Lucy, and Carly - as best they can. With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut author Christine Reilly tells the unusual love story of this family.

Gem has never known what it is to have security. She's never known an adult she can truly rely on. But the one constant in her life has been Dixie. Gem grew up taking care of her sister when no one else could: not their mother, whose issues make it hard for her to keep food on the table, and definitely not their father, whose intermittent presence is the only thing worse than his frequent absence.

At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she's eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and loss, she's incapable of perceiving slight or injury.

After their devastating journey from the Anchor to Sophia, Clive and Clover Hamill, Gemma Poplin, and Paz Dedios have all been separated - not only in space, but in their convictions. In the Anchor, Clive would like nothing better than to never speak with Paz again, but when he is tapped to help with her interrogation, the two of them begin to reconcile their differences, which don’t run nearly as deep as they expected. In Sophia, as Clover learns more and more about the city and its enigmatic director, Zeno, his faith in his mission begins to waver.

Kitty Tessler is the winsome and clever only child of self-made hotel and nightclub tycoon Nicolas Tessler. Kitty may not have the same pedigree as the tennis club set she admires, but she still sees herself as every inch the socialite - spending her days perfecting her "look" and her nights charming all the blue-blooded boys. It seems like the fun will never end until Kitty's father issues a terrible ultimatum: she may no longer date the idle rich. Instead, Kitty must marry Andre, her father's second-in-command, and take her place as the First Lady of his hotel empire.

Charles Wallace Murry is old enough to start school, but his sister, Meg, and their friend Calvin know he isn't cut out for school on Earth - Meg worries that he'll be more misunderstood than ever. Luckily, with the help of the three celestial creatures - Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which - there is another place where Charles Wallace can get his education: Intergalactic P.S. 3, a public school in a completely different galaxy.

When their paths first cross, Ben Livingston is a fledgling screenwriter on the brink of success; Tatum Connelly is a struggling actress tending bar in a New York City dive. They fall in love, they marry, they become parents, and they think only of the future. But as the years go by, Tatum's stardom rises while Ben's fades. In a marriage that bears the fallout of ambition and fame, Ben and Tatum are at a crossroads. Now all they can do is think back....

They said that the first generation of man was brought low by its appetites: for knowledge, for power, for wealth. They said mankind's voracity was so great, the Lord sent his own Daughter to bring fire and devastation to the world. The survivors were few, but over the course of centuries they banded together to form a new civilization - the Descendancy - founded on the belief that the mistakes of the past must never be repeated. Brothers Clive and Clover Hamill, the sons of a well-respected Descendant minister, have spent their lives spreading that gospel.