Showing results by narrator "Emily Woo Zeller" in All Categories

Vivien Lee has spent her entire consulting career helping CEOs look good, so when she finally has the chance to go after her dream of running a business, she grabs it. A lifelong athlete, Vivien arrives at the smart sports campus in Portland, Oregon, and is introduced as the first female president. It’s one of the highest profile jobs in an industry inhospitable to women. Principled but slightly naïve, Vivien believes her male peers will give her a fair shot. Stumbling early, Vivien makes a series of rookie mistakes.

Sumiko Tan wrote her first personal column as a young reporter in 1994. Over the next 22 years, her fortnightly column in The Sunday Times gathered a faithful readership and made her a household name. Sundays with Sumiko is a collection of her most representative columns over the past two decades, exploring family, love, friends, career, dogs, death, and marriage.

In 2157, the Adryil, an advanced race of telepathic humanoids contacted Earth. A century later, 15-year-old violist Iris Lei considers herself lucky to attend Papilio, a prestigious performing arts school powered by their technology. A sudden encounter with an Adryil boy upends her world. Iris longs to learn about him and his faraway realm, but the only evidence she has of his existence is the mysterious alien device he slipped to her. When she starts hearing his voice in her head, she wonders if her world of backstabbing artists and pressure for perfection is driving her insane.

Vintage cookware and cookbook collector Jaymie Leighton has agreed to help her sister clear out the house of a deceased older neighbor, and she's thrilled at the prospect of discovering antique kitchenware and other treasures - until she opens a vintage trunk in the cellar and finds the remains of a teenage girl with a cleaver buried in her skull. When the body of a second girl is found just days later in a nearby river, the clues all indicate that the crimes are connected - and that the culprit's motives are hidden in the past.

A severed left hand is found in a minivan abandoned on a dry riverbed. When Tokyo Metropolitan Police Force lieutenant Reiko Himekawa and her team join the investigation, the hand is quickly identified as belonging to building contractor Ken'ichi Takaoka, and from the amount of blood spilled in the van, it is presumed that he was killed. However, searches fail to turn up the rest of the body, and the mystery deepens when a childhood friend shown a photo of the victim declares, "That's not Takaoka".

Born in India, Carolyn Rydell moves her shipping business to London. Although she is exotically beautiful and wealthy, her late husband's aristocratic family rejects her because of her profession and heritage. Feeling increasingly isolated, Caro uses work as a shield against loneliness. Then she finds an injured man floating in the Thames - and the pattern of her life changes.

After being diagnosed in her early 30s with terminal breast cancer, Heather McManamy felt like her life was crumbling. Her "normal" vanished and was replaced with multiple surgeries and dozens of chemo treatments that could briefly extend her life but would not prevent her inevitable death. With an effervescent spirit and a new perspective, Heather started to live each day as if it were her last. She learned to soak in the moment, appreciate the beauty around her, and celebrate her blessings.

This one-of-a-kind treasury brings together the talents of nearly two dozen best-selling middle-grade authors - including Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, Ally Condie, and Jennifer A. Nielsen - who have created original short stories and modern-day fairy tales based on the lives and dreams of children they have met who all have two things in common: They have very big hopes and dreams, and they are all cancer patients.

Right before the start of her freshman year, Emma's family unexpectedly moves to England. The book club is stunned, but thanks to videoconferencing, they can keep the club alive. They decide to tackle Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a particularly fitting choice. In England, Emma deals with a new queen bee, Annabelle, who makes her life miserable. And back home, Annabelle's cousins - who have swapped homes with the Hawthornes - whip the rest of the school into a frenzy.

Twenty-five-year-old Ivy Rowan rises from her sickbed after being struck by the great influenza epidemic of 1918, only to discover that the world has been torn apart in just a few short days. But Ivy's lifelong gift - or curse - remains. She sees the uninvited ones - ghosts of loved ones who appear to her, unasked for and unwelcomed, for they always herald impending death.

It's been three months since Lane made her first kill - the sadistic Decapitator - and now she feels both closer and more alienated than ever from her united, grieving family. Haunted by conflicting memories of her mother, Lane resumes her role as the vigilante Masked Savior out of a feeling of obligation - but her heart just isn't in it anymore. Now that Lane has felt the rush of deeper, darker thrills, a growing part of her wants to revisit its seductive power, and she's not sure how long she can resist.

By 2035, 11.5 million Americans will be over the age of 85 - more than double today's five million - and living longer than ever before. To enable all of us to age with dignity and security in the face of this coming Age Wave, our society must learn to value the care of our elders. The process of building a culture that supports care is a key component to restoring the American dream and, as Ai-Jen Poo convincingly argues, will generate millions of new jobs and breathe new life into our national ideals of independence, justice, and dignity.

Princeton University, 1980. A young and unambitious librarian named Anna Roth is assigned the task of retrieving the records of Kurt Gödel - the most fascinating and hermetic mathematician of the 20th century. Her mission consists of befriending and ultimately taming the greatman's widow, Adele, a notoriously bitter woman set on taking belated revenge against the establishment by refusing to hand over these documents of immeasurable historical value.

Twenty-five, Chinese-American, and agoraphobic, Marcy Chen navigates love, sex, gourmet food, family and a desperate fear of people and intimacy. Living in the trendy Fremont district of Seattle, Washington, Marcy has created a life insulated from the people around her. Slowly she realizes that she must make a choice between seclusion and safety, or living the life she wants - in fear.

Judy Chicurel's exquisitely written debut evokes the atmosphere of a 1970s summer in a close-knit working class community on Long Island. For readers of Jennifer Egan and Anne Tyler. Katie and her young friends face a changing world, with prospects very different from those presented to their parents. The Vietnam War seems pointless to many but has devastated lives that remain broken even after the fighting is over.

Sophy Dunbarron - the illegitimate daughter of a king who never was - has always felt like an impostor. Separated from her birth mother, raised by parents mourning the loss of their true daughter, and unacknowledged by her father, Sophy desires only a place and a family to call her own. But fate has other ideas. Caught up in Elanna Valtai’s revolution, Sophy has become the reigning monarch of a once-divided country - a role she has been groomed her whole life to fill. But as she quickly discovers, wearing a crown is quite a different thing from keeping a crown.

Meet nine courageous young adults who have lived in the United States with a secret for much of their lives: they are not U.S. citizens. They came from Colombia, Mexico, Ghana, Independent Samoa, and Korea. They came seeking education, fleeing violence, and escaping poverty. All have heartbreaking and hopeful stories about leaving their homelands and starting a new life in America. And all are weary of living in the shadows.

The past never really leaves us. Crime reporter Julia Gooden sees proof of this every day in her stories. A dark childhood, a negligent parent, early abandonment - any one of them can seal a person's fate as either a villain or victim. Julia, who experienced all three, seems to have beaten the odds, finding happiness raising her two sons and a blossoming relationship with detective Raymond Navarro. But now, after three decades of absence, Julia's conman father has resurfaced to throw her life into turmoil again.

Too loud. Too shrill. Too far. Too much. Despite the systematic chipping away at our voices, autonomy, and rights, women who demand more - or even just enough - continue to be pushed aside, talked over, and dismissed. From unbridled online abuse to the unspoken societal rules that dictate who can express anger, when you're a feminist the personal is political...and it's time we all embrace feminism as a matter of survival.

Looking forward to her girls-only college reunion vacation, Jaymie's on cloud nine at the idea of lazy trips to the beach, dinner cruises on the nearby river, and snug sleeping in the vintage trailer she's renovated. But no sooner does the group reconnect than her hopes turn to tension as petty squabbles and old acrimonies surface, along with tagalong friends, unexpected guests, and stalkerish ex-husbands. And when a local tool belt Romeo with an eye for one of the women is found murdered, his home ablaze, the simmering hostility in the group suddenly shifts to secrecy.