The Light in the Piazza takes place in Italy in the summer of 1953. Margaret Johnson and her beautiful, twenty-six-year-old daughter, Clara, are touring the Tuscan countryside. While sightseeing, Clara meets a good-looking young Italian man, Fabrizio, and quickly embarks on a whirlwind romance with him, despite her mother’s stern disapproval.Margaret, extremely protective of her daughter, attempts to keep Clara and Fabrizio apart, not only because of the cultural differences betwee...

This exciting audio collection contains three hours of rapid-fire smokin’ mysteries and all the clues you need to solve them at breakneck speed. Scott Brick, Pat Fraley, and a full cast of twenty-six narrators voice dames, dolts, and detectives in this collection of original whodunit gems.This audiobook includes special recordings of late audiobook narrator Frank Muller, as well as a tribute to his memory. Proceeds go to the Frank Muller family.

The most dangerous magical object in the history of the world waits quietly in the treasury of a decaying Arabian palace. It knows your name and home and history and fate: it knows the past and future of the entire human race. It is a carpet, an impossible, dazzling carpet, and though a glance at it can drive a man mad, many will risk their lives to look into its pattern and discover their destinies.And when the carpet is stolen, it is up to young King Walid to recover it. Walid be...

Time Pieces is a quietly beautiful coming-of-age story from a master storyteller.Eleven-year-old Valena, her family, and dog live in rural Ohio, where she and her cousin Melinda share experiences that include seeing the aurora borealis, surviving a tornado, and going to an amazing circus.Yet Valena lives in both the present and the past as she struggles with racism in her daily life and listens to and learns from her mother’s tales of her family’s proud history. Moving back...

Former Saturday Night Live writer Patricia Marx brings her clever, deadpan humor to this addictively readable novel about one woman's comic obsession with her first boyfriend.A neurotic young graduate student looking for distraction from her doomed thesis is inexplicably swept off her feet by a narcissistic philosophy professor. The obsession continues even after he has dumped her for someone even needier and she has given up on school and become a television writer. Meeti...

From the author of Winter Range comes a powerful and frightening literary thriller of love, loyalty, and menacing secrets.Nance Able has finally recovered from the violent death of her first husband and is living a new life in the West with her second husband, Ned. When Meredith, her younger, errant sister, decides to move to the same town, Nance’s long-sought happiness is threatened.As a snake scientist, she is attuned to the dangers of the natural world, but she ...

Madeline Dare, a tough-talking, shotgun-toting ex-debutante, is not your average detective. Then again, not much about her life is what she expected. Born of old money into high society, she married into a Syracuse farming family and a bottom-of-the-food-chain job writing puff pieces for the local newspaper. Her emotional barometer these days ranges from dry irony to whining exasperation.Then Madeline discovers mysterious circumstances linking her favorite cousin to a twenty-year-o...

Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard educated, African American professor of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro-football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even more distressing, however, is that her beloved son has just become engaged to a gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.For Windsor, this is no laughing matter. Determined to get to the source of it, she embarks on a journey into her o...

Jane Urquhart’s stunning new novel weaves two parallel stories, set a century apart.Sylvia Bradley was rescued from her parents’ house by marriage to a doctor whose care has both nourished and imprisoned her. When she meets Andrew Woodman, a historical geographer, her world changes through their devastating and ecstatic affair.A year after Andrew’s death, Sylvia tells this story to Jerome McNaughton, a young artist whose discovery of Andrew’s body unlocks a secret in his ow...

One of the greatest treats in all world literature, this masterpiece from Mark Twain is revolutionary. It offers both brilliant humor and tragedy as Huck and Jim explore moral dilemmas of slavery and freedom. Huck, the narrator, is shrewd, ingenious, and literal—he reports on everything he sees, which allows the listener to experience the hypocrisy of “sivilization.” This superb reading by Patrick Fraley is rich in the color and adventurous spirit of the Mississippi River. It captures the ...

The sun shines on Tom Sawyer. The idealized childhood of this fictional hero, based on Mark Twain’s own early life along the banks of the Mississippi, is filled with robust good humor and high-spirited adventures. Yet there is also an in-depth experience of the central South of the 1840s—its dialects, superstitions, and social values. While romping through fun-filled fantasy, Tom Sawyer shows how morally complicated real life can be.This reading of Tom Sawyer is especially...

This anthology of unabridged short stories represents some of the most significant works from the most influential American authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Included are Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Mermaids by Louisa May Alcott, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain, An Occurrence at Owl Cree...