Friday, February 28, 2014

New Adult Audiobooks - Feb. 28, 2014

Rogue's Lady by Robyn Carr; read by Justine Eyre

Born to a respected family, seventeen-year-old English beauty Vieve Donnelle always gets what she wants. But when word arrives that her father’s estate isn’t as wealthy as it appears, the noble heiress must rethink her betrothal to an impoverished aristocrat. Enter Captain Tyson Gervais, an infuriating colonial sea captain traveling to England for business in foreign trade. Despite high tensions between England and the colonies, Vieve can’t resist thinking about the dashing American merchant who elicits such conflicting reactions from her - making her feel both the sensual temptress and the childish fool in the same moment. Tyson never imagined he’d be dallying with a spoiled noble, but Vieve’s young, tempting curves seduce him against his better judgment. Though he knows a designing woman can wreak havoc, he aches for the chance to claim one as his own. Spanning two countries in the Georgian era, Rogue's Lady is a sexy tale of forbidden love that fans of romance will devour.


 
Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin; read by Oliver Wyman

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights; its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake, orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.

Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.

Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and beseiged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.



The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew by Alan Lightman; read by Bronson Pinchot

In The Accidental Universe, physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores the emotional and philosophical questions raised by discoveries in science, focusing most intently on the human condition and the needs of humankind. Here, in a collection of exhilarating essays, Lightman shows us our own universe from a series of fascinating and diverse perspectives. He takes on the difficult dialogue between science and religion; the conflict between our human desire for permanence and the impermanence of nature; the possibility that our universe is simply an accident; the manner in which modern technology has divorced us from enjoying a direct experience of the world; and our resistance to the view that our bodies and minds can be explained by scientific logic and laws alone. With his customary passion, precision, lyricism and imagination, in The Accidental Universe Alan Lightman leaves us with the suggestion - heady and humbling - that what we see and understand of the world and ourselves is only a tiny piece of the extraordinary, perhaps unfathomable whole.



e. e. cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever; read by Stefan Rudnicki

e. e. cummings' radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax resulted in his creation of a new, idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. And while there was critical disagreement about his work (Edmund Wilson called it ''hideous,'' while Malcolm Cowley called him ''unsurpassed in his field''), at the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-seven, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States.

Now, in this new biography, Susan Cheever traces the development of the poet and his work. She takes us from cummings' seemingly idyllic childhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through his years at Harvard (rooming with Dos Passos, befriending Malcolm Cowley and Lincoln Kirstein) where the radical verse of Ezra Pound lured the young writer away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem and towards a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We follow cummings to Paris in 1917 and, finally, to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day, including Marianne Moore and Hart Crane.

Rich and illuminating, e. e. cummings: A Life is a revelation of the man and the poet, and a brilliant reassessment of the freighted path of his legacy.



I Always Loved You: A Story of Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas by Robin Oliveira; read by Mozhan Marno

A novel of Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas’s great romance from the New York Times bestselling author of My Name Is Mary Sutter...

The young Mary Cassatt never thought moving to Paris after the Civil War to be an artist was going to be easy, but when, after a decade of work, her submission to the Paris Salon is rejected, Mary’s fierce determination wavers. Her father is begging her to return to Philadelphia to find a husband before it is too late, her sister Lydia is falling mysteriously ill, and worse, Mary is beginning to doubt herself. Then one evening a friend introduces her to Edgar Degas and her life changes forever. Years later she will learn that he had begged for the introduction, but in that moment their meeting seems a miracle. So begins the defining period of her life and the most tempestuous of relationships.

In I Always Loved You, Robin Oliveira brilliantly re-creates the irresistible world of Belle Époque Paris, writing with grace and uncommon insight into the passion and foibles of the human heart.

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