Search results for ""Verve Books""

No one knows Margo''s real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges. That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo''s subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a patron''s death in the library bathroom offers a hint of Margo''s mysterious past, Patricia can''t resist digging deeper - even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.

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At a meatpacking facility in Missouri, Dee-Dee and her coworkers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee''s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term. Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges her to quit living in sin and marry her boyfriend, Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother and boyfriend''s newfound attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She will be complete. When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go back to living i

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Outside a New York apartment building, a violent attack alters the course of three lives forever. Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through to adulthood and who grapples with expectations surrounding a first-generation American and her own personal desires. And Oliver, a charming, white lawyer with a dark family secret, who is continuously propelled towards Tammy and Tony, whether by fate or his choices. We follow Tony, Tammy and Oliver across three decades, watching them struggle with the American dream, and whether they must sacrifice and their sense of selves to attain it. This heart-breaking story will make you question - was it really worth it?

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1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history. Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island''s lushness - its heat and light, its textures and tastes - take hold of Elizabeth. And when she''s introduced to her translator''s inscrutable wife - a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form - she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude''s acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, the fates of Elizabeth and the statue are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with h

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A new client - a successful financial advisor - has been found stabbed to death on the beach near his palatial Jersey Shore home. Unfortunately, the time of death is estimated to be during Erin''s one and only consultation with him. As the last person to see him alive, Erin is now the prime suspect. While the investigation unfolds, Erin and Duane are called on to represent a mother charged with abducting her child, a hot-button case that has both private and public implications for Erin. As she battles one prosecutor who wants to see her charged with murder and another determined to send her to jail for refusing to divulge her client''s location, Erin also faces a devastating family tragedy. With not only her career on the line, but also her personal relationships and her freedom, the stakes have never been higher.

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You''ve always got to listen to the birds. In a tiny town on the North Norfolk coast, Fran''s life is unravelling. As she fills her days cleaning the caravan park she owns, she is preoccupied by worry - about the behaviour of her son, the absences of her husband and her strained relationship with her sister''s family. Her one source of relief: early in the mornings, before the responsibilities and uncertainties take over, she slips out to the beach to watch the birds. Small-town tension simmers all around her when a new teacher starts at the local school and a Romany community settle in the field adjoining her caravan park. Not to mention the beheaded birds that have started appearing across the town. Then the schoolteacher and Fran''s brother-in-law both go missing on the same night. But all Fran can seem to care about is the birds. Meanwhile, Tad, a seventy-year-old Romany man, watches the townspeople from the distance of his caravan - and sees everything clearly.

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Six-year-old Gracie Lynn is perpetually curious and bighearted. Convinced she knows how to save her beloved grandfather John from the ''worm'' that is eating his brain - a metaphor her mother once used to explain John''s dementia and sundown syndrome - Gracie helps him break out of his nursing home, and the two disappear together on a quest to chase the sun. But what''s an adventure for Gracie is a nightmare scenario for her estranged parents, LeeAnn and Dan. There''s no way to predict where John might have taken their young daughter, or if he''s capable of keeping her safe.

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Newlywed Rosie has grown disenchanted with NYC. Inspired by Instagram ads, she starts thirsting for a rural life upstate - one full of beauty and authenticity. She just needs to convince her tech-bro husband, Jordan, of her vision for the future. Willing to do anything for Rosie''s happiness, Jordan signs on, and they offer - well above asking price - on a beautiful, historic fixer-upper in the Hudson Valley. But when Jordan suddenly loses his job, the couple is forced to rent out the property''s dilapidated outbuilding. There''s no heat, it''s overrun with mould and nothing works. Enter Dylan and Lark: an incredibly attractive and handy queer couple who offer to rent the outbuilding and help Rosie and Jordan with repairs. They also happen to be living the life Rosie had envisioned for herself: hand-built furniture, herbal tinctures, guinea hens and hand-dyed linens. Rosie grows increasingly infatuated with their new tenants, especially with model-esque, charismatic Dylan - to Jordan''

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1998. Ontario has been hit by a days-long, life-endangering ice storm, and on Regis University campus, with classes cancelled, the students are partying. In the midst of it all, eighteen-year-old Ros''s roommate Megan goes missing. As a panicked search ensues, Ros is blamed for not keeping a closer eye on Megan, and the incident casts a shadow over the next two decades of her life. 2020. Ros''s former partner, Lukas, the father of her eleven-year-old son, is accused of a sexual assault. The accusation brings new details of an old story to light, forcing Ros to revisit a dark moment from her past. Ros must take a hard look not only at the father of her child, but also at her own mistakes, her own trauma, and at the supposedly liberal period she grew up in.

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Our narrator is a gifted photographer, an uncertain wife, an infertile mother, a biracial woman in an America that''s coming undone. As she grapples with a lifetime of ambivalence about motherhood, yet another act of police brutality makes headlines, and this time the victim is Noah, a boy in her photography class. Unmoored by the grief of a recent, devastating miscarriage and Noah''s fight for his life, she worries she can no longer chase the hope of having a child, no longer wants to bring a Black body into the world. Yet her husband Asher - contributing white Jewish genes alongside her Black-Japanese ones to any potential child - is just as desperate to keep trying. Throwing herself into a new documentary on motherhood and making secret visits to Noah in the hospital, this is when she learns she is, impossibly, pregnant. As life shifts once more, she must decide what she dares hope for the shape of her future to be.

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It''s 1946, and though war correspondent Billie Walker is happy to finally be home, for her the heady postwar days are tarnished by the loss of her father and the disappearance of her husband, Jack. To make matters worse, the newspapers are now sidelining her reporting talents to prioritise jobs for returning soldiers. Determined to take control of her own future, she reopens her late father''s private investigation agency, and, slowly, the women of Sydney come knocking. At first, Billie''s bread and butter is tailing cheating husbands. Then, a young man, the son of European immigrants, goes missing, and Billie finds herself on a dangerous new trail that will lead her to the highest levels of Sydney society, and down into its underworld. As the danger mounts and Billie realises that much more than one man''s life is at stake, it becomes clear that, though the war was won, it is far from over.

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