Fiona Davis has 8 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 12 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 269 ratings. The most-rated is The Lions of Fifth Avenue.
The Lions of Fifth Avenue
Summary
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick and a New York Times best seller! “A page-turner for booklovers everywhere!... A story of family ties, their lost dreams, and the redemption that comes from discovering truth.” (Adriana Trigiani, best-selling author of The Shoemaker's Wife) In New York Times best-selling author Fiona Davis's latest historical novel, a series of book thefts roils the iconic New York Public Library, leaving two generations of strong-willed women to pick up the pieces. It's 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn't ask for more out of life - her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open. As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village's new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club - a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. And when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she's forced to confront her shifting priorities head on...and may just lose everything in the process. Eighty years later, in 1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she's wrangled her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the exhibit Sadie's running begin disappearing from the library's famous Berg Collection. Determined to save both the exhibit and her career, the typically risk-averse Sadie teams up with a private security expert to uncover the culprit. However, things unexpectedly become personal when the investigation leads Sadie to some unwelcome truths about her own family heritage - truths that shed new light on the biggest tragedy in the library's history.
©2020 Fiona Davis (P)2020 Penguin Audio
The Glass Room
Summary
DI Vera Stanhope is not one to make friends easily, but when one of her neighbours goes missing, she feels duty-bound to find out what happened. It’s an easy job to track the young woman down to the Writers’ House, a country retreat where aspiring authors gather to work on their novels. But things get complicated when a body is discovered and Vera’s neighbour is found with a knife in her hand. Vera knows that she should hand the case over to someone else. But the investigation is too tempting and she’s never been one to follow the rules. Working with Sergeant Joe Ashworth, she starts the hunt for a murderer who has turned killing into an art form.
©2012 Ann Cleeves (P)2020 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Address
Summary
From the author of The Dollhouse and The Masterpiece comes the compelling national best-selling novel about the thin lines between love and loss, success and ruin, passion and madness, all hidden behind the walls of the Dakota - New York City’s most famous residence. When a chance encounter with Theodore Camden, one of the architects of the grand New York apartment house the Dakota, leads to a job offer for Sara Smythe, her world is suddenly awash in possibility - no mean feat for a servant in 1884. The opportunity to move to America. The opportunity to be the female manager of the Dakota. And the opportunity to see more of Theo, who understands Sara like no one else...and is living in the Dakota with his wife and three young children. One hundred years later, Bailey Camden is desperate for new opportunities: Fresh out of rehab, the former interior designer is homeless, jobless, and penniless. Bailey's grandfather was the ward of famed architect Theodore Camden, yet Bailey won't see a dime of the Camden family's substantial estate; instead, her “cousin” Melinda - Camden's biological great-granddaughter - will inherit almost everything. So when Melinda offers to let Bailey oversee the renovation of her lavish Dakota apartment, Bailey jumps at the chance, despite her dislike of Melinda's vision. The renovation will take away all the character of the apartment Theodore Camden himself lived in...and died in, after suffering multiple stab wounds by a former Dakota employee who had previously spent seven months in an insane asylum - a madwoman named Sara Smythe. A century apart, Sara and Bailey are both tempted by and struggle against the golden excess of their respective ages - for Sara, the opulence of a world ruled by the Astors and Vanderbilts; for Bailey, the nightlife's free-flowing drinks and cocaine - and take refuge in the Upper West Side's gilded fortress. But a building with a history as rich, and often as tragic, as the Dakota's can't hold its secrets forever, and what Bailey discovers inside could turn everything she thought she knew about Theodore Camden - and the woman who killed him - on its head.
©2017 Fiona Davis (P)2017 Penguin Audio
The Chelsea Girls
Summary
The bright lights of the theater district, the glamour and danger of 1950s New York, and the wild scene at the iconic Chelsea Hotel come together in a dazzling new novel about the 20-year friendship that will irrevocably change two women's lives - from the New York Times best-selling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue. From the dramatic redbrick facade to the sweeping staircase dripping with art, the Chelsea Hotel has long been New York City's creative oasis for the many artists, writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers, and poets who have called it home - a scene playwright Hazel Riley and actress Maxine Mead are determined to use to their advantage. Yet they soon discover that the greatest obstacle to putting up a show on Broadway has nothing to do with their art and everything to do with politics. A red scare is sweeping across America, and Senator Joseph McCarthy has started a witch hunt for communists, with those in the entertainment industry in the crosshairs. As the pressure builds to name names, it is more than Hazel and Maxine's Broadway dreams that may suffer as they grapple with the terrible consequences, but also their livelihood, their friendship, and even their freedom. Spanning from the 1940s to the 1960s, The Chelsea Girls deftly pulls back the curtain on the desperate political pressures of McCarthyism, the complicated bonds of female friendship, and the siren call of the uninhibited Chelsea Hotel.
©2019 Fiona Davis (P)2019 Penguin Audio
The Masterpiece
Summary
In this latest captivating novel, New York Times best-selling author Fiona Davis takes listeners into the glamorous lost art school within Grand Central Terminal, where two very different women, 50 years apart, strive to make their mark on a world set against them. For most New Yorkers, Grand Central Terminal is a crown jewel, a masterpiece of design. But for Clara Darden and Virginia Clay, it represents something quite different. For Clara, the terminal is the stepping stone to her future. It is 1928, and Clara is teaching at the lauded Grand Central School of Art. Though not even the prestige of the school can override the public's disdain for a "woman artist", fiery Clara is single-minded in her quest to achieve every creative success - even while juggling the affections of two very different men. But she and her bohemian friends have no idea that they'll soon be blindsided by the looming Great Depression...and that even poverty and hunger will do little to prepare Clara for the greater tragedy yet to come. By 1974, the terminal has declined almost as sharply as Virginia Clay's life. Dilapidated and dangerous, Grand Central is at the center of a fierce lawsuit: Is the once-grand building a landmark to be preserved, or a cancer to be demolished? For Virginia, it is simply her last resort. Recently divorced, she has just accepted a job in the information booth in order to support herself and her college-age daughter, Ruby. But when Virginia stumbles upon an abandoned art school within the terminal and discovers a striking watercolor, her eyes are opened to the elegance beneath the decay. She embarks on a quest to find the artist of the unsigned masterpiece - an impassioned chase that draws Virginia not only into the battle to save Grand Central but deep into the mystery of Clara Darden, the famed 1920s illustrator who disappeared from history in 1931.
©2018 Fiona Davis (P)2018 Penguin Audio
The Dollhouse
Summary
Enter the lush world of 1950s New York City, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors live side by side in the glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in this debut novel from the national best-selling author of The Chelsea Girls. “Rich both in twists and period detail, this tale of big-city ambition is impossible to put down.” (People) When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong - a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance. Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo, and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist - not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.
©2016 Fiona Davis (P)2016 Penguin Audio
Weaponized Lies
Summary
Previously published as A Field Guide to Lies. We're surrounded by fringe theories, fake news, and pseudofacts. These lies are getting repeated. New York Times best-selling author Daniel Levitin shows how to disarm these socially devastating inventions and get the American mind back on track. Here are the fundamental lessons in critical thinking that we need to know and share now. Investigating numerical misinformation, Daniel Levitin shows how mishandled statistics and graphs can give a grossly distorted perspective and lead us to terrible decisions. Wordy arguments, on the other hand, can easily be persuasive as they drift away from the facts in an appealing yet misguided way. The steps we can take to better evaluate news, advertisements, and reports are clearly detailed. Ultimately, Levitin turns to what underlies our ability to determine if something is true or false: the scientific method. He grapples with the limits of what we can and cannot know. Case studies are offered to demonstrate the applications of logical thinking to quite varied settings, spanning courtroom testimony, medical decision making, magic, modern physics, and conspiracy theories. This urgently needed book enables us to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. As Levitin attests: Truth matters. A post-truth era is an era of willful irrationality, reversing all the great advances humankind has made. Euphemisms like "fringe theories", "extreme views", "alt truth", and even "fake news" can literally be dangerous. Let's call lies what they are and catch those making them in the act. *Includes a PDF of supplemental graphics on visualizing conditional probabilities PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2017 Daniel J. Levitin (P)2017 Penguin Audio
Much Ado About Nutmeg
Summary
Wedding bells are in the air-along with the aroma of maple syrup - in the latest Pancake House Mystery. But a series of murders threatens to spoil everyone's appetite.... Between tourist season, planning her beach wedding, and running her pancake house, the Flip Side, Marley McKinney is busier than ever. On top of that, one of her regulars is competing in Wildwood Cove's Golden Oldies Games - a sporting event for athletes 50 and over - and Marley wants to cheer her on. Everything's running as smooth as batter - until sports reporter Yvonne Pritchard stirs up a triple batch of trouble... Yvonne has one admirer in town - Ed Herman - but she has many more enemies, from a disgruntled coach to an athlete she once shamed on social media. So when a body washes up on shore, and it's no accident, it's not a complete surprise Yvonne is the victim. And when Ed asks Marley to use her sleuthing skills to solve the crime, she'll have to squeeze in time between squeezing into wedding dresses. Then a second victim turns up, and Marley will have to work at high speed to stop a killer from piling up bodies faster than she can whip up a tall stack...
©2020 Sarah Fox (P)2020 Tantor