Blair Brown has narrated 28 audiobooks on Listento.it by 23 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2,187 ratings. The most-rated is City of Girls.
The Last Time They Met
Summary
At a literary festival in Toronto, Linda Fallon encounters the man who was once at the center of her life: Thomas Janes, the famous poet. Since last seeing him, she has married, given birth, and been widowed. Thomas' appearance rocks Linda, raises questions she had long abandoned, and inspires new dreams. The Last Time They Met moves backwards to explore Linda's life years earlier, at age 26, when an affair with Thomas shattered her life, and at age 17, when they first met. In this mesmerizing novel, Anita Shreve, author of the international best seller The Pilot's Wife, examines the resilience of emotion and the extraordinary repercussions a single choice, even a single word, can have over a lifetime.
©2003 Anita Shreve (P)2008 Hachette Audio
Little Night
Summary
Clare Burke's life took a devastating turn when she tried to protect her sister, Anne, from an abusive and controlling husband and ended up serving prison time for assault. The verdict largely hinged on Anne's defense of her spouse - all lies - and the sisters have been estranged ever since. Nearly 20 years later, Clare is living a quiet life in Manhattan as an urban birder and nature blogger, when her niece, Grit, turns up on her doorstep. The two long for a relationship with each other, but they'll have to dig deep into their family's difficult past in order to build one. Together, they face the wounds inflicted by Anne and her husband and find in their new connection a place of healing. When Clare begins to suspect her sister might have followed Grit to New York, she and her niece hold out hope for a long-awaited reunion . . . but will it be the joyous occasion they dream of? And will Clare and her longtime partner, Paul, whose complicated relationship has been sorely tested through the years, find a way back to love and to each other - again?
©2012 Luanne Rice (P)2012 Random House Audio
The Senator's Wife
Summary
Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love. Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton, wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton, is Meri's new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia's husband's chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. What keeps people together, even in the midst of profound betrayal? How can a journey imperiled by, and sometimes indistinguishable from, compromise and disappointment culminate in healing and grace? Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun. Here are all the things for which Sue Miller has always been beloved: the complexity of experience precisely rendered, the richness of character and emotion, and the superb economy of style, fused with an utterly engrossing story.
©2008 Sue Miller (P)2008 Random House, Inc.
A Home at the End of the World
Summary
Michael Cunningham's celebrated novel is the story of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
©1990 Michael Cunningham (P)2004 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Olive's Ocean
Summary
"Olive Barstow was dead. She'd been hit by a car on Monroe Street while riding her bicycle weeks ago. That was about all Martha knew." Martha Boyle and Olive Barstow could have been friends. But they weren't, and now all that is left are eerie connections between two girls who were in the same grade at school and who both kept the same secret without knowing it. Now Martha can't stop thinking about Olive. A family summer on Cape Cod should help banish those thoughts; instead, they seep in everywhere. And this year Martha's routine at her beloved grandmother's beachside house is complicated by the Manning boys. Jimmy, Tate, Todd, Luke, and Leo. But especially Jimmy. What if, what if, what if, what if? The world can change in a minute. Olive's Ocean was a 2004 Newbery Medal Honor Book.
©2004 Kevin Henkes (P)2004 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
While I Was Gone
Summary
A decade ago she put a face on every mother's worst nightmare with her phenomenal best-seller The Good Mother. Now, Sue Miller delivers a spellbinding novel of love and betrayal that explores what it means to be a good wife. In the summer of 1968, Jo Becker ran out on the marriage and the life her parents wanted for her, and escaped, for one beautiful, idyllic year, into a life that was bohemian and romantic, living under an assumed name in a rambling group house in Cambridge. It was a time of limitless possibility, but it ended in a single instant when Jo returned home one night to find her best friend lying dead in a pool of blood on the living room floor. Now Jo has everything she's ever wanted: a veterinary practice she loves, a devoted husband, three grown daughters, a beautiful Massachusetts farmhouse. And if occasionally she feels a stranger to herself and wonders what happened to the freedom she once felt, or how she came to be the wife, mother, and doctor her neighbors know and trust; if at times she feels as if her whole life is vanishing behind her as she's living it, she need only look at her daughters or her husband, Daniel, to recall the satisfactions of family and community and marriage. But when an old housemate settles in her small town, the fabric of Jo's life begins to unravel: seduced again by the enticing possibility of another self and another life, she begins a dangerous flirtation that returns her to the darkest moment of her past and imperils all she loves. While I Was Gone is an exquisitely suspenseful novel about how quickly and casually a marriage can be destroyed, how a good wife can find herself placing all she holds dear at risk. In expert strokes, Sue Miller captures the precariousness of even the strongest ties, the ease with which we abandon each other, and our need to be forgiven. An extraordinary book, her best, from a beloved American writer.
©1999 Random House, Inc.; 1999 Sue Miller
The Silver Boat
Summary
From the beloved New York Times best-selling Luanne Rice comes a heartwarming yet heart-wrenching portrait of three far-flung sisters who come home to Martha's Vineyard one last time. Their mother's beach house is the only place any of them ever found true happiness and they need to begin the difficult process of letting go. Memories of their grandmother, mother, and their Irish father, who sailed away the year Dar turned 12, rise up and expose the fine cracks in their family myth - especially when a cache of old letters reveals enough truth to send them back to their ancestral homeland. Transplanted into the unfamiliar, each sister sees life, her heart, and her relationship to home in a new way. But how do they let go of a place that contains the complicated love of their imperfect family? Without the house, where will they be together? The novel is a season on Martha's Vineyard; a mission to Ireland; a cast of friends, including one wildly off-the-grid Zen genius; passionate love in the surf; and three very different sisters with lives filled with beauty, sorrow, and deep love they'd never been quite sure they could trust. The Silver Boat is Luanne Rice at her very best, complete with her singular talent for capturing a family in all its flawed complexity.
©2011 Luanne Rice (P)2011 Random House Audio
Last Kiss
Summary
New York Times best-selling author Luanne Rice returns to Hubbard's Point, Connecticut, and to characters from her beloved Beach Girls, to tell the haunting story of a close-knit community grappling with a heartbreaking mystery, and of a woman rebuilding her world and reclaiming a love she believed lost a lifetime ago. A face on a poster, a name in the news, an inexplicable tragedy. A promising young man goes out one warm summer evening and is found dead - murdered - less than 24 hours later. No motive. No clues. No answers. Most people reflect briefly on the disturbing headlines, perhaps say a silent prayer of safely removed sympathy, and go on with their lives. But what if the young man was your son? Or your true love? Nearly a year after the death of 18-year-old Charlie, singer-songwriter Sheridan Rosslare still hasn't played a note of the music that was once her life's passion. Tucked away in the beach house where she raised her only child, she lives with her memories of him and a grief too big to share even with her beloved sisters or her dear friend Stevie Moore. Nor can Stevie comfort Charlie's heartbroken girlfriend, Nell Kilvert, whom she regards as a daughter. Nell won't rest until she finds out what really happened to the boy she loved. Out of the past she summons a man she believes cares enough, and is tough enough, to uncover the truth - Sheridan's long-ago soul mate, Gavin Dawson. Unfolding among the Hubbard's Point people and places that fans have come to treasure, and replete with feeling and mystery, Last Kiss weighs the power of the past to heal as well as wound, in a captivating tale of love, loss, and redemption that no listener will ever forget.
©2008 Luanne Rice (P)2008 Random House, Inc.