Sam Freed has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 10 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 31 ratings. The most-rated is Sisters.
Sisters
Summary
Candy is blazing her way through Paris, New York, and Tokyo as fashion's latest supermodel. Her sister Tammy has a job producing a hit show on TV. In New York, oldest sister Sabrina is an ambitious young lawyer. And Annie is an American artist in Florence, living for her art. On one Fourth of July weekend, as they do every year, the four sisters come home to Connecticut for their family's annual gathering. But before the holiday is over, tragedy strikes, and their world is utterly changed. Suddenly, four sisters who have been fervently pursuing success and their own lives reunite to share one New York brownstone, to support each other and their father, and to pick up the pieces while one sister struggles to heal her shattered body and soul. A bustling house is soon filled with eccentric dogs, laughter, tears, friends, men, and the kind of honesty and unconditional love only sisters can provide. But as the four women settle in, they are forced to confront the directions of their respective lives. With unerring insight and compassion, Danielle Steel tells a compelling story of sisters who are irrevocably woven into the fabric of each other's lives. Brilliantly blending humor and heartbreak, she delivers a powerful message about the fragility and the wonder of life.
©2007 Danielle Steel (P)2007 Random House Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House Inc.
Dating Game
Summary
In her 57th best-selling novel, Danielle Steel brilliantly chronicles the roller-coaster ride of dating the second time around - and tells a captivating story of the surprises one woman encounters when she’s thrust into the terrifying, exhilarating world of the dating game. Paris Armstrong never saw it coming. With two grown children and a lovely home in Connecticut, Paris was happy with her marriage, her family, her life. So when her husband of 24 years said they needed to talk, Paris couldn't imagine what he was about to say. "I want a divorce," Peter tells her. Just like that, the husband she adored had dumped her for a younger woman. And just like that, Peter and his 31-year-old lover had made their plans for their future, leaving Paris to pick up the pieces of a shattered life. Within days, Peter was gone, and Paris was left to figure out how she intended to get through the next day, let alone the rest of her life. The task could not have been more painful. First came the tears. Then the excruciating attempts by well-meaning friends to “fix her up” with men who paled in comparison to Peter. Worse yet, she still loved him. Finally, Paris realized she was in a fight for her very survival. Drastic measures were called for. Even her shrink agreed. It was time to move - as far away as possible, just after Peter remarried. Paris had never felt, or been, more alone. Saying good-bye to the world she knew and loved, Paris heads west, to San Francisco, and discovers being single in a world full of men who were too young, too old, too married, or too good to be true. For Paris, the list seemed endless...the charming commitment-phobe...the drunken Neanderthal...the young Frenchman - so adorably sexy she almost forgot about his age, and did, for a while. With her dating track record veering between disappointing and disastrous and her daughter now engaged to a man Paris’ age, Paris finally comes to the conclusion that romance is not in her future. That’s when her small circle of offbeat, loving friends becomes more important than ever before. And a decision Paris makes only for herself changes her life once more. The secret, she discovers finally, is in finding the gifts in life’s unexpected twists and turns and turning despair into freedom and loss into joy. In a poignant, wickedly funny novel about getting dumped and getting over it, about tackling life with both courage and laughter, Danielle Steel explores what it means to start over, whether you wanted to or not, and finding something better than you had before.
©2003 Danielle Steel (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.
Straight Man
Summary
In this uproarious novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character - he is a born anarchist - and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo - side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.
©1997 Richard Russo (P)2003 Random House, Inc.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Summary
Jesse James was a fabled outlaw, a charismatic, spiritual, larger-than-life bad man whose bloody exploits captured the imagination and admiration of a nation hungry for antiheroes. Robert Ford was a young upstart torn between dedicated worship and murderous jealousy, the "dirty little coward" who coveted Jesse's legend. The powerful, strange, and unforgettable story of their interweaving paths - and twin destinies that would collide in a rain of blood and betrayal - is a story of America in all her rough, conflicted glory and the myths that made her.
©1983 Ron Hansen (P)2006, 2007 HarperCollins Publishers
The One Minute Entrepreneur
Summary
Mega best-selling author Ken Blanchard and celebrated business leaders Don Hutson and Ethan Willis present an inspiring story that reveals the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur. In The One Minute Entrepreneur, Ken Blanchard (coauthor of the number-one best selling business classic The One Minute Manager); Don Hutson, CEO of U.S. Learning; and Ethan Willis, CEO of Prosper Learning, tell the inspiring story of one man's challenges in creating his own business. Through a powerful and engaging narrative, we confront many of the typical problems all entrepreneurs face in starting up their business, from finding new sources of revenue to securing the commitment of their people and the loyalty of their customers. More important, we learn the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur, including how to build a firm foundation, how to ensure a steady cash flow, and how to create legendary service. In addition, the book offers invaluable advice, delivered through One Minute Insights, from such entrepreneurs and thinkers as Sheldon Bowles, Peter Drucker, Michael Gerber, and Charlie "Tremendous" Jones. Today, in the midst of the largest entrepreneurial surge in U.S. history, four out of five small businesses continue to fail. The One Minute Entrepreneur offers businesspeople and would-be entrepreneurs a treasure trove of wisdom on how to think, act, and succeed in creating and sustaining a business, no matter what their industry.
©2008 Ken Blanchard (P)2008 Random House, Inc.
Legends II: Volume V
Summary
Fantasty fans, rejoice! Seven years after writer and editor Robert Silverberg made publishing history with Legends, the acclaimed anthology of original short novels by some of the greatest writers in fantasy finction, the long-awaited second volume is here. Each of the best-selling writers represented in these selections from Legends II returns to the fantasy universe he or she made famous throughout the world. Whether set before or after events already recounted elsewhere, whether featuring beloved characters or compelling new creations, these masterful short novels are both mesmerizing stand-alones - perfect introductions to the work of their authors - and indispensable additions to the epics on which they are based.
©2012 Ballantine Books (P)2012 Random House Audio
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy
Summary
Turner Buckminster can't find anything good to say about his first six hours in Phippsburg, Maine, where even baseball is a different game. He's about ready to light out for the Territories, where every shirt he wears won't have to be starched white and no one will know him as the new minister's son. But after meeting Lizzie Bright Griffin, a smart and sassy girl who lives on nearby Malaga Island, a poor community founded by former slaves, he doesn't feel quite so miserable. Lizzie shows Turner how to hit a Maine baseball, dig for clams along the shore, and row a boat next to a whale, opening up a whole new world to him, one filled with the mystery and wonder of Maine's rocky coast. But the two soon discover that the town elders, along with Turner's father, want to force the people of Lizzie's island to leave so that a lucrative tourist trade can be started there. Although Turner is forbidden to step foot on the island, he and Lizzie try to save its people, and get caught up in a spiral of disasters that alter their lives forever. Gary D. Schmidt has crafted a unique coming-of-age novel based on the true event of an island's destruction in 1912. This novel is a 2005 Newbery Medal Honor Book.
©2004 Gary D. Schmidt (P)2005 Random House, Inc. Listening Library, an imprint of the Random House Audio Publishing Group
God's Politics
Summary
Since when did believing in God and having moral values make you pro-war, pro-rich, and solely pro-Republican? And since when did promoting and pursuing a progressive social agenda with a concern for economic security, health care, and educational opportunity mean you had to put faith in God aside? God's Politics offers a clarion call to make both our religious communities and our government more accountable to key values of the prophetic religious tradition, that is, make them pro-justice, pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-equality, and pro-family (without making scapegoats of single mothers or gays). Our biblical faith and religious traditions simply do not allow us as a nation to continue to ignore the poor and marginalized, deny racial justice, tolerate the ravages of war, or turn away from the human rights of those made in the image of God. These are the values of love and justice, reconciliation, and community that Jesus taught and that are at the core of what many of us believe, Christian or not. Jim Wallis inspires us to hold our political leaders and policies accountable by integrating our deepest moral convictions into our nation's public life.
©2005 Jim Wallis (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Challenger Park
Summary
From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it's like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today's astronauts. At the novel's center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. And Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight. Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son's asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant, perhaps unreachable, her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways. In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan's narrative authority brought a vanished 19th-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives, the risks, the friendships, the rituals, and the training of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting, indeed a thrilling, novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
©2006 Stephen Harrigan (P)2006 Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.