Showing results by narrator "Esther Wane" in All Categories

Once upon a time, in a parallel universe, there existed the continent of Triton. The land was filled with beauty, but it was also splintered by war. Out of the chaos grew a conspiracy to reawaken the Beast, a fearsome creature who wrought only tragedy and devastation. The only way to stop him was to fulfill an ancient prophecy: Triton’s four strongest warriors must wed its four most powerful witches, binding all nations together and finally bringing peace to the land.      

Isla may be a mermaid princess, but she's never felt at home in her undersea kingdom. Instead she dreams of the day her people can return to the surface - and the boy whose life she once saved. But while Isla foresees danger for her people beneath the ocean, she has no concept of the dark forces working to keep her people submerged. When an impetuous vow sets her on the course of the truth, Isla discovers that shadowy foes beset the kingdoms of both land and sea. 

Brenna Seagrave doesn't want to be a countess. She prefers her life of danger and disguise as a spy for the kingdom of Andar, but the Andari court isn't quite ready for a countess who engages in espionage. Feeling trapped, Brenna accepts an invitation to a mysterious estate, where she hopes to connect with the mother she's never had a chance to know. But nothing is quite as Brenna expects. 

Greyhounds, streaks of lightning, were bred to be the fastest dogs on earth. Yet for decades, tens of thousands were destroyed, abandoned, and abused each year when they couldn't run fast enough. Scrappy Marion Fitzgibbon, whose empathy for animals made her relentless, became obsessed with saving these dogs - despite the overwhelming power of dog-racing proponents - when she became head of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has long captured the public imagination. Newspaper column inches have been devoted to murderers with psychopathic features, and we also encounter psychopaths in films and books. Individuals with psychopathy are characterized in particular by lack of empathy and guilt, manipulation of other people and, in the case of criminal psychopathy, premeditated violent behavior. They are dangerous and can incur immeasurable emotional, psychological, physical, and financial costs to their victims and their families.

A young woman hunts for her wayward shadow at the school where she first learned magic - while another faces a test she never studied for as ice envelopes the world. The tasks assigned a bookish boy lead him to fateful encounters with lizards, owls, trolls, and a feisty, sarcastic cat. A bear wedding is cause for celebration, the spinning wheel and the tower in the briar hedge get to tell their own stories, and a kitchen maid finds out that a lost princess is more than she seems. The sea witch reveals what she hoped to gain when she took the mermaid's voice.

After more than 20 years in hiding, Alexei is returning home. His kingdom is destroyed, his people dead or enslaved, and the magic that once protected them lost to all but memory. His only hope to provide sanctuary for the few who remain is the uncertain word of a traitor, a broken man who claims to know the hiding place of Erath's greatest treasure. To find it, Alexei will have to return to the place where Erath fell, and brave the shadowed halls of a castle that echoes with the ghosts of his past.

For Emily Rossi, life may not be perfect, but it's pretty close. She has a great career, a house in the country, a solid marriage to Eric and two wonderful children - tennis superstar Daniel and quiet, sensitive Zara. But when her fourteen-year-old daughter brings home a toxic new best friend, Emily’s seemingly perfect family starts to spiral out of control.

Princess Ilani is an outcast, shunned since her seventh birthday for possessing forbidden magic. But when her 12 sisters are trapped by a deception that threatens to tear their father's empire apart, Ilani must come out of hiding and join forces with a devilishly charming foreigner whose motives remain shrouded by secrecy and mistrust. 

Art teacher Walter Hartright is on the road to London when he encounters an enigmatic woman dressed entirely in white. She's an unnerving portent of strange things to come as Hartright starts a new job as drawing-master at Limmeridge House. There the teacher falls in love with Laura, his betrothed pupil, who bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white. Soon Walter is drawn into a family intrigue of greed, secrets, madness, and revenge.

As World War II progressed, the Okma family took six Jewish refugees into their house, hiding them in a secret room behind their fireplace. The youngest daughter, Kieks, joined the Resistance, delivering illegal newspapers, guiding British parachutists around The Hague and preparing safe houses for Special Forces who were dropped in from England. 

This thought-provoking anthology offers a close examination of the psychology behind the intricate narrative and compelling characters in author George R.R. Martin's best-selling work, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the popular HBO TV series based upon his books, Game of Thrones. In Martin's richly detailed world, deceit, manipulation, and greed rule the day, and almost everyone fights for power over the realm or simply over their own lives. How do love and hate, good and evil, need and greed, altruism and narcissism drive the very best and very worst human behaviors?

Princess Sophia has helped her twin sister Lily save the duchy of Marin. But now Sophie faces an even greater threat when she sets out to free the cursed kingdom of Palinar from its beastly prince. Alone, and with danger on every side, Sophie must navigate a magical castle and its even more mysterious master to discover the secret to breaking the curse. Except the more time she spends with Prince Dominic, the more she starts to question who exactly she's supposed to be saving. 

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive-making tools, for example, or using language - survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible.

The last time Valerie was in Paris, she was three years old, running from the Nazis, away from the only home she had ever known. Now as a young woman all alone in the world, Valerie must return to Paris, to the bookshop and her sole surviving relative, her grandfather Vincent, the only person who knows the truth about what happened to her parents. As she gets to know grumpy, taciturn Vincent again, she hears a tragic story of Nazi-occupied Paris, a doomed love affair, and a mother willing to sacrifice everything for her beloved daughter.  

This fully revised and updated third edition of 50 Top Tools for Coaching includes a greater emphasis on professional qualification and accreditation, enhanced tools on self-development and strategy, a brand-new addition of transactional analysis tools, and an increased amount of career coaching tools. The authors have also solicited feedback from readers to create a "readers' top tools" section and they provide real-life examples from coaches on how the tools in the book have helped them be more successful and serve their clients better. 

Many of us share a shameful little secret: deep down we feel like complete frauds and are convinced that our accomplishments are the result of luck rather than skill. This is a psychological phenomenon known as Imposter Syndrome. This book examines the reasons why up to 70 percent of us are developing this syndrome - and what we can do about it. 

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts.

Once upon a time, in a parallel universe, there existed the continent of Triton. The land was filled with beauty, but it was also splintered by war. Out of the chaos grew a conspiracy to reawaken the Beast, a fearsome creature who wrought only tragedy and devastation. The only way to stop him was to fulfill an ancient prophecy: Triton’s four strongest warriors must wed its four most powerful witches, binding all nations together and finally bringing peace to the land.      

Once upon a time, in a parallel universe, there existed the continent of Triton. The land was filled with beauty, but it was also splintered by war. Out of the chaos grew a conspiracy to reawaken the Beast, a fearsome creature who wrought only tragedy and devastation. The only way to stop him was to fulfill an ancient prophecy: Triton’s four strongest warriors must wed its four most powerful witches, binding all nations together and finally bringing peace to the land.