Overcoming Fake Talk explains why we often fail at our most important communications and offers proven advice for turning challenging confrontations into rewarding exchanges that foster collaboration, improve performance, and achieve results. You’ll develop an understanding of the skills for holding a REAL conversation, including both the “said” and the “unsaid” elements present in any conversation; discover the framework for preparing and holding difficult yet meaningful conversations; and learn to no longer avoid the tough conversations they need to have. In Overcoming Fake Talk, business communication guru John R. Stoker offers proven advice for turning challenging confrontations into rewarding exchanges that foster collaboration, improve performance, and achieve results.

Most people spend the majority of their lives at work, and many not happily. Here’s a way to find your inner spirit—what you truly desire to do in life—this audiobook illuminates the path leading you to ultimately achieving your goals. J. P. Hansen will help you get there through exercises such as building a great resume, nailing the interview, and knowing whether or not to accept a particular job offer when it comes along.

When “swinger” Simon Appleyard is found strung-up and naked in his Hull apartment, the authorities are only too happy to chalk up his death to a suicide. After all, a new gang has taken over the local drug trade, and Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh’s Serious and Organized Crime Unit is being run ragged by this well-connected and merciless group of criminals. With violent drug-related crime on the rise, the last thing the police need is an investigation of a depressed young man’s death.

But more bodies begin to turn up, and all are somehow connected to the local underground erotic scene. Although Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy would be perfectly content to stay at home with his beloved wife and newborn baby, he begins to suspect that murder is just the tip of the iceberg. As his shrewd investigation brings him uncomfortably close to the local political elite, powerful people who would kill to keep their secrets buried, and who have the power to make or break his career, McAvoy realizes he is hunting a killer who has plenty more targets in sight, and a lust that won’t be satisfied until the River Humber runs red.

1794. The height of the French Revolution. Charles Hayden sets off aboard the ill-fated HMS Themis with orders to destroy a French frigate sailing from Le Havre and to gather intelligence from a royalist spy. On discovering French plans for an imminent invasion of England, Hayden must return to Portsmouth to give warning before it’s too late.

But the enemy has been lying in wait for him, and so begins a dangerous chase out into the Atlantic and into the clutches of a powerful French squadron. After a thwarted attempt to masquerade as French sailors, Hayden and his officers are taken prisoner. A shipwreck following a storm and a case of mistaken identity befall Hayden and his men, as they try in desperation to escape in order to warn the Lords of the Admiralty. Failure will mean the invasion of England, and the guillotine for Hayden.

No one writes about family quite like Drew Magary. The GQ correspondent and Deadspin columnist’s stories about trying to raise a family have attracted millions of readers online. And now he’s finally bringing that unique voice to a memoir. In Someone Could Get Hurt, he reflects on his own parenting experiences to explore the anxiety, rationalizations, compromises, and overpowering love that come with raising children in contemporary America.

In brutally honest and funny stories, Magary reveals how American mothers and fathers cope with being in over their heads (getting drunk while trick-or-treating, watching helplessly as a child defiantly pees in a hotel pool, engaging in role-play with a princess-crazed daughter), and how stepping back can sometimes make all the difference (talking a toddler down from the third story of a netted-in playhouse, allowing children to make little mistakes in the kitchen to keep them from making the bigger ones in life). It’s a celebration of all the surprises, joyful and otherwise, that come with being part of a real family.

In the wake of recent bestsellers that expose how every other culture raises their children better, Someone Could Get Hurt offers a hilarious and heartfelt defense of American child rearing with a glimpse into the genuine love and compassion that accompany the missteps and flawed logic. It’s the story of head lice, almost-dirty words, and flat head syndrome, and a man trying to commit the ultimate act of selflessness is a selfish world.

Have you ever had a close call? Do you sometimes sense that you are not alone? Do you wonder if you have ever met an angel “unaware”?

When Betty Malz was a young mom, she suffered a ruptured appendix and, after many fatal complications, was declared dead. Twenty-eight minutes later, she returned to life, bringing with her a vibrant and encouraging message about these heavenly helpers called angels.

Over the years that followed, Betty spoke and wrote about her amazing experience, including the armies of angels she saw awaiting God’s commands to help his people. And it seemed that everywhere she turned, she met others eager to tell her about their encounters with angelic beings.

The Conduct of Saints portrays a battleground on which power, God, sex, and the devil collide in the impoverished city of Rome during May and June of 1945.

The German occupation of the Eternal City has ended, the war in Europe is over, the atomic bomb has yet to fall on Japan, and Rome is under the jurisdiction of the victors: the American, British, and French Allied Control Commission.

An American Vatican prelate and lawyer, Brendan Doherty, is involved in two crusades. Abhorring capital punishment, he means to avert the execution of the Nazi collaborator Pietro Koch. Also, as devil’s advocate, Doherty intends to prove the hypocrisy of Alessandro Serenelli, the man who forty years before murdered Maria Goretti. Converted by a vision, Serenelli has spent his life, in prison and out, promoting the beatification of his victim.

Doherty—memory tormented, hard drinking, both angry and compassionate, a moral street fighter for what he is sure is right—feels guilty for having done too little to save the city’s Jews from Auschwitz. He engages in his causes and quarrels with Rome’s pre–dolce vita, postwar society—people both fictional and historical, like Alessandro Serenelli, Maria Goretti, Pietro Koch, Pope Pius XII, and film director Luchino Visconti—until he comes to a reckoning with himself and with the serene, unshakable saint-maker Serenelli.

Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest

Bertie Wooster is living the high life as an English gentleman in New York. But when he's instructed to look after young Wilmot, a fearful drip who just happens to be the son of the fearsome Lady Malvern, matters become jolly complicated jolly quickly. And for some reason, Bertie’s valet Jeeves refuses to be of any help at all. What’s to be done?

Leave it to Jeeves

Has Jeeves let his master down? Bertie’s attempts to play cupid result in the most atrocious misunderstanding and it’s all because he took Jeeves’ advice! Now the happiness of Bertie’s pal Corky hangs in the balance and his latest portrait is, well, let’s just say it’s not quite up to snuff. Jeeves will have to exert the old cerebellum to its fullest extent to get the chaps out of this pickle.

For twenty-one-year-old Gemma, life has never been normal. She knows nothing about her past and has been haunted by the same monsters in her nightmares for months. Unemotional and numb to life, she feels disconnected from everyone—until the very first day she cries. After that, nothing in her life is the same. Her emotions slowly begin to surface, and she starts experiencing love, happiness, and anger, feelings she never knew existed. But they leave her confused; she doesn’t know whether to embrace them or run away from them.

Her life only gets more complicated when she meets Alex. Sexy, arrogant, and secretive, Alex can get under Gemma’s skin like no one else, yet she’s drawn to him by an invisible connection she has no control over. She’s also seen him before—in her nightmares. Every part of Gemma’s mind is screaming at her to stay away from Alex, but every other part of her is begging to get close to him. But the closer she gets, the more she realizes Alex knows more about her than he first let on.

As secrets about her past unravel, Gemma’s life is threatened. She must figure out what’s going on before she winds up dead, but the only person she can turn to for answers is the one person she isn’t sure she can trust.

Captain Josie Corsino has selected Kyle Richards, a trusted and talented sergeant, to supervise a burglary task force in Hollywood division. While working that special detail, Richards is involved in a fatal shooting. He’s reluctant to be candid about his relationship with the man he killed, and that leads not only to uncovering his mysterious past but exposing Josie’s division to notoriety and a fiery assault. 

As detectives investigate the shooting, Josie’s loyalty to her sergeant is second-guessed by her bureau chief, civil rights activists, and even a few of her police officers. Was the shooting justified, or did Sergeant Richards have another reason for killing the unlikely burglary suspect? Before that question can be answered, there’s a brutal murder in Hollywood in which Richards appears to be the most likely suspect. Josie wants to support her sergeant but finds herself questioning his actions and his motives.

Josie joins forces with Detective Red Behan and Lieutenant Marge Bailey to help solve the murder and determine if there is a link between the man Richards shot and the homicide victim. The trail leads from a boxing gym in east Los Angeles to LAPD’s office of the chief of police and finally back to Hollywood, where Josie discovers corrupt cops thriving within her police station.

At home, Josie is becoming impatient and distant with her husband and her son, who continue to make demands on her time. She also finds herself drawn to Sergeant Richards, creating even greater domestic turmoil.

Earth has been devastated by a massive solar flare. Now a small group of survivors fights to rebuild civilization.

Cities became ovens, grasslands seas of flame. As the touch of dawn swept westward across the spinning planet, its fiery finger killed everything in its path. Glaciers in Switzerland began to melt; floodwaters poured down on burning Alpine villages. Paris became a torch, then London. North of the Arctic Circle, Laplanders in their summer furs burst into flame as their reindeer collapsed and roasted on the smoking tundra.

The line of dawn raced westward across the Atlantic, but as it did, the sun dimmed as quickly as it had flared.

The Americas escaped the sun’s wrath … almost.

Orson Scott Card, bestselling author of Ender’s Game, teams up with Kathryn H. Kidd to launch an epic science fiction saga of space exploration—and a dramatic conflict between human and nonhuman intelligence.

On the Ark, a colony ship bound outward across the stars, not everyone is a volunteer—or even human. Lovelock is a capuchin monkey engineered from conception to be the perfect servant: intelligent, agile, and devoted to his owner. He is a “witness,” privileged to spend his days and nights recording the life of one of Earth’s most brilliant scientists via digital devices implanted behind his eyes.

But Lovelock is something special among witnesses. He’s a little smarter than most humans: smart enough to break through some of his conditioning, smart enough to feel the bonds of slavery—and want freedom.

Set against the awesome scope of interstellar space, and like Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide before it, Lovelock probes the provocative interface between humanity and another sentient species.

We all make mistakes. Nobody is perfect. And that includes five of the greatest scientists in history: Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. But the mistakes these great luminaries made helped advance science. Indeed, as Mario Livio explains, science thrives on error, advancing when erroneous ideas are disproven.

As a young scientist, Einstein tried to conceive of a way to describe the evolution of the universe at large, based on General Relativity, his theory of space, time, and gravity. Unfortunately he fell victim to a misguided notion of aesthetic simplicity.

Fred Hoyle was an eminent astrophysicist who ridiculed an emerging theory about the origin of the universe that he dismissively called “The Big Bang.” The name stuck, but Hoyle was dead wrong in his opposition.

Along with Darwin (a blunder in his theory of Natural Selection), Kelvin (a blunder in his calculation of the age of the earth), and Pauling (a blunder in his model for the structure of the DNA molecule), were brilliant men and fascinating human beings. Their blunders were a necessary part of the scientific process. Collectively they helped to dramatically further our knowledge of the evolution of life, the Earth, and the universe.

Fourth grader Odessa Green-Light lives with her mom and her toad of a little brother, Oliver. Her dad is getting remarried, which makes no sense according to Odessa. If the prefix “re” means “to do all over again,” shouldn’t he be remarrying Mom? Meanwhile, Odessa moves into the attic room of their new house. One day she gets mad and stomps across the attic floor. Then she feels as if she is falling and lands … on the attic floor. Turns out that Odessa has gone back in time a whole day! With this new power she can fix all sorts of things—embarrassing moments, big mistakes, and even help Oliver be less of a toad. Her biggest goal: reunite Mom and Dad.

Fans of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series and Lauren Kate’s Fallen novels will devour The Beautiful and the Cursed, a wholly original interpretation of gargoyle lore.

It was bizarre and inexplicable, but after it happened no one spoke of it and Ingrid Waverly was forced to leave her life in London behind. She had to trade a world full of fancy dresses and society events for Paris with her mother and younger sister, Gabby.

In Paris there are no grand balls or glittering parties, and, disturbingly, the house her twin brother Grayson found for them isn’t a house at all. It’s an abbey—creepy, old abbey with a roof lined in stone gargoyles that one could almost mistake for living, breathing creatures.

And Grayson is missing.

Yet no one seems to be concerned about Grayson’s whereabouts save for Luc, a devastatingly handsome servant who has some secrets of his own.

There’s one secret about the city that he can’t keep hidden, though. There’s a murderer on the loose. And every day Grayson is missing means that there’s less of a chance he’s alive.

Ingrid is sure her twin isn’t dead—she can feel it deep in her soul—but she knows he’s in grave danger, and that it’s up to her and Gabby to find him before all hope is lost.

Only the path to him is more than she could ever imagine.