Michael K Bender (134 results)

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Two years after the reservoir gave up its dead, Callan believed he'd left this particular work behind him - the drive out to some other county's failing department, the slow, patient dismantling of a corruption nobody wanted looked at too closely. He'd built a consulting practice out of the wreckage of Marrow Falls: a training module, a reputation, a way of practicing the posture of the thing without ever again standing fully inside it.Then a letter arrives from Sheriff Corinne Task of Aldwich County, a place he's never worked, written by a woman he's never met, asking for help with a situation she "isn't yet able to describe in writing." Three men have died in the past eighteen months - a fall, a single-vehicle crash, a hunting accident that shouldn't have been possible for a man who'd hunted the same hillside since he was nine years old. All three had filed complaints against the county board in the months before they died. Task doesn't believe in coincidence. Neither, anymore, does Callan.With medical examiner Dr. Priya Kade beside him, Callan starts pulling a thread that runs straight through the county clerk's records office, the board chairmen carefully cultivated reputation as the last thing standing between a dying county and total collapse, and a construction corridor that doesn't stop cleanly at any county line. What they find isn't a single corrupt official cutting a single bad deal. It's a method - patient, deniable, built out of small mercies and careful silences extended one at a time until the exceptions are the whole of what a county's machinery has quietly become. And it's already, they come to understand, being taught to the next county down the line.As the case widens - pulling in an FBI agent chasing a civil rights complaint from the other side of the county line, a fifteen-year-old boy who saw more on a dark road than anyone twice his age should have to carry, a records clerk thirty years into a career built on not asking questions who finally decides to start asking them, and a county board chairman who has spent eleven years convincing himself that patience and silence are simply the cost of keeping a dying place alive - Callan has to reckon with the thing he brought to Aldwich already carrying, unexamined, in the trunk of his car: the difference between the man his own father built an entire county's machinery to protect, and the man Callan has spent two years, one case at a time, trying to become instead.What the Ground Keeps is a slow-burn small-town thriller in the tradition of patient, character-driven procedurals - the kind that trust readers with the unglamorous texture of the work itself: a records room, a kitchen-table map, a phone call at eleven at night that isn't quite a threat and is somehow worse for it. It is a novel about institutional corruption as a taught method rather than a single villain's scheme, about the particular loneliness of being the only person in a room willing to ask an inconvenient question, and about a man trying to prove - to a sheriff who took a considerable risk trusting him, to a woman three hours away who has already survived loving someone who does this work, and to a father whose clearest days now arrive without warning and without much time left to spend them - that a demonstration only stays a demonstration if nobody learns from it.A direct sequel to The Quiet County, What the Ground Keeps also stands entirely on its own: a new county, a new sheriff, a new pattern of deaths dressed in a different county's particular local grammar, and the same hard-won conviction, carried forward from book to book, that the actual work of dismantling something like this happens less in dramatic confrontations than in small, unglamorous moments - a policy quietly revised, a question finally asked pro Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Forensic psychologist Mara Williams has spent her career listening to other people's darkest secrets. She never expected to come home to one.Twelve years after leaving Ashford Hollow, Mara returns to the Catskills town she grew up in to help care for her mother, Celia, whose grip on her own memory has started to slip. The town looks exactly as she left it -- the same steeple over the sugar maples, the same lake, the same neighbors who have known her since she was a girl. It takes her a while to notice how carefully it has all been watched.Set over one tightening autumn sliding into a Catskills winter, Ashford Hollow becomes a character in its own right: small enough that everyone assumes they would notice if something were wrong, and exactly the kind of place where something has been wrong for a very long time.Martin Shaw is the kind of neighbor everyone trusts: helpful, quiet, unremarkable, the sort of man who offers to carry your groceries and remembers your coffee order. He has also spent more than a decade cataloguing the town's most private moments on cassette tape, one labeled reel at a time, filed away in an archive he has built with the patience of a man who has never once been in a hurry. A section of that archive is reserved entirely for Mara -- and has been since long before she came back.Told in alternating chapters from Mara's perspective and Martin's own carefully controlled point of view, THE LISTENER puts readers inside both the investigation and the obsession driving it, watching in real time as a quiet, methodical man convinces himself that devotion and violation are the same thing.When a local woman goes missing, Mara's professional instincts pull her into the investigation almost against her will, working alongside a local detective who is more grateful for her expertise than he initially lets on. She spends her working life building psychological profiles of people who hurt others; she knows, better than most, exactly what obsession looks like from the outside, clinically, at a safe distance. What she does not yet know is how long she has already been living inside someone else's.Underneath the thriller runs a quieter story about caregiving and inheritance: what it costs to come home and look after a parent who is slowly losing the details of a life she spent decades building, and what it means for a woman whose entire profession is attentiveness to admit she has spent her adult life avoiding that same closeness with the people who actually love her.As the case tightens and more women in Ashford Hollow disappear, Mara has to hold two versions of her hometown in her head at once: the one she remembers, full of porch lights and familiar faces, and the one that has apparently been listening back the entire time. Her mother's failing memory becomes its own kind of clock, ticking against how much time Mara actually has. An old, unresolved piece of her own past -- a recording she never knew existed until it is far too late to feel safe about it -- resurfaces at the worst possible moment. And somewhere on the outskirts of town, in a building nobody has reason to visit, a very patient man's patience is finally running out.THE LISTENER is a slow-burn psychological thriller about surveillance, obsession, and the razor-thin difference between being heard and being watched. It is a novel about a woman whose entire profession rests on the belief that being truly listened to is a form of care -- and what happens when she discovers that, in the wrong hands, it can just as easily become a form of theft.Atmospheric, character-driven, and unsettling in the way only a story about your own hometown can be, THE LISTENER is for readers of Caroline Kepnes's YOU and Colleen Hoover's VERITY, and f Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Everything you ever deleted on your phone or computer went somewhere.The apology you typed at midnight and erased. The breakup you wrote at 2:14 a.m. and never sent. The photograph you took down. The letter you dragged to the trash. You believed they were gone. You believed your draft folder belonged to you alone.You were wrong.For three years, one of the world's biggest social media companies has been quietly keeping all of it inside a hidden system called the Reservoir. Every unsent message. Every deleted post. Every file wiped from a personal device. The company calls it research into "authenticity." The engineer who helped build it knows better.When she spots a number on a dashboard that should read zero, she realizes the Reservoir has sprung a leak. She reports it. Her warning is passed up the chain, softened, and buried in a fourth-floor conference room by an ambitious executive who sees not a crisis, but the richest record of human intent ever gathered. The company's exhausted chief executive, carrying unsent words of her own, lets herself be talked into the smaller version of the truth.Then the dam breaks.In a single afternoon, a billion people's deleted words spill into public view. A man sees his unsent apology to his estranged brother exposed. A woman watches three screens of her most honest writing become searchable by strangers. A mother's erased confession about her son reappears exactly as she wrote it. A veteran, a widow, a new hire, a teenager who once typed "I don't know who I am anymore" all discover at once that nothing they deleted was ever truly gone.What follows is a flood of truth no one asked for and no one can take back. Marriages crack open. Careers end over sentences ripped out of context. Old wounds between families finally surface, some to heal and some to break for good. Senators demand answers. And the engineer faces a choice she has been putting off for weeks: stay silent and keep her job, or tell the world how it really happened.Inside the company, loyalties shatter. The executive races to frame the disaster as a technical glitch. The chief executive must decide whether to protect the company or finally admit what she allowed. And in homes everywhere, ordinary people must decide what to do with an honesty that arrived without permission: run from it, or finally live up to it.Told through eight anonymous lives and the people who built the machine that exposed them, Everything We Deleted is a gripping, deeply human novel about the distance between what we feel and what we allow ourselves to say. It moves from corporate intrigue to a congressional hearing, and from quiet bedrooms to crowded living rooms, asking questions every one of us has faced with a thumb hovering over "Send" What would people think of us if they could read our drafts?What are we protecting when we delete the truest thing we've written?And what might happen if, just once, we said it out loud?This is not a story that ends with a tidy moral. Some people are hurt in ways that are never set right. But scattered through the wreckage are brothers standing in doorways, strangers discovering they were never alone, and a hard-won kind of honesty that no algorithm could have designed.Perfect for readers who love thought-provoking fiction about technology, privacy, and the lives we hide in plain sight, Everything We Deleted will make you look at your own phone differently, and may finally give you the courage to send the message you've been saving.Michael K. Bender, a former corporate CEO and Foreign Commercial Officer who spent decades watching what people say and what they leave unsaid, brings a lifetime of observation to this timel Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Twenty-four centuries ago, a man walked the covered colonnades of the Lyceum in Athens, talking with anyone willing to keep pace, about what it means to live well. He was not interested in living long for its own sake, or in living comfortably for its own sake. He was interested in a harder question: what does it mean to live a life that is actually good? That man was Aristotle, and this book argues he may be the most overlooked resource available to anyone navigating retirement, aging, and the search for meaning in later life. Making the Most of Your Golden Years takes Aristotle's philosophy of eudaimonia - often translated as "happiness," but closer in meaning to "flourishing" - and applies it to the real questions of the second half of life. Aristotle believed the good life is not a feeling you either have or don't have on a given Tuesday; it is an activity, practiced continuously, the way a musician plays rather than simply is. If flourishing is a skill built through repetition, it is available at every stage of life to those willing to practice it - and in some respects becomes more available with time, not less. Central to this argument is phronesis, or practical wisdom: the hard-won ability to see a messy, real-life situation clearly and know what ought to be done about it. Aristotle was blunt about its source - lived experience, and nothing else. A brilliant twenty-year-old cannot, by definition, possess practical wisdom, because it cannot be acquired any faster than one year at a time. This book argues that modern life has largely forgotten this, to the detriment of the people who have earned this particular expertise. Organized into four parts and thirteen chapters, the book moves from the mature mind (judgment, purpose, and reflection after sixty) through virtue in daily practice (courage, temperance, generosity and legacy, patience), out into the social life of wisdom (friendship, community, love and companionship), and finally to the final act: accepting change with grace and preparing for the future without anxiety. Each chapter blends an honest account of what Aristotle actually thought, translated into plain modern language; real-world illustration; and concrete, actionable practice, because Aristotle believed understanding alone was never sufficient - virtue is built by doing. Appendices extend the book into daily use: daily virtue practices for seniors, a 30-day Aristotelian wisdom challenge, modernized reflections, reflection journal prompts, a ready-made guide for book clubs, and a quick-reference summary of the twelve virtues. No background in philosophy is required, and nothing here demands agreement with every idea to get real value from it. The book is built to be read in any order: front to back, or by turning directly to whichever chapter answers the question most urgent right now - a difficult health scare, a freshly opened retirement calendar, or the loss of a lifelong partner. It promises nothing easy - Aristotle was not a philosopher of effortless comfort. What he offered instead was rarer: a clear-eyed account of what genuine flourishing requires, at any age, paired with real humor, since Aristotle considered wit a virtue and believed nothing about growing older requires growing solemn. Aristotle believed old age was not a diminished version of life but its own distinct country, with its own weather and its own form of excellence available to no one else. Making the Most of Your Golden Years is a set of maps for exploring it well - for readers ready to treat the second half of life not as decline to be managed, but as an achievement still in progress. Instead of viewing aging as a slow decline, this guide uses ancient wisdom to transform the later chapters of life into a purpose Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …

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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. No one throws you a party when you win these battles. No one sends flowers when you lose them.You know the feeling. It's ten at night, the dishes are done, the house is quiet, and a low hum rises beneath an ordinary life: Is this it? Is this who I've become? You don't say it to your spouse, because it would sound ungrateful. You don't say it to your friends, because most of them carry the same hum and pretend not to. So you carry it. Quietly. The way an entire generation has been carrying it, one aging parent, one career shift, and one unreturned phone call at a time.The Things We Carry into Our 40s, 50s, 60s, and Beyond is a warm, honest, and deeply reassuring look at the long middle stretch of life, the decades where most of living actually happens, yet which we rarely name except as a punchline about red convertibles. This isn't a crisis. It's a transition. And it deserves to be understood.Written from the far end of the road by an author who spent his career as a corporate executive and commercial diplomat, rebuilding his life in country after country across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and later teaching in classrooms closer to home, this book gathers the quiet truths of midlife into 42 short, readable chapters organized around four universal passages: THE FRIENDSHIPS THAT FADEWhy the guest list shrinks, why the friend who just stopped calling still matters, why work friends aren't forever, and how to make, and keep, real friends after forty. The loneliness no one warns you about, and the few who stay.THE DREAMS WE REVISEThe life you thought you'd be living by now. Trading the big dream for a good life. When your career no longer defines you, the money story you inherited, the marriage you renegotiate in the middle, the sandwich years, and beginning again after divorce or loss.THE REGRETS WE FINALLY FACEThe conversation you never had. The risks you didn't take. The silence between family members, what the body starts telling you, the years you gave to work, the day your peers begin to die, and the day you finally stop pretending you're fine.THE CLARITY WE EARNCaring less and living more. The gift of solitude. The second act no one assigned you. Setting down the grudge, becoming an elder, the rituals of ordinary days, a legacy that isn't a monument, and the quiet gratitude of enough.Inside you'll find: - Short chapters you can read in a single sitting, with the room to think afterward- Composite stories drawn from real lives across generations and continents- Gentle, practical insight for the friendships, family ties, and choices that shape these decades- An appendix of reflection and conversation questions, ideal for book clubs, spouses, old friends, and anyone ready to talk about what usually goes unsaidThis is not a book that tells you to fix yourself. It is a book that tells you that you are not alone. That the fading friendships, the revised dreams, and the regrets you've kept in a drawer for twenty years are not signs of failure. They are the ordinary, shared terrain of a life fully lived. And on the far side of them waits something worth the journey: a lightness, a clarity, and a deeper sense of what truly matters.Whether you're forty and feeling the first shift, fifty and caught between generations, sixty and wondering what comes next, or well beyond and ready to look back with grace, this book offers companionship for the road and permission to set some of the weight down.Perfect for readers of positivity, personal growth, and reflective nonfiction, and a meaningful gift for a friend, sibling, or partner entering a new season of life. Moving beyond the Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

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Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Two years after the reservoir gave up its dead, Callan believed he'd left this particular work behind him - the drive out to some other county's failing department, the slow, patient dismantling of a corruption nobody wanted looked at too closely. He'd built a consulting practice out of the wreckage of Marrow Falls: a training module, a reputation, a way of practicing the posture of the thing without ever again standing fully inside it.Then a letter arrives from Sheriff Corinne Task of Aldwich County, a place he's never worked, written by a woman he's never met, asking for help with a situation she "isn't yet able to describe in writing." Three men have died in the past eighteen months - a fall, a single-vehicle crash, a hunting accident that shouldn't have been possible for a man who'd hunted the same hillside since he was nine years old. All three had filed complaints against the county board in the months before they died. Task doesn't believe in coincidence. Neither, anymore, does Callan.With medical examiner Dr. Priya Kade beside him, Callan starts pulling a thread that runs straight through the county clerk's records office, the board chairmen carefully cultivated reputation as the last thing standing between a dying county and total collapse, and a construction corridor that doesn't stop cleanly at any county line. What they find isn't a single corrupt official cutting a single bad deal. It's a method - patient, deniable, built out of small mercies and careful silences extended one at a time until the exceptions are the whole of what a county's machinery has quietly become. And it's already, they come to understand, being taught to the next county down the line.As the case widens - pulling in an FBI agent chasing a civil rights complaint from the other side of the county line, a fifteen-year-old boy who saw more on a dark road than anyone twice his age should have to carry, a records clerk thirty years into a career built on not asking questions who finally decides to start asking them, and a county board chairman who has spent eleven years convincing himself that patience and silence are simply the cost of keeping a dying place alive - Callan has to reckon with the thing he brought to Aldwich already carrying, unexamined, in the trunk of his car: the difference between the man his own father built an entire county's machinery to protect, and the man Callan has spent two years, one case at a time, trying to become instead.What the Ground Keeps is a slow-burn small-town thriller in the tradition of patient, character-driven procedurals - the kind that trust readers with the unglamorous texture of the work itself: a records room, a kitchen-table map, a phone call at eleven at night that isn't quite a threat and is somehow worse for it. It is a novel about institutional corruption as a taught method rather than a single villain's scheme, about the particular loneliness of being the only person in a room willing to ask an inconvenient question, and about a man trying to prove - to a sheriff who took a considerable risk trusting him, to a woman three hours away who has already survived loving someone who does this work, and to a father whose clearest days now arrive without warning and without much time left to spend them - that a demonstration only stays a demonstration if nobody learns from it.A direct sequel to The Quiet County, What the Ground Keeps also stands entirely on its own: a new county, a new sheriff, a new pattern of deaths dressed in a different county's particular local grammar, and the same hard-won conviction, carried forward from book to book, that the actual work of dismantling something like this happens less in dramatic confrontations than in small, unglamorous moments - a policy quietly revised, a question fina Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Everything you ever deleted on your phone or computer went somewhere.The apology you typed at midnight and erased. The breakup you wrote at 2:14 a.m. and never sent. The photograph you took down. The letter you dragged to the trash. You believed they were gone. You believed your draft folder belonged to you alone.You were wrong.For three years, one of the world's biggest social media companies has been quietly keeping all of it inside a hidden system called the Reservoir. Every unsent message. Every deleted post. Every file wiped from a personal device. The company calls it research into "authenticity." The engineer who helped build it knows better.When she spots a number on a dashboard that should read zero, she realizes the Reservoir has sprung a leak. She reports it. Her warning is passed up the chain, softened, and buried in a fourth-floor conference room by an ambitious executive who sees not a crisis, but the richest record of human intent ever gathered. The company's exhausted chief executive, carrying unsent words of her own, lets herself be talked into the smaller version of the truth.Then the dam breaks.In a single afternoon, a billion people's deleted words spill into public view. A man sees his unsent apology to his estranged brother exposed. A woman watches three screens of her most honest writing become searchable by strangers. A mother's erased confession about her son reappears exactly as she wrote it. A veteran, a widow, a new hire, a teenager who once typed "I don't know who I am anymore" all discover at once that nothing they deleted was ever truly gone.What follows is a flood of truth no one asked for and no one can take back. Marriages crack open. Careers end over sentences ripped out of context. Old wounds between families finally surface, some to heal and some to break for good. Senators demand answers. And the engineer faces a choice she has been putting off for weeks: stay silent and keep her job, or tell the world how it really happened.Inside the company, loyalties shatter. The executive races to frame the disaster as a technical glitch. The chief executive must decide whether to protect the company or finally admit what she allowed. And in homes everywhere, ordinary people must decide what to do with an honesty that arrived without permission: run from it, or finally live up to it.Told through eight anonymous lives and the people who built the machine that exposed them, Everything We Deleted is a gripping, deeply human novel about the distance between what we feel and what we allow ourselves to say. It moves from corporate intrigue to a congressional hearing, and from quiet bedrooms to crowded living rooms, asking questions every one of us has faced with a thumb hovering over "Send" What would people think of us if they could read our drafts?What are we protecting when we delete the truest thing we've written?And what might happen if, just once, we said it out loud?This is not a story that ends with a tidy moral. Some people are hurt in ways that are never set right. But scattered through the wreckage are brothers standing in doorways, strangers discovering they were never alone, and a hard-won kind of honesty that no algorithm could have designed.Perfect for readers who love thought-provoking fiction about technology, privacy, and the lives we hide in plain sight, Everything We Deleted will make you look at your own phone differently, and may finally give you the courage to send the message you've been saving.Michael K. Bender, a former corporate CEO and Foreign Commercial Officer who spent decades watching what people say and what they leave unsaid, brings a lifetime of observation Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. No one throws you a party when you win these battles. No one sends flowers when you lose them.You know the feeling. It's ten at night, the dishes are done, the house is quiet, and a low hum rises beneath an ordinary life: Is this it? Is this who I've become? You don't say it to your spouse, because it would sound ungrateful. You don't say it to your friends, because most of them carry the same hum and pretend not to. So you carry it. Quietly. The way an entire generation has been carrying it, one aging parent, one career shift, and one unreturned phone call at a time.The Things We Carry into Our 40s, 50s, 60s, and Beyond is a warm, honest, and deeply reassuring look at the long middle stretch of life, the decades where most of living actually happens, yet which we rarely name except as a punchline about red convertibles. This isn't a crisis. It's a transition. And it deserves to be understood.Written from the far end of the road by an author who spent his career as a corporate executive and commercial diplomat, rebuilding his life in country after country across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and later teaching in classrooms closer to home, this book gathers the quiet truths of midlife into 42 short, readable chapters organized around four universal passages: THE FRIENDSHIPS THAT FADEWhy the guest list shrinks, why the friend who just stopped calling still matters, why work friends aren't forever, and how to make, and keep, real friends after forty. The loneliness no one warns you about, and the few who stay.THE DREAMS WE REVISEThe life you thought you'd be living by now. Trading the big dream for a good life. When your career no longer defines you, the money story you inherited, the marriage you renegotiate in the middle, the sandwich years, and beginning again after divorce or loss.THE REGRETS WE FINALLY FACEThe conversation you never had. The risks you didn't take. The silence between family members, what the body starts telling you, the years you gave to work, the day your peers begin to die, and the day you finally stop pretending you're fine.THE CLARITY WE EARNCaring less and living more. The gift of solitude. The second act no one assigned you. Setting down the grudge, becoming an elder, the rituals of ordinary days, a legacy that isn't a monument, and the quiet gratitude of enough.Inside you'll find: - Short chapters you can read in a single sitting, with the room to think afterward- Composite stories drawn from real lives across generations and continents- Gentle, practical insight for the friendships, family ties, and choices that shape these decades- An appendix of reflection and conversation questions, ideal for book clubs, spouses, old friends, and anyone ready to talk about what usually goes unsaidThis is not a book that tells you to fix yourself. It is a book that tells you that you are not alone. That the fading friendships, the revised dreams, and the regrets you've kept in a drawer for twenty years are not signs of failure. They are the ordinary, shared terrain of a life fully lived. And on the far side of them waits something worth the journey: a lightness, a clarity, and a deeper sense of what truly matters.Whether you're forty and feeling the first shift, fifty and caught between generations, sixty and wondering what comes next, or well beyond and ready to look back with grace, this book offers companionship for the road and permission to set some of the weight down.Perfect for readers of positivity, personal growth, and reflective nonfiction, and a meaningful gift for a friend, sibling, or partner entering a new season of life. Movin Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Forensic psychologist Mara Williams has spent her career listening to other people's darkest secrets. She never expected to come home to one.Twelve years after leaving Ashford Hollow, Mara returns to the Catskills town she grew up in to help care for her mother, Celia, whose grip on her own memory has started to slip. The town looks exactly as she left it -- the same steeple over the sugar maples, the same lake, the same neighbors who have known her since she was a girl. It takes her a while to notice how carefully it has all been watched.Set over one tightening autumn sliding into a Catskills winter, Ashford Hollow becomes a character in its own right: small enough that everyone assumes they would notice if something were wrong, and exactly the kind of place where something has been wrong for a very long time.Martin Shaw is the kind of neighbor everyone trusts: helpful, quiet, unremarkable, the sort of man who offers to carry your groceries and remembers your coffee order. He has also spent more than a decade cataloguing the town's most private moments on cassette tape, one labeled reel at a time, filed away in an archive he has built with the patience of a man who has never once been in a hurry. A section of that archive is reserved entirely for Mara -- and has been since long before she came back.Told in alternating chapters from Mara's perspective and Martin's own carefully controlled point of view, THE LISTENER puts readers inside both the investigation and the obsession driving it, watching in real time as a quiet, methodical man convinces himself that devotion and violation are the same thing.When a local woman goes missing, Mara's professional instincts pull her into the investigation almost against her will, working alongside a local detective who is more grateful for her expertise than he initially lets on. She spends her working life building psychological profiles of people who hurt others; she knows, better than most, exactly what obsession looks like from the outside, clinically, at a safe distance. What she does not yet know is how long she has already been living inside someone else's.Underneath the thriller runs a quieter story about caregiving and inheritance: what it costs to come home and look after a parent who is slowly losing the details of a life she spent decades building, and what it means for a woman whose entire profession is attentiveness to admit she has spent her adult life avoiding that same closeness with the people who actually love her.As the case tightens and more women in Ashford Hollow disappear, Mara has to hold two versions of her hometown in her head at once: the one she remembers, full of porch lights and familiar faces, and the one that has apparently been listening back the entire time. Her mother's failing memory becomes its own kind of clock, ticking against how much time Mara actually has. An old, unresolved piece of her own past -- a recording she never knew existed until it is far too late to feel safe about it -- resurfaces at the worst possible moment. And somewhere on the outskirts of town, in a building nobody has reason to visit, a very patient man's patience is finally running out.THE LISTENER is a slow-burn psychological thriller about surveillance, obsession, and the razor-thin difference between being heard and being watched. It is a novel about a woman whose entire profession rests on the belief that being truly listened to is a form of care -- and what happens when she discovers that, in the wrong hands, it can just as easily become a form of theft.Atmospheric, character-driven, and unsettling in the way only a story about your own hometown can be, THE LISTENER is for readers of Caroline Kepnes's YOU and Colleen Hoover's Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. …

Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Twenty-four centuries ago, a man walked the covered colonnades of the Lyceum in Athens, talking with anyone willing to keep pace, about what it means to live well. He was not interested in living long for its own sake, or in living comfortably for its own sake. He was interested in a harder question: what does it mean to live a life that is actually good? That man was Aristotle, and this book argues he may be the most overlooked resource available to anyone navigating retirement, aging, and the search for meaning in later life. Making the Most of Your Golden Years takes Aristotle's philosophy of eudaimonia - often translated as "happiness," but closer in meaning to "flourishing" - and applies it to the real questions of the second half of life. Aristotle believed the good life is not a feeling you either have or don't have on a given Tuesday; it is an activity, practiced continuously, the way a musician plays rather than simply is. If flourishing is a skill built through repetition, it is available at every stage of life to those willing to practice it - and in some respects becomes more available with time, not less. Central to this argument is phronesis, or practical wisdom: the hard-won ability to see a messy, real-life situation clearly and know what ought to be done about it. Aristotle was blunt about its source - lived experience, and nothing else. A brilliant twenty-year-old cannot, by definition, possess practical wisdom, because it cannot be acquired any faster than one year at a time. This book argues that modern life has largely forgotten this, to the detriment of the people who have earned this particular expertise. Organized into four parts and thirteen chapters, the book moves from the mature mind (judgment, purpose, and reflection after sixty) through virtue in daily practice (courage, temperance, generosity and legacy, patience), out into the social life of wisdom (friendship, community, love and companionship), and finally to the final act: accepting change with grace and preparing for the future without anxiety. Each chapter blends an honest account of what Aristotle actually thought, translated into plain modern language; real-world illustration; and concrete, actionable practice, because Aristotle believed understanding alone was never sufficient - virtue is built by doing. Appendices extend the book into daily use: daily virtue practices for seniors, a 30-day Aristotelian wisdom challenge, modernized reflections, reflection journal prompts, a ready-made guide for book clubs, and a quick-reference summary of the twelve virtues. No background in philosophy is required, and nothing here demands agreement with every idea to get real value from it. The book is built to be read in any order: front to back, or by turning directly to whichever chapter answers the question most urgent right now - a difficult health scare, a freshly opened retirement calendar, or the loss of a lifelong partner. It promises nothing easy - Aristotle was not a philosopher of effortless comfort. What he offered instead was rarer: a clear-eyed account of what genuine flourishing requires, at any age, paired with real humor, since Aristotle considered wit a virtue and believed nothing about growing older requires growing solemn. Aristotle believed old age was not a diminished version of life but its own distinct country, with its own weather and its own form of excellence available to no one else. Making the Most of Your Golden Years is a set of maps for exploring it well - for readers ready to treat the second half of life not as decline to be managed, but as an achievement still in progress. Instead of viewing aging as a slow decline, this guide uses ancient wisdom to transform the later chapters of life i Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability. …