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The Glittering Strand: A triumphant story of a young womans fight for independence
By Judith Lennox. 1991
Spiced with the colour and sensuous splendour of the sixteenth-century silk trade, The Glittering Strand is the triumphant story of…
a young woman's fight for independence. Serafina Guardi and her father, a wealthy silk merchant from Marseilles, are sailing to Italy to celebrate her betrothal when their ship is captured by Barbary corsairs. Serafina finds herself plunged into the unknown, brutal world of the North African slave states. From there, she beings the long struggle to free herself from servitude. Serafina's wit and beauty are tempered by her ruthlessness - a ruthlessness which eventually threatens to lose her both her lover and her child. Embattled by the prejudices of the age and by the ambitions of her treacherous cousin Angelo, Serafina fights against poverty, loneliness and despair, vowing to regain her lost inheritance - the Guardi silk house - at whatever cost.Star Struck (Pick Your Own Plot Bedventure #1)
By Meredith Michelle. 2016
ARE YOU READY TO CHOOSE YOUR OWN HOLLYWOOD ENDING? You are Anna Chambliss, a beautiful A-list actress engaged to a…
gorgeous Hollywood star. Life is beyond perfect--until you wake one morning to find tabloid headlines proclaiming that your fiancé is cheating on you. How do you react? Your love life, your career, and your future happiness all depend on what you choose to do--and who you do it with. Will your engagement crumble in public scandal? Do you seek out a sexy new leading man? Enjoy a night of mind-blowing bliss with a near stranger? Or do you find your soul mate away from the spotlight's glare? Every decision you make has consequences, some steamy, some dangerous. Follow your destiny from movie sets to glittering premieres to glamorous vacation spots--and always remember: life in the fast lane can include all kinds of juicy detours. The choice is yours...All My Sisters: A sumptuous wartime novel of love and loss (Charnwood Ser.)
By Judith Lennox. 2005
Iris, Marianne, Eva and Clemency are the daughters of Sheffield manufacturer, Joshua Maclise. In the tumultuous years before the First…
World War, the sisters seek to fulfil their ambitions. Pretty, self-centred Iris dreams of a grand marriage, quiet Marianne meets the love of her life, and passionate Eva longs for independence. Only Clemency, caring for her invalid mother, remains tied to the family home. Years pass and, her hopes of marriage dashed, Iris becomes a nurse in a London hospital. Marianne, living on a tea estate in Ceylon, finds first her happiness and then her life threatened by a cruel and ruthless man. When Eva falls in love with the Bohemian, Gabriel Bellamy, her dreams of a career as an artist falter. As the clouds darken and war changes the lives of all the sisters, Clemency fights to free herself from the bonds that confine her and to discover love at last.When to Engage an Earl (Spinster House #3)
By Sally Mackenzie. 2017
If love is a malady, the Spinster House ladies have caught it, one by one.Miss Jane Wilkinson couldn’t be more…
delighted when her two best friends marry, creating a much-desired vacancy at the Spinster House. For the first time in her twenty-eight years, Jane can be free of her annoying older brother and enjoy complete solitude—with the exception of the Spinster House cat, Poppy. If only Jane’s unruly thoughts didn’t keep drifting to handsome Alex, Earl of Evans, in the most un-spinster like ways…Though jilted once, Alex has always intended to marry and raise a family. Now that his two closest friends have tied the knot, he is more determined than ever to find a wife. If only it wasn’t the intriguing Miss Jane Wilkinson that his heart—as well as the rest of him—desired. Not only does she appear uninterested in marriage, it’s clear she’s the managing sort. And yet, despite Alex’s fiercely independent spirit, the idea of being managed by her is quite appealing. Now if he can only convince her to give up her beloved Spinster House in favor of a far more pleasurable home—in his arms…Sally MacKenzie’s novels are…“Naked, noble, and irresistible!” —Eloisa James“Perfect.” —RT Book Reviews“Great fun.” —Publishers Weekly“Always a delight to read.” –Booklist, Starred ReviewStories of Your Life
By Ted Chiang. 2002
A new edition of Ted Chiang’s masterful first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, which includes his first eight…
published stories plus the author’s story notes and a cover the author commissioned himself. Combining the precision and scientific curiosity of Kim Stanley Robinson with Lorrie Moore’s cool, clear love of language and narrative intricacy, this award-winning collection offers readers the dual delights of the very, very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar. Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change—the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens—while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story, a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection. A clever pastiche of news reports and interviews chronicles a college’s initiative to “turn off” the human ability to recognize beauty in “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” With sharp intelligence and humor, Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty and constant change, and also by beauty and wonder. The collection received the Locus Award and the stories have received the Hugo, Seiun, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards.Courtesan
By Dora Levy Mossanen. 2005
Set amid the elegant châteaux of Belle époque France and the closely guarded world of nineteenth-century Persian women, Courtesan unfolds…
with the breathtaking cinematic sweep and stunning visual grandeur of an epic film. At its heart are three unforgettable women: Madame Gabrielle, the courtesan whose fateful liaison with the shah of Persia reverberates in the lives of her daughter, Françoise, and her rebellious and brave granddaughter, Simone, whose journey plunges her into the cutthroat diamond trade, where the secrets of an ancient culture may hold the truth she desperately seeks.Civil War on Sunday (Magic Tree House #21)
By Mary Pope Osborne. 2000
The Story of Land and Sea
By Katy Simpson Smith. 2014
Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut…
novel follows three generations of family--fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave--characters who yearn for redemption amid a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love. Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife, Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her tenth birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and Moll develop a close but uneasy companionship. Helen gradually takes over the running of the plantation as the girls grow up, but when she meets John, the pirate turned Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father's wishes by falling in love. Moll, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a stranger. Her only solace is her son, Davy, whom she will protect with a passion that defies the bounds of slavery.In this elegant, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith captures the singular love between parent and child, the devastation of love lost, and the desperate paths we travel in the name of renewal.Katalin Street
By Len Rix, Magda Szabo. 1969
From the author of The Door, selected as one of the New York Times "10 Best Books of 2015," this…
is a heartwrenching tale about a group of friends and lovers torn apart by the German occupation of Budapest during World War II.In prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster’s dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist.Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection. But the girl survives in a miasmal afterlife, and reappears at key moments as a mute witness to the inescapable power of past events.As in The Door and Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabó conducts a clear-eyed investigation into the ways in which we inflict suffering on those we love. Katalin Street, which won the 2007 Prix Cévennes for Best European novel, is a poignant, somber, at times harrowing book, but beautifully conceived and truly unforgettable.Dead Horse Creek
By Matt Cole. 2006
Chet Hargraves hadn't planned on staying long when he rode into the small Montana town of Dead Horse Creek. He…
was just a ranch hand, line rider with no work between seasons, trapped by a pending blizzard before he could leave. But even before he had arrived his past had caught up with him. Perhaps he should have braved the blizzard and left as he was told to do. Chet Hargraves hated to be told what to do. It became even tougher to leave when he saw Beth again. She was the woman he's loved for so long, though she had said she could not love a gunfighter. These weren't the best reasons to stay around yet they were all he had. Chet did not realize - yet - that the reason he was told to leave was a big range war was brewing. The war was to be fought with hired guns and killers, some of the best and worst the West had seen. Chet was one of them, albeit knowingly. Before long Chet was going to see to it that this war was ended. It would be fought here in a small Montana town along the Dead Horse Creek.Melville: A Novel
By Edmund White, Jean Giono, Paul Eprile. 2017
In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his…
return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel’s challenge—to express man’s fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece. Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essai, Melville: A Novel—part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Paul Eprile’s expressive translation of this intimate homage brings the exchange full circle.The Devouring
By James R. Benn. 2017
A murder in wartime Switzerland reveals Swiss complicity with the Nazis in World War II and US Army detective…
Billy Boyle is called to investigate Europe 1944 Captain Billy Boyle and his friend Lieutenant Piotr Kaz Kazimierz are sent to neutral Switzerland to work with the Office of Strategic Services OSS investigating Swiss banks that are laundering looted Nazi gold The US and Swiss governments are about to embark on diplomatic discussions regarding the Safehaven Protocols aimed at limiting the amount of war materials exported by Switzerland to the Nazis stemming the tide of looted gold and preventing postwar use of Nazi wealth by war criminals With the talks about to begin and the Gestapo ever present the OSS wants Billy and Kaz to protect the participants which turns out to be a very deadly task The plans go wrong from the beginning when Billy and Kaz crashland in France As they make their way through occupied territory to the border they meet Anton Lasho a member of the Sinti ethnic group whose family was slaughtered by the Nazis and who is in turn a one-man Nazi-killing machine They ll need his help because as they find once they make it across the border Swiss banks are openly laundering gold harvested from concentration camps and those who are profiting will do everything they can to protect their wealth and hide their dark secretsMy Heart Laid Bare
By Joyce Carol Oates. 1998
Finally returned to print in a beautiful paperback edition, a haunting gothic tale of a nineteenth-century immigrant family of confidence…
artists--a story of morality, duplicity, and retribution that explores the depths of human manipulation and vulnerabilityThe patriarch of the Licht family, Abraham has raised a brood of talented con artists, children molded in his image, and experts in The Game, his calling and philosophy of life. Traveling from one small town to the next across the continent, from the Northeast to the frontier West, they skillfully swindle unsuspecting victims, playing on their greed, lust, pride, and small-mindedness. Despite their success, Abraham cannot banish a past that haunts him: the ghost of his ancestor Sarah Licht, a former con woman who met with a gruesome fate.As Abraham involves his family in more and more complex and impressive schemes, he finds himself caught between the specter of Sarah and the growing terrors of his present. While his carefully crafted lies and schemes begin to fracture and disintegrate before his eyes, Abraham discovers that the bond of family is as tenuous and treacherous as the tricks he perpetrates upon unsuspecting strangers.The Season of Open Water
By Dawn Tripp. 2005
From the critically acclaimed author of Moon Tide comes a mesmerizing novel of love and violence, family and betrayal. The…
Season of Open Water is the passionate, searing story of a young woman coming of age in a New England seacoast town that is swept up in the dangerous trade of rum-running.It is October 1927. Bridge Weld is nineteen, headstrong and beautiful, working in her grandfather Noel's boatbuilding shop. When Noel is approached by a local bootlegger to refit a boat for smuggling, he feels in his gut that he should not accept the work, yet he takes the job for the money it offers and for the chance it gives him to build a future for his beloved granddaughter, Bridge, and her brother, Luce. What Noel doesn't count on is that Luce will be lured into the rum work himself and will try to pull Bridge into it with him. But Bridge has embarked on a different course. Caught up in a passion for Henry, a veteran of World War I, Bridge is propelled beyond the confines of her known world, and ultimately she must choose between the man who loves her and the brother to whom she has been loyal all her life. As Bridge strikes out on her own, Luce's fierce attachment spirals out of control.Exquisitely written, haunting in its rendering of place, The Season of Open Water is a superb novel about a family and the lawlessness of the heart, a love story that explores the often inescapable connections between violence and desire.From the Hardcover edition.The Wrath & the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn #1)
By Renée Ahdieh. 2015
#1 New York Times BestsellerA sumptuous and epically told love story inspired by A Thousand and One NightsEvery dawn brings…
horror to a different family in a land ruled by a killer. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, takes a new bride each night only to have her executed at sunrise. So it is a suspicious surprise when sixteen-year-old Shahrzad volunteers to marry Khalid. But she does so with a clever plan to stay alive and exact revenge on the Caliph for the murder of her best friend and countless other girls. Shazi's wit and will, indeed, get her through to the dawn that no others have seen, but with a catch . . . she's falling in love with the very boy who killed her dearest friend.She discovers that the murderous boy-king is not all that he seems and neither are the deaths of so many girls. Shazi is determined to uncover the reason for the murders and to break the cycle once and for all.From the Hardcover edition.Titanic
By Kathleen Duey, Karen A. Bale. 2014
The Titanic -- April 14, 1912 Gavin Reilly is working in the Titanic's galley to earn his passage from Ireland…
to America. He can't wait to join his brother in New York. He has big dreams and bigger ambitions. Karolina Green is returning home to the States with her Aunt Rose after the death of her parents in England. She wants, more than anything, to mend her shattered life in New York. On a calm, clear April night their hopes and dreams turn into a nightmare -- like those of hundreds of other passengers on the Titanic. Rich and poor, famous and unknown, the people aboard the Titanic find themselves at the mercy of a cold seathat even the greatest ship ever built can't conquer. Few will live to remember the disaster the world still can't forget -- will Gavin and Karolina be among the survivors?Hunting Shadows
By Charles Todd. 2014
In the latest mystery from New York Times bestselling author Charles Todd, Inspector Ian Rutledge is summoned to the quiet,…
isolated Fen country to solve a series of seemingly unconnected murders before the killer strikes again August 1920. A society wedding at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire becomes a crime scene when a guest is shot just as the bride arrives. Two weeks later, after a fruitless search for clues, the local police are forced to call in Scotland Yard. But not before there is another shooting in a village close by. This second murder has a witness; the only problem is that her description of the killer is so horrific it's unbelievable. Badgered by the police, she quickly recants her story. Despite his experience, Inspector Ian Rutledge can find no connection between the two deaths. One victim was an Army officer, the other a solicitor standing for Parliament; their paths have never crossed. What links these two murders? Is it something from the past? Or is it only in the mind of a clever killer?Then the case reminds Rutledge of a legendary assassin whispered about during the war. His own dark memories come back to haunt him as he hunts for the missing connection--and yet, when he finds it, it isn't as simple as he'd expected. He must put his trust in the devil in order to find the elusive and shocking answer.The Confectioner's Tale: A Novel of Paris
By Laura Madeleine. 2015
At the famous Patisserie Clermont, a chance encounter with the owner's daughter has given one young man a glimpse into…
a life he never knew existed: of sweet cream and melted chocolate, golden caramel and powdered sugar, of pastry light as air. But it is not just the art of confectionery that holds him captive, and soon a forbidden love affair begins.Almost eighty years later, an academic discovers a hidden photograph of her grandfather as a young man with two people she has never seen before. Scrawled on the back of the picture are the words "Forgive me." Unable to resist the mystery behind it, she begins to unravel the story of two star-crossed lovers and one irrevocable betrayal.This is a novel in the guise of the tape recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110…
years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s.The Care and Management of Lies
By Jacqueline Winspear. 2014
By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained--by Thea's passionate embrace…
of women's suffrage and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea's brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea's gift to Kezia is a book on household management--a veiled criticism of the bride's prosaic life to come. Yet when Tom enlists to fight for his country and Thea is drawn reluctantly onto the battlefield herself, the farm becomes Kezia's responsibility. Each must find a way to endure the ensuing cataclysm and turmoil.As Tom marches to the front lines and Kezia battles to keep her ordered life from unraveling, they hide their despair in letters and cards filled with stories woven to bring comfort. Even Tom's fellow soldiers in the trenches enter and find solace in the dream world of Kezia's mouth-watering, albeit imaginary, meals. But will well-intended lies and self-deception be of use when they come face-to-face with the enemy?The Care and Management of Lies paints a poignant picture of love and friendship strained by the pain of separation and the brutal chaos of battle. Ultimately, it raises profound questions about conflict, belief, and love that echo in our own time.