MAY 2012:
This Golden Land by
Barbara Wood (May 1st)
Eighteen-year-old
Hannah Conroy has always dreamed of following in her father’s footsteps as a
healer. But in nineteenth-century England, the medical profession is closed to women.
She sees midwifery as a back door into that world, but her fledgling career is
crushed by personal tragedy. Seeking to escape a possible murder conviction in
England, Hannah’s world is turned upside down as she boards a boat bound for
Melbourne. Arriving during a period of enormous change in Australia, Hannah
faces a myriad of challenges. Not only must she fight for acceptance as a
medical professional, but she also falls in love with and must decide between
two men: an American photographer seeking a new life in Australia, and a rowdy
outlaw fleeing arrest. This
Golden Land presents a
love story that neither time nor distance can erase.
Inside a beautiful mansion on
Virgins of Paradise Street in post-World War II Cairo, Jasmine and Camelia
Rasheed grow to womanhood under the watchful eyes of their grandmother and the
other women of the prominent Rasheed family. Despite the glamour and elegance
of the city, women still wear the veil and live in harems. But as Egypt begins
to change, so do Jasmine and Camelia. Rebelling against a society in which the
suppression of women is assumed, Jasmine and Camelia embark on turbulent
personal and professional voyages of discovery. Cast out of the family, Jasmine
travels to America to become a doctor while Camelia sets out to become one of
the foremost beledi dancers in the Middle East.
Night Trains by
Barbara Wood (May 1st)
Occupied by the
Germans, the strategically located town of Sofia, Poland, stands on the brink
of annihilation in 1941. As every arrest and execution brings total
obliteration closer to reality, two medical doctors devise an ingenious plan —
to stage a typus epidemic that will force the Nazis to evacuate. The locals and
their enemy swiftly become enmeshed in what soon becomes the most daring act of
resistance in World War II.
Beautiful and
courageous, Samantha Hargrave dares to dream that she will become one of the
first female doctors — and surgeons — in America. Born in the slums of London
and possessing a special gift for healing, Samantha struggles to enter the
all-male medical profession. When her ambition encounters hostile rejection in
England, she sails to America, where she meets an eccentric doctor who takes
her on as an apprentice. But at the high-profile Astor Ball in New York,
Samantha is introduced to the second of the three men who will change her life
forever — and love just might interfere with her ambition.
Green
City in the Sun by Barbara Wood (May 1st)
In 1917, Dr. Grace
Treverton arrives in Kenya, determined to bring modern medicine to the African
natives. Her brother, Sir Valentine Treverton, has his own dream for the
British protectorate: to establish an agricultural empire to rival any in
England. The aspirations of the wealthy Trevertons collide with those of the
Mathenge tribe, an African family that has lived on the land for years. After
an African medicine woman who fights to maintain native traditions curses the
Trevertons, a series of tragedies threatens to destroy what the once-great
family fought to create.
After her mother's
death in 1857, Leyla's only links with her heritage and family are a letter and
her last name—Pemberton. Resolved to seek out her past, she travels from London
to the brooding countryside mansion of Pemberton Hurst. Leyla longs to find a
loving family, but more important, she needs to uncover the truth of her past.
But the Pembertons seem strangely reluctant to discuss family history, and the
house feels smothered by the weight of untold secrets. Increasingly torn
between the safety of life with her sophisticated fiancé in London and a new,
dangerous love, Leyla is no longer sure where to turn and whom to trust. Then
terror strikes. A murderer roams the corridors of Pemberton Hurst, and Leyla is
suddenly thrown into a maelstrom of deceit, madness, and horror. With her life
in jeopardy, Leyla must uncover the truth of her past before it destroys her.
Ancient Rome: 54 C.E.
Nineteen-year-old Ulrika is plagued with strange visions and dreams. In order
to discover the truth behind her past and her unusual powers, Ulrika embarks on
a dangerous journey to her father's homeland, Germania. There, she discovers
her calling, a rare gift known as the Divining. Sent on a quest to find her
destiny, she travels far and wide, from ancient Germania to the vast and exotic
countries of Syria, Babylon, and Persia. Along the way she meets wise spiritual
guides men, women, and spirits alike who teach her to harness her ability to
heal and protect others. Ulrika's journey also brings her close to the handsome
trader Sebastianus Gallus, who must depart for his own quest to the Far East to
gain riches for the powerful emperor Nero. But can Ulrika reunite with the man
she loves, fulfill her profound destiny, and usher in a new era in Rome under
the threatening rule of Nero? A powerful, spiritual story of romance, betrayal,
faith, and courage, The Divining stunningly brings to life one young woman's
daring role in shaping the entire ancient empire of Rome.
Australia,
1871—Following her mother’s sudden death, Joanna Drury sets sail from India and
arrives in Melbourne to claim the property left to her by her mother—and to
trace the mysteries of her family’s past. From her first steps on shore,
Joanna becomes entangled with a lost boy who leads her to the fascinating Hugh
Westbrook. She agrees to look after the child in exchange for Hugh’s help in
finding her inheritance. But she falls deeply in love with Hugh and with life
at his sheep station, Merinda. When strange nightmares begin to plague
her—the same that tormented her mother—Joanna starts to notice the Aborigines’
strange reaction to her. Delving into Australia’s past, she discovers the
tragic events that have marked her family’s destiny and her own life, events
that happened long ago in the time the Aborigines call “the Dreaming.”
Soul Flame by Barbara
Wood (May 1st)
Born into the tumultuous world of
ancient Antioch, Selene is orphaned at birth. But before her father dies, he
leaves a puzzling clue to her heritage: she has come from the gods and has a
special destiny to fulfill. In the coming years, Selene studies the primitive
healing arts with Mera, the healer-woman who adopts her. She learns how to
lower fevers by brewing Hecate’s Cure from the willow tree, how to apply green
mold to an open wound to prevent infection, and most importantly, how to calm a
patient by summoning the inner power of the “soul flame.” But on her sixteenth
birthday, Selene falls in love with Andreas, a passionate and troubled surgeon.
When fate cruelly separates them, Selene’s search for Andreas takes her to the
great centers of civilization in the ancient world—Egypt, Babylon, and Rome.
Desperate to find Andreas, Selene is torn between love and her dreams of
healing when a revolutionary vision brings her to the fulfillment of her
destiny—and the dawn of modern medicine.
It is the year of the Great
Conjunction, when the two most powerful planets, Jupiter and Saturn, align-an
astrological phenomenon that occurs once every thousand years and heralds
the death of one age and the dawn of another. The streets of London are abuzz
with predictions of horrific events to come, possibly even the death of Queen
Elizabeth. When several of the queen’s maids of honor are found dead, rumors of
black magic abound. Elizabeth calls upon her personal astrologer, John Dee, and
Giordano Bruno to solve the crimes. While Dee turns to a mysterious medium
claiming knowledge of the murders, Bruno fears that something far more
sinister is at work. But even as the climate of fear at the palace intensifies,
the queen refuses to believe that the killer could be someone within her own
court. Bruno must play a dangerous game: can he allow the plot to progress far
enough to give the queen the proof she needs without putting her, England, or
his own life in danger?
For seven years the Babylonian
princess Tiamat has kept her family's secret, waiting for her father, the
mad king Nebuchadnezzar, to return to his family and his kingdom. Married for
treaty at fourteen and widowed at twenty-one, she revels in her newfound
independence, determined to control her own destiny. But when a
nobleman is found dead in the palace, Tia must discover who is responsible for
the murder, even if her own freedom is threatened. Evidence points to the
man-beast roaming the Gardens, and Tia fears the closely-guarded secret
may soon be discovered. But the lies have only begun to unravel, and as
Tia uncovers one unspeakable truth after another, she finds that she is
the center of the intrigue, and her questions are a threat to her very
life. Madness, sorcery, and sinister plots mingle like an alchemist’s
deadly potion, and Tia must dare to risk everything—to save the kingdom and
herself.
The mansions and gutters of
Victorian London come to life when Charles Maddox, a disgraced police officer
turned independent detective, is called to the offices of Edward Tulkinghorn,
London's most powerful solicitor and one of its most dangerous men.
Tulkinghorn's cl ient has been sent threatening letters, and Charles is hired
to find out the culprit. To solve this first mystery, he needs the help
of his uncle, England's greatest detective, whose failing health belies
occasional flickers of his old genius. But to penetrate the labyrinth of this
case will open a Pandora's box, drawing them into a tangled and dangerous web,
where Britain's powerbrokers can get away with murder...
Francesca Felizzi, former mistress
of the Duke of Ferrara, is now an aspiring courtesan. Astonishingly beautiful
and ambitious, she revels in the power she wields over men. But when she is
visited by an inexperienced young man, it becomes horribly clear to Francesca
that despite her many admiring patrons, she has never truly been loved.
Suddenly, her glittering and sumptuous life becomes a gaudy façade. And then
another unexpected encounter brings with it devastating implications that
plunge Francesca and her two young daughters into the sort of danger she has
dreaded ever since she began to work the streets all those years ago.
As England’s first female autopsy
surgeon, Dody McCleland must prove herself in London’s turbulent political
climate. After a heated women’s rights rally results in the murder of an
innocent suffragette, Dody is shocked to discover that the victim was a friend
of her sister—fueling her determination to uncover the cause of the protestor’s
suspicious death. For Dody, gathering clues from a body is often easier than
handling the living—especially a man like Chief Detective Inspector Pike. Pike
is looking to get to the bottom of the case but has a hard time trusting
anyone—including Dody. Determined to earn Pike’s trust and to find the killer,
Dody will have to sort through real and imagined secrets. But if she’s not
careful, she may end up on her own examination table.
Young Roman Hasford stood by his
mother and sister on the family’s Arkansas hill farm while his father was off
fighting the Civil War. Now that his father has returned, Roman heads west to
blaze his own trail. Eager for adventure, Roman gets more than he bargained for—from
the rough and- tumble boomtown of Leavenworth, Kansas, to the blood-soaked
prairies where he fights Cheyenne warriors at the Battle of Beecher Island.
Authentic and action-packed, Roman is an epic, unforgettable
coming-of-age story, set against the background of the sprawling, wild, new
frontier of the American West.
One of the most famous figures in
all of Spanish history is Juana de Castile, who would come to be known as Juana
the Mad. She was a fiercely intelligent princess who inherited Queen Isabel's
throne and married a man so beautiful he was called Philippe the Handsome. But
what began seeming like a fairy tale ended quite differently. After Queen
Juana's husband died, she was accused of insanity and locked away in a palace,
unseen by her people for the next forty-six years. What happened between her
fairy-tale beginning and a locked tower room?
Swashbuckling hero Ethan Gage has
outsmarted wily enemies and survived dangerous challenges across the globe,
from the wilds of the American Frontier to the treacherous streets of Paris to
the blinding sands of Egypt. In this latest adventure, Gage and his new wife,
Astiza, are in the Caribbean, on a desperate hunt to find the Lost Treasure of
Montezuma—a legendary hoard rumored to have been hidden from Cortez’s
plundering Spanish conquistadors. Hot on his heels are British agents who want
the gold to finance a black slave revolt in St. Dominique—Haiti—robbing enemy
France of its richest colony. The French, too, seek the treasure for the
secrets it contains, the key to an incredible new weapon that can ensure
Britain’s defeat—on its own land. Little do Gage and Asiza know that the
race for gold and glory will thrust them into the center of a bloody struggle
for freedom when St. Dominique’s black slaves take up arms against their white
masters. And this time, Gage’s luck may be running out.
When Beatrice of Savoy, countess of
Provence, sends her four beautiful, accomplished daughters to become queens,
she admonishes them: Family comes first. As a result, the daughters—Marguerite,
queen of France; Eleanor, queen of England; Sanchia, queen of Germany; and
Beatrice, queen of Sicily—work not only to expand their husbands’ empires and
broker peace between nations, but also to bring the House of Savoy to greater
power and influence than before. Their father’s death, however, tears the
sisters apart, pitting them against one another for the legacy each believes rightfully
hers—Provence itself. Told from alternating points of view of all four queens,
and set in the tumultuous thirteenth century, this is a tale of greed, lust,
ambition, and sibling rivalry on a royal scale, exploring the meaning of true
power and bringing to life four of the most celebrated women of their time—each
of whom had an impact on the history of Europe.
Eliza dreams of writing plays for
the king’s theater, where she will be admired for her wit rather than her
father’s wealth. Beth is beautiful but poor, so she must marry well, despite
her love for her childhood sweetheart. Zabby comes to England to further her
scientific studies—and ends up saving the life of King Charles II. Soon her
friendship with the handsome king becomes a dangerous, impossible obsession.
Though she knows she should stay away from the court, the queen needs ladies in
waiting. And so the three Elizabeths from very different walks of life find
themselves at the center of the most scandal-filled court that England has ever
seen.
An angry and self-loathing veteran
of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after
enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical
scars. His home--and himself in it--may no longer be as he remembers it, but
Frank is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his
medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town
they come from, which he's hated all his life. As Frank revisits the memories
from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his sense of self, he
discovers a profound courage he thought he could never possess again. A deeply
moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood--and his
home.
An extraordinarily evocative story
of obsession, love and secrets, The Knot holds at its heart the struggle of one
man: Henry Lyte. Spanning twelve years, 1565-1578, Henry struggles with his
life’s work, the translation of a Herbal which lists, for the first time, every
herb, against the backdrop of his heart’s desire, the creation of a perfect,
beautiful garden at the heart of which lies the Knot. After the tragic death of
his much-loved first wife Anys, Henry falls in love again and brings Frances
home to Lytes Cary. She struggles to come to terms with life in the remote
rural setting of the Levels in Somerset, and feels the threat of the watery
landscape despite Henry’s efforts to show her how the landscape he loves can
bring her happiness. Henry’s father is not happy about his second marriage
however, and the tensions within the family grow. Just as Henry finds a
precarious equilibrium, in his intellectual and emotional lives, this sense of
balance is shattered by his father’s unexpected death and the unleashed
malevolence of Henry’s step-mother, Joan Young, begins.
Mary is a loving daughter, a
quick-witted girl, and a slave to one of the wealthiest families in Richmond,
Virginia. When Bet Van Lew, the outspoken daughter of the family that
owns Mary, decides to send her to Philadelphia to be educated, Mary must leave
her parents to seize her freedom. Life in the North offers Mary a
different kind of education than she ever expected. Carefully keeping the
secrets of her own enslaved family, she joins the abolition movement to bring
fugitive slaves to freedom. As the nation edges toward war, Mary defies
Virginia law by returning to Richmond, vowing to care for her ailing father—and
to fight for emancipation. Knowing that slaves are considered incapable of
intelligence, she poses as a slave in the Confederate White House to spy on
President Jefferson Davis. Together Mary and Bet risk their own lives to
smuggle invaluable information to the Union commanders. As illness and
hunger ravage the city, Mary's espionage leads her to deceive even those who
are closest to her. Just when it seems all her dangerous gambles to end
slavery will pay off, the death and destruction of the war take their greatest
toll, and Mary discovers that everything comes at a cost—even freedom.
In the Tudor age, ambition, power
and charismatic allure are essential and Catherine Howard has plenty of all
three. Not to mention her loyal best friend, Kitty Tylney, to help cover her
tracks. Kitty, the abandoned youngest daughter of minor aristocracy, owes
everything to Cat – where she is, what she is, even who she is. Friend, flirt,
and self-proclaimed Queen of Misrule, Cat reigns supreme in a loyal court of
girls under the none-too-watchful eye of the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk.
When Cat worms her way into the heart of Henry VIII and becomes Queen of
England, Kitty is thrown into the intoxicating Tudor Court. It’s a world of
glittering jewels and elegant costumes, of gossip and deception. As the Queen’s
right-hand-woman, Kitty goes from the girl nobody noticed to being caught
between two men – the object of her affection and the object of her desire.
But the atmosphere of the court turns from dazzling to deadly, and Kitty
is forced to learn the difference between trust and loyalty, love and lust,
secrets and treason and to accept the consequences when some lessons are learned
too late.
"Chemistry of Tears"
begins in London as Catherine Gehrig, a museum conservator, learns of the death
of her colleague and longtime lover, a married man. While quietly grieving, she
is assigned the job of restoring a rare 19th-century automaton,which could be
crucial to the museum's future funding. She starts to uncover its history, that
of an Englishman who travelled to Germany in the 1850s to commission a
"magical amusement" for his tubercular son.
Henry Bright has newly returned to
West Virginia from the battlefields of the First World War. Griefstruck by the
death of his young wife and unsure of how to care for the infant son she left
behind, Bright is soon confronted by the destruction of the only home he’s ever
known. His hopes for safety rest with the angel who has followed him to
Appalachia from the trenches of France and who now promises to protect him and
his son. Haunted by the abiding nightmare of his experiences in the war and
shadowed by his dead wife’s father, the Colonel, and his two brutal sons,
Bright—along with his newborn—makes his way through a ravaged landscape toward
an uncertain salvation.
It’s 1732 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and
strong-willed Jess van Sandt knows only too well that it’s a man’s world. She
believes she’s being swindled out of her inheritance by her stepfather – and
she’s determined to stop it. When help appears in the unlikely form of handsome
Scotsman Killian Kinross, himself disinherited by his grandfather, Jess finds
herself both intrigued and infuriated by him. In an attempt to recover her
fortune, she proposes a marriage of convenience. Then Killian is offered the
chance of a lifetime with the Swedish East India Company’s Expedition and he’s
determined that nothing will stand in his way, not even his new bride. He sets
sail on a daring voyage to the Far East, believing he’s put his feelings and
past behind him. But the journey doesn’t quite work out as he expects…
Set in a small town in
Massachusetts, Next to Love follows three childhood friends, Babe, Millie, and
Grace, whose lives are unmoored when their men are called to duty. And yet the
changes that are thrust upon them move them in directions they never dreamed possible—while
their husbands and boyfriends are enduring their own transformations. In the
decades that follow, the three friends lose their innocence, struggle to raise
their children, and find meaning and love in unexpected places. And as they
change, so does America—from a country in which people know their place in the
social hierarchy to a world in which feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and
technological innovations present new possibilities—and uncertainties. And yet
Babe, Millie, and Grace remain bonded by their past, even as their children
grow up and away and a new society rises from the ashes of the war.
Paris, 1774. Eighteen-year-old Marie
Antoinette has just ascended to the throne of France, along with her husband,
Louis XVI. But life is not easy for the young royals. Despite increased
pressure to produce a male heir, Louis is still unable to consummate the
marriage, and countless scandals erupt as Marie Antoinette tries to forge her
own identity in a court and a kingdom that will always see her as a foreigner.
As she forever influences fashion with her lavish gowns and sparkling jewels,
Marie Antoinette faces romantic scandal, and ripples of revolution begin
spreading across the country, though no one can predict what lies ahead...
When Isabel, a Spanish aristocrat
living in the pro-Nazi Spain of 1941, becomes involved in a plot to kill her
Fascist husband, she finds herself betrayed by her mysterious lover. The
effects of her betrayal play out in a violent struggle for power in both family
and government over three generations, intertwining her story with that of a
young lawyer named Maria forty years later. During the attempted Fascist coup
of 1981, Maria is accused of plotting the prison escape of a man she
successfully prosecuted for murder. As Maria's and Isabel's narratives unfold they
encircle each other, creating a page-turning literary thriller firmly rooted in
history.
The Second World War looms in a
world that dreads another international conflict, and England is full of
secrets, not least of which is the affair the newly proclaimed King is having
with an American divorcée. But not every confidence involves royalty. The
lovely young chauffeur May Thomas and the complex Oxford undergraduate Julian
Richardson share an undeclared love, while the identity of May’s real father
remains mysterious. Mrs. Cage, the housekeeper, desperately tries to keep her
Nazi-sympathies hidden, and Evangeline Nettlefold’s ambivalent relationship
with her school friend Wallis Simpson threatens to become explosive. Secrecy,
tensions between parent and child, the private tussles of life, and the dilemma
of whether or not duty supersedes love, reverberate throughout Abdication, in
matters of social conscience, politics, and romance.
We lusted for an even greater
prize... It is the one prize that can never be lost or stolen or burnt. And we
would find it in Miklagard... Raven and the Wolfpack have suffered. Good men
have died and the treasures they fought so hard for have been lost. But to such
men as these there is something more valuable than silver. That thing is fame
-- for fame is the saga-story that a Viking warrior leaves behind when he dies.
Now the sea road leads to Constantinople, which Norsemen call Miklagard, the
Great City, for it is there that they might find both riches and glory. But the
Great City is far away and the voyage there takes the Fellowship in to unknown
waters where they face new enemies. From the wind-whipped marshes of the
Carmargue to the crumbling walls and arenas of a decaying Rome, Raven must
fight harder for his life than ever before. He must prove himself to others --
and he must watch his back too, for an old enemy is sharpening his treacherous
claws. The young warrior with the blood-tainted eye will even challenge the
Norns of fate who, it is said, have spun his doom. But the Valkyries are
stalking, eager for new heroes to take to Ódin's hall. The clash of sword and
axe and spear will ring out in Miklagard and the Fellowship will pay a high
price in blood for the fame they seek.
London, 1914. World War I is looming
on the horizon, women are fighting for the right to vote, and global explorers
are pushing the limits of endurance at the Poles and in the deserts. Into this
volatile time, Jennifer Donnelly places her vivid and memorable characters:
Willa Alden, a passionate mountain climber who lost her leg while
climbing Kilimanjaro with Seamus Finnegan, and who will never forgive him for
saving her life. Seamus Finnegan, a polar explorer who tries to forget
Willa as he marries a beautiful young woman back home in England. Max von
Brandt, a handsome sophisticate who courts high society women, but who has a
secret agenda as a German spy; and many others.
The year is 1740. George II is on
the throne, but England’s remoter provinces remain largely a law unto
themselves. In Lancashire a grim discovery has been made: a squire’s wife,
Dolores Brockletower, lies in the woods above her home at Garlick Hall, her
throat brutally slashed. Called to the scene, Coroner Titus Cragg finds the
Brockletower household awash with rumor and suspicion. He enlists the help of
his astute young friend, doctor Luke Fidelis, to throw light on the case. But
this is a world in which forensic science is in its infancy, and policing
hardly exists. Embarking on their first gripping investigation, Cragg and
Fidelis are faced with the superstition of witnesses, obstruction by local
officials, and denunciations from the squire himself.
Though he battled for seven years to
marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a
son and her sharp intelligence and strong will alienate his old friends and
noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the
court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice, Bring
Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the Queen and her suitors
for adultery and treason. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to
bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of
conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the
poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without
a ferocious struggle. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his
natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's
head?
Mistress of death Francesca
Giordano—court poisoner to the House of Borgia—returns to confront an ancient
atrocity that threatens to extinguish the light of the Renaissance and plunge
the world into eternal darkness. As the enemies of Pope Alexander VI close in
and the papal court is forced to flee from Rome, Francesca joins forces with
her lover, the brilliant and ruthless Cesare Borgia to unravel a conspiracy
that strikes at the heart of Christendom. But when a shattering secret from her
past imperils her precarious hold on sanity, only Francesca’s own courage and
resolve can draw her back from the brink of madness to save all she values
most.
A Blaze of Glory takes us to the
action-packed Western Theater for a vivid re-creation of one of the war’s
bloodiest and most iconic engagements—the Battle of Shiloh. It’s the spring of
1862. The Confederate Army in the West teeters on the brink of collapse
following the catastrophic loss of Fort Donelson. Commanding general Albert
Sidney Johnston is forced to pull up stakes, abandon the critical city of
Nashville, and rally his troops in defense of the Memphis and Charleston
Railroad. Hot on Johnston’s trail are two of the Union’s best generals: the
relentless Ulysses Grant, fresh off his career-making victory at Fort Donelson,
and Don Carlos Buell. If their combined forces can crush Johnston’s army and
capture the railroad, the war in the West likely will be over. There’s just one
problem: Johnston knows of the Union plans, and is poised to launch an
audacious surprise attack on Grant’s encampment—a small settlement in
southwestern Tennessee anchored by a humble church named Shiloh.
Victorian London is a cesspool of
crime, and Scotland Yard has only twelve detectives—known as “The Murder
Squad”—to investigate thousands of murders every month. Created after the
Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure to capture Jack the Ripper, The
Murder Squad suffers rampant public contempt. They have failed their
citizens. But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own. . .
one of the twelve ...
When Walter Day, the squad’s newest
hire, is assigned the case of the murdered detective, he finds a strange
ally in the Yard’s first forensic pathologist, Dr. Bernard Kingsley. Together
they track the killer, who clearly is not finished with The Murder Squad . . .
but why?
London, 1811. The twisting streets
of riverside Wapping hold many an untold sin. Bounded by the ancient Ratcliffe
Highway and the modern wonder of the London Dock, shameful secrets are largely
hidden by the noise and glory of Trade. But now two families have fallen victim
to foul murder and John Harriott, magistrate of the Thames River Police Office,
must deliver revenge up to a terrified populace. His only hope is his senior
officer, Charles Horton. Harriott only recently came up with a word to describe
what it is that Horton does. It is detection. Plymouth, 1564. Young Billy
Ablass arrives from Oxford with the burning desire of all young men: the
getting and keeping of money. Captain Jack Hawkyns is about to set sail in a
ship owned by Queen Elizabeth herself, and Billy sees the promise of a better
life with a crew intent on gain and glory. But the kidnap of hundreds of human
souls in Africa is not the only cursed event to occur on England’s first
official slaving voyage. On a sun-blasted Florida islet, Billy too is to be
enslaved for the rest of his accursed days.
Lucy Derrick is a young woman of
good breeding and poor finances. After the death of her beloved father, she is
forced to maintain a shabby dignity as the unwanted boarder of her tyrannical
uncle, fending off marriage to a local mill owner. But just as she is on the
cusp of accepting a life of misery, events take a stunning turn when a handsome
stranger—the poet and notorious rake Lord Byron—arrives at her house, stricken
by what seems to be a curse, and with a cryptic message for Lucy. Suddenly her
unfortunate circumstances are transformed in ways at once astonishing and
seemingly impossible. With the world undergoing an industrial transformation,
and with England on the cusp of revolution, Lucy is drawn into a dangerous
conspiracy in which her life, and her country’s future, is in the balance.
Inexplicably finding herself at the center of cataclysmic events, Lucy is
awakened to a world once unknown to her: where magic and mortals collide, and
the forces of ancient nature and modern progress are at war for the soul of
England . . . and the world. The key to victory may be connected to a cryptic
volume whose powers of enchantment are unbounded. Now, challenged by ruthless
enemies with ancient powers at their command, Lucy must harness newfound
mystical skills to prevent catastrophe and preserve humanity’s future. And
enthralled by two exceptional men with designs on her heart, she must master
her own desires to claim the destiny she deserves.
JUNE 2012:
As Henry VIII draws his last breath,
two very different women, Jane Dudley, Viscountess of Lisle, and Frances Grey,
Marchioness of Dorset, face the prospect of a boy king, Edward VI. For Jane
Dudley, basking in the affection of her large family, the coming of a new king
means another move upward for her ambitious, able husband, John. For Frances
Grey, increasingly alienated from her husband and her brilliant but arrogant
daughter Lady Jane Grey, it means that she—and Lady Jane—are one step
closer to the throne of England. Then the young king falls deathly ill. Determined
to keep England under Protestant rule, he concocts an audacious scheme that
subverts his own father’s will. Suddenly, Jane Dudley and Frances Grey are
reluctantly bound together in a common cause—one that will test their
loyalties, their strength, and their faith, and that will change their lives
beyond measure.
India, 1857. Aged just twenty-one,
Lakshmi Bai, otherwise known as Manu, the widowed and recently deposed Rani of
Jhansi, finds herself embroiled in the developing Indian Mutiny. Torn between
leading Jhansi into battle or following the advice of her close friend and
confidante, Emma Hammond, a tragic succession of events is triggered as the
Mutiny comes to a head and Manu faces her destiny: one which will see her
crowned as India's queen of glory.
An unexpected letter brings
life-changing news in this suspenseful tale of family secrets and ties.
Canterbury, 1900. Olivia Fratton will scream if she hears the words 'Isabel's
wedding' one more time; she's struggling to cope with her little sister's
demands on their limited budget. But Olivia is not the only Fratton with
worries: Isabel, older brother Theo and the 'golden boy' of the family, Luke, all
have their own troubles. But these pale into insignificance when a letter is
delivered from someone none of the family ever expected to hear from again . .
.
The year is 92 B.C. Gordianus has
just turned eighteen and is about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime: a
far-flung journey to see the Seven Wonders of the World. Gordianus is not yet
called “the Finder”—but at each of the Seven Wonders, the wide-eyed young Roman
encounters a mystery to challenge the powers of deduction. Accompanying
Gordianus on his travels is his tutor, Antipater of Sidon, the world’s most
celebrated poet. But there is more to the apparently harmless old poet than
meets the eye. Before they leave Rome, Antipater fakes his own death and
travels under an assumed identity. Looming in the background are the first
rumblings of a political upheaval that will shake the entire Roman world.
Teacher and pupil journey to the fabled cities of Greece and Asia Minor, and
then to Babylon and Egypt. They attend the Olympic Games, take part in exotic
festivals, and marvel at the most spectacular constructions ever devised by
mankind. Along the way they encounter murder, witchcraft and ghostly hauntings.
Traveling the world for the first time, Gordianus discovers that amorous
exploration goes hand-in-hand with crime-solving. The mysteries of love are the
true wonders of the world, and at the end of the journey, an Eighth Wonder
awaits him in Alexandria. Her name is Bethesda.
Gaius Vinius is a reluctant
Praetorian Guard—the Emperor’s personal guard—and a man with a disastrous
marriage history. Flavia Lucilla is also in the imperial court, and she is
responsible not only for having created the ridiculous hairstyle worn by the
imperial ladies but for also making toupees for the balding and increasingly
paranoid emperor. The two of them are brought together in an unlikely manner—a
devastating fire in Rome—which then leads to a lifelong friendship. Together
they watch Domitian’s once talented rule unravel into madness and cruelty,
until the people closest to him conspire to delete him from history. As an
imperial bodyguard, Vinius then faces a tough decision.
Abilene, Kansas, 1871. Will Merritt is fiercely protective of the cattle trade that
made his father’s fortune. But Will and his friends are also drawn to Abilene’s
exotic Texastown district—so notorious that the mayor has hired famous gunman
Wild Bill Hickok to police its streets. Yet even with Hickok as marshal,
Abilene boils with deep divisions. Then, Will’s father reveals a stunning
secret that further challenges Abilene’s future, one that makes the Merritts
outcasts. And when Wild Bill’s tenure as marshal comes to a violent head, Will
realizes that everything—his family, his friends, and the only home he’s ever
known—could be gone in an instant, leaving only an empty wilderness once again.
1348. Abandoned and
raised in a convent, Alice Perrers rose from obscure beginnings to become the
powerful, infamous mistress of Edward III. After she refuses to take the veil,
a chance meeting with royalty changes everything: kindly Queen Philippa, deeply
in love with her husband but gravely ill, chooses Alice as a lady-in-waiting.
But Alice is torn when her vibrant spirit captures the king’s
interest...and leads her to a betrayal she never intended. In Edward’s private
chambers, Alice discovers the pleasures and paradoxes of her position. She is
the queen’s confidante, the king’s lover, yet she can rely only on herself. It
is a divided role she was destined to play, and she vows to play it until the
bitter end. For when her detractors voice their hatred, and accusations of
treason swirl around her, who will stand by Alice then?
It is 1942 and the world is at war.
It is a war that has already shattered families and devastated countries. But
for some, it will also mean the greatest of adventures. In a burns hospital in
Sussex, a beautiful young singer performs to a ward full of burned and maimed
soldiers. Saba is captivating and one pilot, Dom, shudders as her gaze turns
his way. He can't bear her to see his scars but resolves to write to her once
they have healed. Saba heads to London to audition for ENSA. London is
recovering from the darkest days of the Blitz and everything is broken or taped
up. Dom tracks Saba down at the Theatre Royal and they spend a heady few days
together. The world is on the brink of enormous change, and as they try to stop
themselves falling in love - every girl knows you don't fall for a pilot, as he
won't make it home - Saba is posted to Egypt to entertain the troops. But their
paths will cross again...Saba's journey will take her to the fading glamour of
Alexandria and the heat and decadence of Turkey. On the glamorous Middle
Eastern social circuit, Saba rubs shoulders with double agents and diplomats,
movie stars and smugglers. Some want her voice, some her friendship, and some
the secrets she is perfectly placed to discover.
Only a few years before becoming a
famous actress and an icon for her generation, a fifteen year-old Louise Brooks
leaves Wichita to make it big in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is
accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone who is neither mother nor
friend. Cora Carlisle is a complicated but traditional woman with her own
reasons for making the trip. She has no idea what she’s in for: Young Louise,
already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous blunt bangs and black bob,
is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately,
the five weeks they spend together will change their lives forever. For Cora,
New York holds the promise of discovery that might prove an answer to the
question at the center of her being, and even as she does her best to watch
over Louise in a strange and bustling city, she embarks on her own mission. And
while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, it liberates her in a way she
could not have imagined. Over the course of the summer, Cora’s eyes are opened
to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the
possibilities for being fully alive.
Juliana St. John is the
daughter of a prosperous knight in Marlborough, who has since passed away.
Though her future seems charted for her to marry the son of her father's
business partner, a set of circumstances occur that set her on a God-directed
course toward the court of Henry the Eighth and his last wife, Kateryn Parr.
Sir Thomas Seymour, the brother of Jane Seymour, late mother to the current
heir, Prince Edward, returns to Wiltshire to tie up his business with Juliana's
father's estate, and as he does, chances upon her reading in the local church.
He sees instantly that she would fit into the household of the woman he loves,
Kateryn Parr. Her mother agrees to have her placed in Parr's household for
"finishing" and Juliana goes, though perhaps reluctantly, for she
knows a secret. She has been given the gift of prophecy and in one of her
visions she has seen Sir Thomas shredding the dress of the king's daughter, the
lady Elizabeth, to perilous consequence. As Juliana accompanies Parr to court,
Henry's devout sixth queen raises the stakes for all reformers. Their support
of Anne Askew puts them in life-threatening jeopardy, as does the queen's
desire to direct her husband's, and the realm's, direction and belief. In the
end, Juliana must choose between love and honor, personal fulfillment and
sacrifice; she ultimately learns the secret that will undo everything she
thought she knew about her own life.
Narrated by a eunuch whose
allegiance to Iran is second only to his loyalty to the powerful princess he
serves, Equal of the Sun is a tale of power, loyalty, and love in the royal
court of sixteenth century Iran. Princess Pari, who knows more about the inner
workings of the court than almost anyone, is in possession of an incredible
tapestry of secrets and information and when her father, the Shah, dies
suddenly leaving a vacuum of power, the princess takes over the royal court
until her brother can come to the capital and be crowned as the next shah. The
intricate dance of negotiations that follows reveals a power struggle of epic
proportions.
Parker weaves a tale of adventure
and longing as he charts one hundred and fifty years in the life and death of
an island and its inhabitants— the descendants of Theodosia Burr Alston and
those of the freed man whose family would be forever tethered to hers. It’s a
tale of pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, that
takes place on a tiny island battered by storms, infested with mosquitoes, and
cut off from the world—as difficult to get to as it is impossible to leave for
those who call it home. From Theodosia’s capture at sea to the passionate lives
of her great-great-great-granddaughters to the tender story of the black man
who cares for them all his days, this is an inspired novel about love, trust,
and the often tortuous bonds of family and community.
Before Versailles is the luscious,
sweeping story of the young Louis XIV in his first year as king of France. Told
in the alternating perspectives of the young king and his first love, the woman
who would become his mistress, Karleen Koen's newest weaves a portrait of court
and country in turmoil with the legends of this colorful period in history,
including that of the mysterious man in the iron mask.
On November 9, 1938— Kristallnacht—
the Nazis unleash a night of terror across Germany that paves the way for
Hitler’ s “ Final Solution.” Meanwhile, the Japanese Imperial Army continues to
rampage through China and tighten its stranglehold on Shanghai, a besieged and
divided city that becomes the last haven for thousands of desperate European
Jews. Dr. Franz Adler, an Austrian Jew and renowned surgeon, is swept up in the
wave of anti-Semitic violence washing over Vienna and flees to China with his
daughter. There, at a Shanghai refugee hospital, Franz meets an enigmatic
nurse, Soon Yi “ Sunny” Mah. The chemistry between them is intense and
immediate, until Sunny’s life is shattered when a drunken Japanese sailor
attempts to rape her and murders her father. The danger escalates for Shanghai’
s Jewish refugee community as the Japanese ally themselves militarily with
Germany and attack Pearl Harbor. Soon, the Japanese overrun the European
enclaves within Shanghai. Facing starvation, disease and the threat of
internment— or worse— Franz struggles to keep the refugee hospital open while
protecting his own family and fights to outwit the Nazis and save the city’ s
Jewish community from a terrible fate.
Kane’s brilliant novel begins in the
Thracian village to which Spartacus has returned after escaping from life as an
auxiliary in the Roman army. Jealous of his attachment to Ariadne, a Dionysian
priestess, the Thracian king betrays Spartacus to the Romans who take him,
along with Ariadne, into captivity and to the school of gladiators at Capua.
Against the background of the unbelievable brutality of gladiatorial life,
Spartacus and Crixus the Gaul plan the audacious overthrow of their Roman
masters. They escape and flee to Vesuvius, where they recruit and train an army
of escaped slaves that will have to face the conquerors of the known world, the
most successful deadly army in all of history in a battle that will set in
motion the legend that is Spartacus.
Orphaned after the death of her
mother, eighteen-year-old Esther Chambers heads west in search of her only
living relative. In the lawless frontier town of Century, Oregon, she’s met by
her distant cousin, a laconic cattle rancher named Ferris Pickett. Pick leads
her to a tiny cabin by a small lake, and there she begins her new life as a
homesteader. If she can hold out for five years, the land will join Pick’s
impressive spread. But this town on the edge of civilization is in the midst of
a very real range war. There’s plenty of land, but somehow it is not enough for
the ranchers. Small incidents of violence swiftly escalate, and the bloodshed
starts to threaten the town’s future. Meanwhile, Esther finds her sympathies
divided between Pick and Ben Cruff, sworn enemy of the cattlemen. As her
passion for Ben and her land grows, she begins to see how she can’t be loyal to
both.
In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger
Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had
dedicated his extraordinary life to improving plight of oppressed peoples
around the world—especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the
Amazon—but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed
in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern
Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and
execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement’s trial and eventual
hanging tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights
work wasn’t fully reexamined until the 1960s. Vargas Llosa brings this complex
character to life as no other writer can and tackles a controversial man whose
story has long been neglected.
In the thick of a blizzard, a town
priest discovers he's been poisoned. As numbness creeps up his body, he summons
the last of his strength, scratching a sign in the frost that will lead the
town hangman, his daughter, the physician, and the priest's feisty recently
arrived sister on a scavenger hunt for the treasure of the Knights Templars.
But the priest's murderer is already on their trail, and he's not the only one
after the legendary fortune#58; a dark monk is not far behind, and a band of
thieves is roving the countryside, attacking solitary travelers and spreading
panic. The race is on, and the stakes are high.
No one believed I was destined for
greatness. So begins Isabella’s story,in this evocative, vividly imagined novel
about one of history’s most famous and controversial queens—the warrior who
united a fractured country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to
the Inquisition, and the visionary who sent Columbus to discover a New World.
Young Isabella is barely a teenager when she and her brother are taken
from their mother’s home to live under the watchful eye of their half-brother,
King Enrique, and his sultry, conniving queen. There, Isabella is thrust into
danger when she becomes an unwitting pawn in a plot to dethrone Enrique.
Suspected of treason and held captive, she treads a perilous path, torn between
loyalties, until at age seventeen she suddenly finds herself heiress of
Castile, the largest kingdom in Spain. Plunged into a deadly conflict to secure
her crown, she is determined to wed the one man she loves yet who is forbidden
to her—Fernando, prince of Aragon. As they unite their two realms under “one
crown, one country, one faith,” Isabella and Fernando face an impoverished
Spain beset by enemies. With the future of her throne at stake, Isabella
resists the zealous demands of the inquisitor Torquemada even as she is seduced
by the dreams of an enigmatic navigator named Columbus. But when the Moors of the
southern domain of Granada declare war, a violent, treacherous battle against
an ancient adversary erupts, one that will test all of Isabella’s resolve, her
courage, and her tenacious belief in her destiny.
Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the story
of a nineteenth-century street urchin named Jaffy Brown. Following an incident
with an escaped tiger, Jaffy goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed
importer of exotic animals, alongside Tim, a good but sometimes spitefully
competitive boy. Thus begins a long, close friendship fraught with ambiguity
and rivalry. Mr. Jamrach recruits the two boys to capture a fabled dragon
during the course of a three-year whaling expedition. Onboard, Jaffy and Tim
enjoy the rough brotherhood of sailors and the brutal art of whale hunting.
They even succeed in catching the reptilian beast. But when the ship’s whaling
venture falls short of expectations, the crew begins to regard the dragon
seething with feral power in its cage as bad luck, a feeling that is cruelly
reinforced when a violent storm sinks the ship. Drifting across an increasingly
hallucinatory ocean, the survivors, including Jaffy and Tim, are forced to
confront their own place in the animal kingdom. Masterfully told, wildly atmospheric,
and thundering with tension, Jamrach’s Menagerie is a truly haunting novel
about friendship, sacrifice, and survival.
The Queen’s Lover begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the
dashing Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen first meets the
mesmerizing nineteen-year-old Dauphine, Marie Antoinette, wife of the shy,
reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter
launches a lifelong romance that will span the course of the French Revolution.
The affair begins in friendship, however, and Fersen quickly becomes a devoted
companion to the entire royal family. As he roams the halls of Versailles and
visits the private haven of Le Petit Trianon, Fersen discovers the deepest
secrets of the court, even learning the startling, erotic details of Marie
Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI. But the events of the American Revolution
tear Fersen away. Moved by the cause, he joins French troops in the fight for
American independence. When he returns, he finds France on the brink of
disintegration. After the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is moved from
Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their
young children (Marie-Thérèse and the Dauphin—whom many suspect is in fact
Fersen’s son). The failed attempt leads to a moregrueling imprisonment, and the
family spends its excruciating final days captive before the King and Queen meet
the guillotine.
1855, Lucknow. As tensions simmer in
the heat of repressive colonial India, a prince of Avadh and an English woman
defy their societies’ prejudices to fall in love. But in a world where private
happiness is at the mercy of wider events, even as Salim and Rachael are drawn
closer together, their privileged lives are about to be torn apart. Trouble
begins when the British annex Avadh and banish the rightful king. Determined to
recover what is rightfully his, Salim seizes the chance to fight back when a
small sepoy mutiny flares into bloody rebellion against British rule. As unrest
spreads across the subcontinent, the contested ancient city of Lucknow proves
one of the most dangerous places to be. Torn between their loyalties to each
other, their families and the opposing sides that threaten to raze Lucknow to
the ground, can Salim and Rachael’s love prove strong enough to rise above the
devastation surrounding them, and survive together to a world beyond?
Barcelona,1957. It is Christmas, and
Daniel Sempere and his wife Bea have much to celebrate. They have a beautiful
new baby son named Julian, and their close friend Fermín Romero de Torres is
about to be wed. But their joy is eclipsed when a mysterious stranger visits
the Sempere bookshop and threatens to divulge a terrible secret that has been buried
for two decades in the city’s dark past. His appearance plunges Fermín and
Daniel into a dangerous adventure that will take them back to the 1940’s and
the dark early days of Franco’s dictatorship. The terrifying events of that
time launch them on a journey fraught with jealousy, suspicion, vengeance, and
lies, a search for the truth that will put into peril everything they love and
ultimately transform their lives.
An immortal woman learning firsthand
that the heart wants what the heart wants…no matter how high the stakes. Fans
of The Taker can finally indulge in their next juicy fix with the second book
of the trilogy, The Reckoning. In this gripping, pulse-pounding supernatural
sequel, discover what happens to Lanny, Luke, Adair—and Jonathan. The Reckoning
picks up where The Taker leaves off, following Lanny on her path to
redemption—and creating a whole new level of suspense.
Amsterdam, 1912. When
fifteen-year-old Minke Van Aisma travels to Amsterdam to care for the dying
wife of a wealthy man, she has no idea what adventures await her. Within hours
of his wife’s death, her employer proposes marriage, and the couple sets sail
for the oil fields of Argentina. They settle in the rough coastal town of
Comodoro Rivadavia, where Minke eventually learns that her husband is not a
successful trader, but a morphine producer. The future that seemed so bright
takes an even darker turn the morning their toddler son, Zeff, is kidnapped.
Soon after, morphine production is outlawed and her husband must immediately
immigrate to New York. Already pregnant with their daughter, Minke has little
choice but to wait for the new baby’s arrival, then travel to America, leaving
her lost firstborn behind forever.
India, 1530. Humayun, the newly
crowned second Moghul emperor, is a fortunate man. His father, Babur, has left
him wealth, glory, and an empire that stretches a thousand miles south of the
Khyber Pass; he must now build on his legacy, and make the Moghuls worthy of
their legendary forebear, Tamburlaine. But, unbeknownst to him, Humayun is
already in grave danger. His half-brothers are plotting against him; they doubt
that he has the strength, the will, the brutality needed to command the Moghul
armies and lead them to still-greater glories. Soon Humayun will be locked in a
terrible battle: not only for his crown, not only for his life, but for the
existence of the very empire itself.
It’s 1663 in the tiny, hardscrabble
Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now present-day southern Manhattan. Orphan
children are going missing, and among those looking into the mysterious state
of affairs are a quick-witted twenty-two-year-old trader, Blandine von
Couvering, herself an orphan, and a dashing British spy named Edward Drummond.
Suspects abound, including the governor’s wealthy nephew, a green-eyed
aristocrat with decadent tastes; an Algonquin trapper who may be possessed by a
demon that turns people into cannibals; and the colony’s own corrupt and
conflicted orphanmaster. Both the search for the killer and Edward and
Blandine’s newfound romance are endangered, however, when Blandine is accused
of being a witch and Edward is sentenced to hang for espionage. Meanwhile, war
looms as the English king plans to wrest control of the colony.
Venice, 1580. Legendary architect
Andrea Palladio is dying. His last act is to hide the Quattro Libri, four books
written in his own hand, which not only codify his architectural genius, but
also contain a dangerous secret. 430 years later, architect Andrea di Pietro is
lecturing at the University of Venice when she is sent a mysterious book. When
she returns it to the Library of San Marco she is arrested, for the book is one
of the stolen Quattro Libri. With the help of art fraud officer Marcantonio
Rezzonico, Andrea goes on a quest for the remaining three books, a search which
takes her all the way from the great villas of the Veneto to the basilicas of
Istanbul encountering many obstacles along the way. On her journey Andrea not
only discovers her true love of architecture, but also the story of Palladio
and the four extraordinary men who helped him hide the Quattro Libri. She
begins to realize that the secret they kept could be the salvation of Venice
herself.
In 2011 Freya Dane, a Ph.D.
candidate in archaeology, arrives on the ancient Scottish island of Findnar.
After years of estrangement from her father, himself an archaeologist who
recently died, Freya has come to find out what she can about his work. As she
reads through his research notes, she sees he learned a great deal about the
Viking and Christian history of the island. But what he found only scratches
the surface of the discoveries Freya is about to make. In 800 A.D. a Pictish
girl named Signy loses her entire family during a Viking raid. She is taken in
by the surviving members of the Christian community on Findnar, but when she
falls deeply in love with a Viking boy, she is cast out. She eventually becomes
a nun and finds herself at the center of the clash between the island’s three
religious cultures. The tragedy of her story is that, in the end, she must
choose among her adopted faith, her native religion, and the man she loves.
Centuries apart, Freya and Signy are each on the verge of life-changing events
that will bring present-day and Viking-era Scotland together.
When young Robert Dudley, an earl’s
son, meets squire’s daughter Amy Robsart, it is love at first sight. They marry
despite parental misgivings, but their passion quickly fades, and the ambitious
Dudley returns to court. Swept up in the turmoil of Tudor politics,
Dudley is imprisoned in the Tower. Also a prisoner is Dudley’s childhood
playmate, the princess Elizabeth. In the shadow of the axe, their passion
ignites. When Elizabeth becomes queen, rumors rage that Dudley means to free
himself of Amy in order to wed her. And when Amy is found dead in unlikely
circumstances, suspicion falls on Dudley—and the Queen…
When Great War veteran Laurence
Bartram arrives in Easton Deadall, he is struck by the beauty of the place: a
crumbling manor, a venerable church, and a memorial to the village’s soldiers,
almost all of whom died in one bloody battle. Now peace prevails, and the rest
of England is newly alight with hope, but Easton Deadall remains haunted by
tragedy—as does the Easton family. In 1911, five-year-old Kitty disappeared
from her bed and has not been seen in thirteen years; only her fragile mother
still believes she is alive. While Laurence is a guest of the manor, a young
maid vanishes in a sinister echo of Kitty’s disappearance. And when a body is
discovered in the manor’s ancient church, Laurence is drawn into the grounds’
forgotten places, where deadly secrets lie in wait.
Set in the tenements of lower
Manhattan in 1871, The Virgin Cure is the story of Moth, a twelve-year-old girl
“from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the
man who broke her heart." Abandoned by her father and sold into servitude
by her mother, Moth struggles to survive alone in the murky world of the
Bowery, a wild and lawless enclave filled with thieves, beggars, sideshow
freaks, and prostitutes. She eventually meets Miss Everett, the proprietor of
an “Infant School,” a brothel that caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for
"willing and clean" companions—desirable young virgins like Moth.
Moth also finds friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician struggling
against the powerful forces of injustice, who teaches Moth to question and
observe the world around her. The doctor hopes to protect Moth from falling
prey to a terrible myth known as the "virgin cure"—the tragic belief
that deflowering a "fresh maid" can heal the incurable and
tainted—that has destroyed the lives of other Bowery girls. Ignored by society,
unprotected by the law, Moth dreams of independence. But there's a high price
to pay for freedom, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie
Street.
JULY 2012:
An important discovery puts Roger
the Chapman's life in danger. In the autumn of 1483, Roger goes on an errand of
mercy to Hereford, where he is caught up in the Duke of Buckingham's rebellion
against the new king, Richard III. Roger takes refuge in Tintern Abbey, but on
his return to Bristol, a murder and a series of house robberies lead him to the
eventual discovery of the treasure stolen from the abbey on the night he was
there. It also means great danger, not only for himself, but a member of his
family . . .
The story of one Englishwoman’s
remarkable relationship with an Indian princess at the height of the British
Empire . . . India, 1849.
When Emma Hammond is left penniless in India after her husband is murdered by
thieves, little does she know that she will soon be residing in one of the
richest palaces in the country. Just six years earlier, back in England, Emma
was implicated in the death of a housekeeper and sentenced to ten years exile
in India. Now, unable to return home, she sits before Manikarnika, known to her
intimates as Manu, who has promised her vast wealth – if she can teach the wild
young girl how to behave like a princess . . .
One afternoon in 1839, Emily Lowry’s
husband vanishes from Wreckers’ Cay, an isolated island off the coast of Key
West where he tends to the lighthouse. As days stretch into months, Emily has
no choice but take charge of Wrecker’s Cay and her husband’s duties tending the
light to support her three children—and a fourth on the way. Unexpected help
arrives when a runaway slave named Andrew washes up on their beach. At first,
Emily is intensely wary of this strange, charming man, whose very presence
there is highly illegal. But Andrew proves himself an enormous help and soon
wins the hearts of the Lowry family. And—far from the outside world and
society’s rules—his place in Emily’s life, as steadfast now as the light, will
forever change their futures. When Emily’s family is ripped apart once again,
she faces untold hardships that test her love and determination and show how
the passionate love of a defiant, determined woman can overcome any obstacle.
London, 1501. In a time of political
unrest, Varina Westcott, a young widow and candle maker for court and church,
agrees to perform a clandestine service for Queen Elizabeth of York, wife of
Henry VII. The queen’s eldest child and heir to the throne, newly married
Prince Arthur, has died suddenly under mysterious circumstances. Elizabeth
wants Varina and royal aid Nicholas Sutton to travel into the Welsh wilderness
to investigate the death. But as the couple unearths one unsettling clue after
another, they begin to fear that the conspiracy they’re confronting is far more
ambitious and treacherous than even the queen imagined.
An
ambitious novel that spans decades and continents, The Things We Cherished
tells the story of Charlotte Gold and Jack Harrington, two fiercely independent
attorneys who find themselves slowly falling for one another while working to
defend the brother of a Holocaust hero against allegations of World War II era
war crimes. The defendant, wealthy financier Roger Dykmans, mysteriously
refuses to help in his own defense, revealing only that proof of his innocence
lies within an intricate timepiece last seen in Nazi Germany. As the narrative
moves from Philadelphia to Germany, Poland, and Italy, we are given glimpses of
the lives that the anniversary clock has touched over the past century, and
learn about the love affair that turned a brother into a traitor.
Boston, 1765: The British Crown
imposes onerous taxes on the colonies, and intrigue swirls around firebrands
like Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty. But for Ethan Kaille, a
conjurer who makes his living tracking down thieves, politics is for
others...until he is asked to recover a necklace worn by the murdered daughter
of a prominent family. Already a man with a dark past, Ethan can ill
afford to turn this case down, lest his livelihood be forfeit. But taking the
case means facing the most powerful members of Boston’s high society and its
seamy underbelly, including the beautiful and deadly Sephira Pryce. And behind
it all, another conjurer of enormous power waits. Ethan’s adversary has already
killed in the service of powerful masters, people for whom others are mere
pawns. Ethan is in way over his head, and he knows it. He is hopelessly
overmatched by the deadly spellcraft of someone he cannot even see.
Fourteen-year-old Catherine de’
Medici arrives in Marseilles to marry Henry, Duke of Orleans, second son of the
King of France. The brokenhearted Catherine has left her true love in Italy,
forced into trading her future happiness for marriage into the French royal
family. Amid the glittering fêtes and banquets of the most immoral court
in sixteenth-century Europe, the reluctant bride becomes a passionate but
unwanted wife. Humiliated and unloved, Catherine spies on Henry and his lover,
the infamous Diane de Poitiers. Tortured by what she sees, Catherine becomes
consumed by a ruthless ambition destined to make her the most despised woman in
France: the dream that one day the French crown will be worn by a Medici heir.
. . .
Enter a world of prostitutes and
Samurais in 12th century Japan. 'This is about what you must do to keep our
honour.' My father enclosed his arms around me, put his head against my middle
and sobbed with no sounds. Kozaisho, the Fifth-Daughter of a lowly farmer,
feels her world shattering when she is sold by her father in exchange for land.
Heartbroken, her one ray of light comes when a series of auspicious omens
allows her to be trained in the skills and ancient warrior-arts of the legendary
samurai. This doesn't protect her from being banished to the Village of
Outcasts when she's old enough, however, and forced to become a Woman-for-Play.
There she realises other weapons are needed in the daily fight for survival,
and using her wit and intelligence, she captivates everyone with her
mesmerising storytelling abilities. Kozaisho is beginning to find some peace in
her life, until a deranged priest, who has tormented her since she was a child,
murders her lover. Armed with her tongue and her sword, she dedicates her
future to avenging the death. But little does she realise she is carving out an
entirely new fate for herself...
In Heading Out to Wonderful,
an attractive and enigmatic stranger—Charlie Beale, a loner, recently home from
the war in Europe—wanders into the town of Brownsburg, a sleepy village of only
a few hundred people nestled in the Valley of Virginia. He brings with him two
suitcases: one contains all his worldly possessions, including a set of
butcher’s knives; the other is full of money. Charlie quickly finds a job at
the local butcher shop and through his work there meets all the townspeople, most
notably Sam Haislett, the five-year-old son of the shop’s owner, and Sylvan
Glass, the beautiful, eccentric teenage bride of the town’s richest man. What
no one anticipates is how the interaction of these three people will alter the
town forever, and how the passion that flares between Charlie and Sylvan will
mark young Sam for life.
As a young girl growing up in Spain,
Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an
ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de León. And in handsome twin brothers
Ramón and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. She
marries Ramón, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a
remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island. Ana faces
unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed
countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos.
But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her
livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose
backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda’s slaves, whose richly drawn
stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may
be her destiny—a once-forbidden love—she will sacrifice nearly everything to
keep hold of the land that has become her true home.
The pursuit of the Virgin Queen was
the greatest hunt in history. For more than half a century Elizabeth I was
pursued by kings, princes, and nobles from around the world. Yet not one of
these illustrious suitors managed to secure their quarry. Why? Was she haunted
by the six marriages of her father, Henry VIII? Was her traumatic early love
affair with Thomas Seymour, effectively her stepfather, to blame? Or was
Elizabeth simply in love with the chase? During the marriage negotiations,
which spanned half a century, romance blended with diplomacy as suitor after
suitor endeavored to ally himself to her in the most intimate of treaties.
Throughout it all Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was the most persistent of
the suitors to the Queen, and although he never won her, he was dearly loved by
Elizabeth all her life.
Thessaloniki, 1917. As Dimitri Komninos is born, a fire sweeps through the
thriving multicultural city, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims live side by
side. It is the first of many catastrophic events that will change forever this
city, as war, fear and persecution begin to divide its people. Five years
later, young Katerina escapes to Greece when her home in Asia Minor is
destroyed by the Turkish army. Losing her mother in the chaos, she finds
herself on a boat to an unknown destination. For the next eighty years, the
lives of Dimitri and Katerina become entwined, with each other and with the
story of the city itself. Through their eyes, we experience the changing
landscape of Thessaloniki, the persecution of its people, Nazi collaboration,
civil war, and economic collapse. Thessaloniki, 2007. A young
Anglo-Greek hears the life story of his grandparents for the first time and
realizes he has a decision to make. For many decades, his grandparents have
looked after the memories and treasures of people who have been forcibly driven
from their beloved city. Should he become their new custodian? Should he stay
or should he go?
A chasm lies between Rahab and her
beloved Sala that can never be crossed. Though Sala rescues young Rahab
from slave bandits, he knows he can never fall in love with a Canaanite. His
belief in the One True God prevents them from a future together. Rahab's beauty
gains royal notice, and she is selected to entice the King during the annual
sacred marriage reenactment praising their pagan god, Baal. But when the King
suffers a heart attack and dies, Rahab is saved from the humiliating act. Her
despair drives her curiosity about Sala's One True God. Could He accept her . .
. even love her? Deceit and pride stand in the way of Rahab's happy ending.
Only God can use these events to tell the larger story of forgiveness and
redemption.
The violet industry is booming in
1898, and a Hudson Valley farm owned by the Fletcher family is turning a
generous profit for its two oldest brothers. But Ida Fletcher, married to the
black sheep youngest brother, has taken up wet nursing to help pay the bills,
and her daughter, Alice, has left school to work. As they risk losing their
share of the farm, the two women make increasingly great sacrifices for their
family’s survival, sacrifices that will set them against one another in a
lifelong struggle for honesty and forgiveness. Vivid and compelling, A Violet
Season is the story of an unforgettable mother-daughter journey in a time when
women were just waking to their own power and independence.
Marshall Stone was a confident,
cocksure pilot when his B-17 bomber was shot down in 1944, and he had to rely
solely on the help of the French Resistance to evade the Nazis. But after the
war, Marshall returned to America, raised a family, and became a successful
airline pilot, never stopping to look back. Now, in 1980, facing forced
retirement, he returns to France and finds himself drawn back in time, to
memories of the crash, to the long months of hiding. Haunted by the war and the
sacrifice of his saviors--especially the young girl in the blue beret, who
guided him through occupied Paris--Marshall searches for the people who helped
him escape, and discovers the astonishing truth about them.
September 1919:20 year-old Tristan
Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian
Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian’s brother Will during the Great War
but in 1917, Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a
conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought
shame and dishonour on the Bancroft family. But the letters are not the real
reason for Tristan’s visit. He holds a secret deep in his soul. One that he is
desperate to unburden himself of to Marian, if he can only find the courage. As
they stroll through the streets of a city still coming to terms with the end of
the war, he recalls his friendship with Will, from the training ground at
Aldershot to the trenches of Northern France, and speaks of how the intensity
of their friendship brought him from brief moments of happiness and
self-discovery to long periods of despair and pain.
Berlin,
August 1936. As the host of the Summer Olympic Games, Adolf Hitler and the
Nazis are determined to show off the superior new Reich they have built.
World-weary British journalist Richard Denham sees the brutality behind the
carefully staged imagery and is determined to report the truth. His view of
Hitler and his henchmen is shared by American swimmer Eleanor Emerson.
Outspoken and rebellious, the beautiful socialite got herself expelled from the
the U.S. team en route to the Games. Now, thanks to her wealthy family’s
connections, she’s a columnist covering the competition for newspapers back
home. While Berlin welcomes the world, the Nazi capital becomes a
terrifying place for Richard and Eleanor. A chance meeting at a reception
thrown by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels will lead them into the center of
a treacherous game involving the Gestapo and the British Secret Intelligence
Service. At stake: a mysterious dossier that threatens to destroy the
leadership of the Third Reich.
When the orphaned Daiyu leaves her
home in the provinces to seek shelter with her cousins in Beijing, she is drawn
into a world of opulent splendor presided over by the ruthless, scheming Xifeng
and the prim, repressed Baochai. As she learns the secrets behind their
glittering façades, she is tangled in a web of intrigue reaching all the way to
the Emperor's Palace, and finds herself no longer able to distinguish friend
from foe. From the petty gossip of the servants' quarters to the political
turmoil that will overthrow the dynasty and plunge the once-mighty family into
grinding poverty, The Red Chamber is a sweeping portrait of
three women whose lives are transformed by the power of friendship and the
force of history in a world where love and duty tear them apart.
At age twelve, Sira
Quiroga swept the atelier floors. By fourteen, she began her apprenticeship as
a seamstress, and within a few years was able to stitch fine fabric into
breathtaking creations. Now with the Spanish civil war brewing in Madrid, Sira
says goodbye to her mother and follows her lover to Morocco, but soon finds
herself abandoned, penniless, and heartbroken. Sira turns to her gift for
creating exquisite clothes. As the great powers are pulled into a second world
war, Sira returns to Madrid, where she assumes a new identity to embark upon a
dangerous undertaking: becoming embroiled in the half-lit world of espionage
and political conspiracy, rife with love, intrigue, and betrayal.
Just
outside London behind a tall stone wall stands Lake House, a private asylum for
genteel women of a delicate nature. In the winter of 1859, recently-married
Anna Palmer becomes its newest arrival, tricked by her husband into leaving her
home, incarcerated against her will and declared hysterical and unhinged. With
no doubts as to her sanity, Anna is convinced that she will be released as soon
as she can tell her story. But Anna quickly learns that liberty will not come
easily. And the longer she remains at Lake House, the more she realizes that --
like the ethereal bridge over the asylum's lake -- nothing is as it appears.
Locked alone in her room, she begins to experience strange visions and memories
that may lead her to the truth about her past, herself, and to freedom - or
lead her so far into the recesses of her mind that she may never escape… Set in
Victorian England, as superstitions collide with a new psychological
understanding, this elegant, emotionally suspenseful debut novel is a tale of
self-discovery, secrets, and search for the truth in a world where the line
between madness and sanity seems perilously fine.
When Elizabeth
Endicott arrives in Aleppo, Syria she has a diploma from Mount Holyoke, a crash
course in nursing, and only the most basic grasp of the Armenian
language. The year is 1915 and she has volunteered on behalf of the
Boston-based Friends of Armenia to help deliver food and medical aid to
refugees of the Armenian genocide. There Elizabeth becomes friendly with
Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant
daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo and travels south into Egypt to join
the British army, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that
he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so
different from the wife he lost. Fast forward to the present day, where we meet
Laura Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her
grandparents' ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed "The Ottoman
Annex," Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much thought.
But when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a newspaper photo of
Laura's grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a
journey back through her family's history that reveals love, loss - and a
wrenching secret that has been buried for generations.
The marriage of Queen Victoria
and Prince Albert produced nine children—five of them princesses, all trained
for the role of marriage to future monarchs. However, the fourth princess,
Louise—later the duchess of Argyll—became known by the court as “the wild one.”
She fought the constraints placed on her brothers and sisters. She broke with
tradition by marrying outside of the elite circle of European royals at a time
when no child of the English throne had wed a commoner in 300 years. Some said
she married for love. Others whispered of scandal covered up by the Crown. In
fact, many years after Louise’s death, a civil lawsuit claimed that the teenage
princess secretly gave birth to a baby boy out of wedlock. One Henry Locock
sought to prove through DNA evidence that his grandfather was Louise’s child,
delivered by Queen Victoria’s gynecologist then secretly adopted by the
doctor’s young son and his wife, thereby avoiding scandal and preserving the
line of succession to the throne. But the mysteries and drama involving
Louise’s life don’t stop there...This is her story.
AUGUST 2012:
1649. England has been torn asunder
by a civil war that has pitted Parliamentarians against Royalists. Captain Kit
Faulkner, bound to the Royalist cause, has been living in exile for the past
four years. Faulkner must now support himself with the tiny rump of the Royal
Navy that remains loyal. But his loyalties are torn, partly by the desire of
his old patron, Sir Henry Mainwaring, who wishes to return home, and partly by
the predatory nature of Prince Charles, who has his eyes on the beautiful
Katherine Villiers .
London, 1914. A killer is at liberty
in the dark alleys of the city. The cadavers of his victims all have one thing
in common: there is no blood in their bodies. As the killer's reign of terror
continues, Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Silas Quinn finds his suspicions
focusing on the members of an exclusive gentleman's club . . . Atmospheric and
macabre, Summon Up the Blood takes the reader on a disturbing yet fascinating
journey through London's aristocratic watering holes, seedy brothels and
shadowy underworld in the turbulent months leading up to World War I.
The tenth gripping mystery to
feature Ursula Blanchard, special aide to Queen Elizabeth I. Happily married to
her third husband, Ursula Blanchard is rudely shaken on receipt of a
threatening letter from the exiled Anne Percy, Countess of Northumberland,
whose treasonous plot against Elizabeth I, Ursula helped foil a few months
previously. Ursula dismisses the Countess's letter as idle threats, but then a
series of strange events rocks Ursula's household - and Ursula herself is
accused of witchcraft. Could Anne Percy really be orchestrating a plot against
Ursula from her exile in the Netherlands And, if so, how can Ursula prove it
before she is hanged as a witch?
A stirring and tempestuous First
World War saga - the second instalment in the Leonora Trilogy. 1916. The
remnants of the Serbian army are holed up in the Greek city of Salonika.
Working as a volunteer with the Red Cross, feisty young Englishwoman Leonora
Malham Brown has secretly become the lover of their colonel, the dashing Sasha
Malkovic. Meanwhile, Leo's fiancé Tom, engulfed in the horrors of the Somme,
discovers a shocking secret about Leo's brother, Ralph. And Leo herself is
keeping a secret from Sasha . . . Tragedy and heartbreak will follow before Leo
has a chance of happiness.
A young knight must ward off
temptation, if he is to marry his true love . . .
1355. When seventeen-year-old
Wulfstan Wynstede is chosen to join the army of his greatest hero, Prince Edward,
later known as the Black Prince, he distinguishes himself but sustains a bad
injury at the Battle of Poitiers. Receiving a knighthood and returning to
Berkhamsted Castle, England, Wulfstan falls in love with Beulah, a pretty,
devout girl, but her father demands a formal betrothal for four years before
they can marry. Can their love sustain them or will Wulfstan be led astray by
the many temptations that face a young knight?
It is 612 AD and Aelric—senator of
the Roman Empire, fresh from a bloodbath in Egypt—is forced to divert the
Imperial galley to Athens. He finds a demoralized and corrupt provincial city
threatened by an army rumored to contain twenty million starving barbarians.
Not to mention an explosive religious dispute, an unexplained corpse, and hints
of something worse than murder. He will have to call upon all his formidable
intellect and lethal ingenuity to survive his enemies inside and outside the
city walls.
As the author of The Prince,
Machiavelli’s name has become synonymous with the work of the devil, with the
brutal exercise of power, and with immorality. Nothing could be further from
the truth. In this richly told historical novel, the life of the much vilified
philosopher comes to vivid life The historical Machiavelli is a diabolically
clever but mild mannered, conscientious civil servant who struts upon the same
stage as heavyweights like Florence’s Medici family, the nefarious and perhaps
incestuous Borgias, the artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo and the
doomed prophet Savonarola. His is an adventure story replete with
violence, treachery, heroism, betrayal, sex, corrupt popes, noble outlaws,
deformed kings, menacing Turks, even more menacing Lutherans, unscrupulous
astrologers, untrustworthy dentists—and, of course, true love. Imprisoned,
tortured and ultimately abandoned, Machiavelli nevertheless remains the sworn
enemy of tyranny and a lifelong champion of freedom and the republican form of
government. Idealistic to the point of impracticality, he pays a dear price for
his convictions. Out of the cesspool that was Italian Renaissance politics,
only one name is still uttered today—that of Niccolo Machiavelli.
They say behind every great man is a
woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned
literary secretary, and her mothering, nurturing friend. When at the age of
forty-five, Edith falls passionately in love with a dashing younger journalist,
Morton Fullerton, and is at last opened to the world of the sensual, it
threatens everything certain in her life but especially her abiding friendship
with Anna. As Edith’s marriage crumbles and Anna’s disapproval threatens to
shatter their lifelong bond, the women must face the fragility at the heart of
all friendships.
Beth, a gifted botanical artist,
declares she will never arry since she intends to dedicate herself to her art.
But then her cousin Noah arrives from Virginia and sparks off a chain of events
which change her life forever. She makes friends in high places and, against a
back ground of rising political unrest, she plays a small but crucial part in
the Glorious Revolution and so alters the course of history.
Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers (Aug 6th)
Transporting readers from cosmopolitan
seventeenth-century Paris to the Canadian frontier, this vibrant debut tells of
the struggle to survive in a brutal time and place. Laure Beausejour has been
taken from her destitute family and raised in an infamous orphanage to be
trained as a lace maker. Striking and willful, she dreams of becoming a
seamstress and catching the eye of a nobleman. But after complaining about her
living conditions, she is sent to Canada as a fille du roi, expected to marry a
French farmer there. Laure is shocked by the primitive state of the colony and
the mingling of the settlers with the native tribes. When her ill-matched
husband leaves her alone in their derelict hut for the winter, she must rely on
her wits and her clandestine relationship with an Iroquois man for survival.
It is the spring of 1767, and to
avenge his father's death, Erasmus Kemp has had the rebellious sailors of his
father's ship, including Sullivan, brought back to London to stand trial on
charges of mutiny and piracy. But as the novel opens, a blithe Sullivan has
escaped and is making his way on foot to the north of England, stealing as he
goes and sleeping where he can. His destination is Thorpe in the East Durham
coalfields, where his dead shipmate, Billy Blair, lived: he has pledged to tell
the family how Billy met his end. In this village, Billy's sister, Nan, and her
miner husband, James Bordon, live with their three sons, all destined to follow
their father down the pit. The youngest, only seven, is enjoying his last
summer aboveground. Meanwhile, in London, a passionate anti-slavery
campaigner, Frederick Ashton, gets involved in a second case relating to the
lost ship. Erasmus Kemp wants compensation for the cargo of sick slaves who
were thrown overboard to drown, and Ashton is representing the insurers who
dispute his claim. Despite their polarized views on slavery, Ashton's beautiful
sister, Jane, encounters Erasmus Kemp and finds herself powerfully attracted to
him. Lord Spenton, who owns coal mines in East-Durham, has extravagant habits
and is pressed for money. When he applies to the Kemp merchant bank for a loan,
Erasmus sees a business opportunity of the kind he has long been hoping for, a
way of gaining entry into Britain's rapidly developing and highly profitable
coal and steel industries. Thus he too makes his way north, to the very same
village that Sullivan is heading for . . .
London, 1903. Joseph Conrad is
struggling with his new novel ('I am placing it in South America in a Republic
I call Costaguana'). Progress is slow and the great writer needs help from a
native of the Caribbean coast of South America. Jose Altamirano, Colombian at
birth, who has just arrived in London answers the great writer's advertisement
and tells him his life story. Jose has been witness to the most horrible things
that a person or a country could suffer, and drags with him not just a guilty
conscience but a story that has almost destroyed him. But when Nostromo is
published the following year Jose is outraged by what he reads: 'You've
eliminated me from my own life. You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me.' I waved
the Weekly in the air again, and then threw it down on his desk. 'Here,' I
whispered, my back to the thief, 'I do not exist.' The Secret History of Costaguana,
the second novel by Juan Gabriel Vasquez to be published in English, is Jose
Altamirano's riposte to Joseph Conrad.
In this imaginative retelling
of Pride and Prejudice, Amanda Grange now tells the classic story
through the eyes of its compelling romantic hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy. The story
unfolds in a series of revealing letters that casts a sparkling new reflection
on Mr. Darcy’s past, his future with the spirited and willful Elizabeth Bennet,
and on the manners and morals of the landed gentry in 19th-century England.
China, 1957. Chairman Mao has
declared a new openness in society: “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred
schools of thought contend.” Many intellectuals fear it is only a trick, and
Kai Y ing’s husband, Sheng, a teacher, has promised not to jeopardize their
safety or that of their young son, Tao. But one July morning, just before his
sixth birthday, Tao watches helplessly as Sheng is dragged away for writing a
letter criticizing the Communist Party and sent to a labor camp for
“reeducation.” A year later, still missing his father desperately, Tao climbs
to the top of the hundred-year-old kapok tree in front of their home, wanting
to see the mountain peaks in the distance. But Tao slips and tumbles thirty
feet to the courtyard below, badly breaking his leg. As Kai Ying struggles to
hold her small family together in the face of this shattering reminder of her
husband’s absence, other members of the household must face their own guilty
secrets and strive to find peace in a world where the old sense of order is
falling. Once again, Tsukiyama brings us a powerfully moving story of ordinary
people facing extraordinary circumstances with grace and courage.
Newly returned to her home in
Mayfair, Lady Emily Hargreaves is looking forward to enjoying the delights of
the season. The delights, that is, as defined by her own eccentricities—reading
The Aeneid, waltzing with her dashing husband, and joining the Women’s Liberal
Federation in the early stages of its campaign to win the vote for women. But
an audacious vandal disturbs the peace in the capital city, splashing red paint
on the neat edifices of the homes of London’s elite. This mark, impossible to
hide, presages the revelation of scandalous secrets, driving the hapless
victims into disgrace, despair and even death. Soon, all of London high society
is living in fear of learning who will be the next target, and Lady Emily and
her husband, Colin, favorite agent of the crown, must uncover the identity and
reveal the motives of the twisted mind behind it all before another innocent
life is lost.
In Tudor England, traitors are
everywhere and the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, is assembling the
greatest intelligence-gathering network in the world. Walsingham’s daughter,
Lady Frances Sidney, smart, courageous, and unhappy in love, longs for the
excitement of decoding encrypted messages and setting traps for those working
for rival Mary, Queen of Scots. When Elizabeth makes her a lady-in-waiting,
Frances seizes the chance to prove herself. She will risk her father’s
condemnation, her heart’s longing, and her very life to safeguard her queen.
Born into an ambitious noble family,
young Jane Seymour is sent to Court as a Maid of Honor to Catherine of Aragon,
Henry VIII’s aging queen. She is devoted to her mistress and watches with
empathy as the calculating Anne Boleyn contrives to supplant her as queen.
Anne’s single-minded intriguing threatens all who stand in her way; she does
not hesitate to arrange the murder of a woman who knows a secret so dark that,
if revealed, would make it impossible for the king to marry Anne. Once
Anne becomes queen, no one at court is safe, and Jane herself becomes the
victim of Anne’s venomous rage when she suspects Jane has become the object of
the king’s lust. Henry, fearing that Anne’s inability to give him a son is a
sign of divine wrath, asks Jane to become his next queen. Deeply reluctant to
embark on such a dangerous course, Jane must choose between her heart and her
loyalty to the king.
Anyone who has lived as long as I
have, and who has done the things I have, knows there will come a reckoning...
Uprooted from her Shanghai childhood, young Cassandra is sent with her father
and twin brother to live on the Black Isle. A teeming British colony in the
Indonesian archipelago, the Isle is a seaport haunted by a restive multitude of
ghosts . . . ghosts that Cassandra can see. These spirits will face off against
the forces of modernity, drawing Cassandra into the center of a turbulent
struggle. Through it all, her strength and perseverance will be put to the
test, as she endures the hope and heartache of an impossible love, even while
she grows into a powerful figure of the Isle's transformation from colonial backwater
to bustling cosmopolitan city.
In 1533 and again in 1534, Henry the
Eighth reportedly kept a mistress while he was married to Anne Boleyn. Now,
that mistress comes to vivid life in Kate Emerson's The King's Damsel.
A real-life letter from Spanish Ambassador Eustace Chapuys, written on
September 27, 1534, reported that the king had "renewed and increased the
love he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of the Court"
and that the queen had tried "to dismiss the damsel from her
service." Other letters from Eustace reveal that the mystery woman was a
"true friend" of the Princess (later Queen) Mary, Henry's daughter by
Catherine of Aragon. Though no one knows who "the king's damsel"
really was, here Kate Emerson presents her as young gentlewoman Thomasine
Lodge, a lady-in-waiting to King Henry's daughter, Princess Mary. Thomasine
becomes the Princess's confidante, especially as Henry's marriage to Catherine
dissolves and tensions run high. When the king procures a divorce in order to
marry Anne Boleyn, who is suspicious and distrustful of Mary, Mary has
Thomasine placed in Anne's service to be her eyes and ears. And that's when she
gets the attention of the king...
It is 1943, the height of the Second
World War, and Berlin has become a city of women. With her husband
serving on the Eastern Front, Sigrid Schroeder is, for all intents and
purposes, the model soldier’s wife. But behind this façade is an entirely
different Sigrid, a Sigrid who dreams of her former Jewish lover, who is now
lost in the chaos of the war. Sigrid’s tedious existence is turned upside down
when she finds herself hiding a mother and her two young daughters— who she
believes might be her lover’s family—and she must make choices that could cost
her everything.
The Kingmaker’s
Daughter is the
gripping and ultimately tragic story of the daughters of the man known as the
“Kingmaker,” the most powerful magnate in England through the Cousins’ Wars. In
the absence of a son and heir, he uses the two girls as pawns in his political
games, but they grow up to be influential players in their own right. In this
novel, her first sister story since The Other Boleyn Girl, Gregory
explores the lives of two fascinating young women. At the court of Edward IV
and his beautiful queen, Elizabeth Woodville, Anne grows from a delightful
child brought up in intimacy and friendship with the family of Richard, Duke of
Gloucester, to become ever more fearful and desperate when her father makes war
on his former friends. Her will is tested when she is left widowed and
fatherless, with her mother in sanctuary and her sister married to the enemy.
Fortune’s wheel turns again when Richard rescues Anne from her sister’s house,
with danger still following Anne, even as she eventually ascends to the throne
as queen. Having lost those closest to her, she must protect herself and her
precious only child, Prince Edward, from a court full of royal rivals.
Empress Josephine's family has
been called to Napoleon's court for the terrible news that he intends to
divorce his barren wife of thirteen years and take a younger bride, the
Austrian Princess Marie-Louise. For Josephine's daughter, Hortense, this means
she is free to leave her husband, Napoleon's brother, having given the
Bonapartes three heirs. As she looks for love, she must support her mother
through the terrible grief of Napoleon's betrayal. For his new wife, it is a
terrible duty she must take on in her father's name. She has nothing in common
with the strange, older man she has married and can find little in her life to
enjoy. But an unlikely friendship with Hortense will bring her much comfort,
especially as she must fight for her own happiness. For Napoleon's sister,
Pauline Bonaparte, it is yet another woman stealing her brother's attention and
affection. Having spent years attempting to control his power and his
influence, she must fight harder and dirtier if she is to win...
Two lovers. Two very different
lives. One future together that will change history. When debutante Wallis
Simpson is growing up, she devotes her teenage daydreams to one man, the future
King of England, Prince Edward. But it's Pamela Holtby, Wallis's aristocratic
best friend, who mixes within the palace circle. Wallis's first marriage to a
dashing young naval pilot is not what she dreamt of; he turns out to be a
dominating bully of a man, who punishes her relentlessly. But her fated
marriage does open a suprising door, to the world of Navy couriers -- where
navy wives are being used to transport messages around the world. This
interesting turn of fate takes Wallis from the exuberant social scene in
Washington to a China that is just emerging from civil war. Edward in the
meantime is busy fulfilling his royal duties -- and some extra-curricular ones
involving married women. Until the day, just before he ascends the throne as
Edward VIII, he is introduced to a very special married woman, Wallis Simpson.
Was Wallis Simpson really the monster the royal family perported her to be? Or
was she an extraordinary woman who led an unimaginable life? A dramatic novel,
that crosses continents and provides a unique insight into one of history's
most charismatic and multi-faceted women.
The Lost Prince, the sequel to the
The Little Book, is a novel about a love that is capable of bridging
unfathomable distances. Recently returned from fin de siècle Vienna,
Eleanor Burden settles into her place in 1890s Boston, but believes that she
has advance knowledge of every major historical event to come. As the
events in her mind begin to occur, Eleanor must decide whether she will allow
history to unfold or bend it to her will.
Cascade, Massachusetts, 1935.
Desdemona Hart Spaulding, a promising young artist, abandoned her dreams of
working in New York City to rescue her father. Two months later he is dead and
Dez is stuck in a marriage to reliable but child-hungry Asa Spaulding. Dez also
stands to lose her father’s legacy, the Cascade Shakespeare Theater, as the
Massachusetts Water Authority decides whether to flood Cascade to create a
reservoir. Amid this turmoil arrives Jacob Solomon, a fellow artist for whom
Dez feels an immediate and strong attraction. As their relationship reaches a
pivotal moment, a man is found dead and the town accuses Jacob, a Jewish
outsider. But the tide turns when Dez’s idea for a series of painted postcards
is picked up by The American Sunday Standard and she abruptly
finds herself back on the path to independence. New York City and a life with
Jacob both beckon, but what will she have to give up along the way?
The Final
Sacrament-James Forrester (UK Rel-Aug 16th)
September
1566. William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms, lives quietly with his family in
London, with a document in his possession that could destroy the state. The
aged Lady Percy, Countess of Northumberland, has not given up trying to find
it. Nor has she forgotten how he betrayed her and the Catholic cause - she has
spent the last two years planning her revenge. But then eloquent and
adventurous courtier, John Greystoke suddenly seems most concerned for
Clarenceux's safety. And why, on behalf of the government, does Francis
Walsingham have spies watching Clarenceux's house day and night? When his wife
and his daughter go missing, Clarenceux finds himself on the run with his other
young daughter, hunted by Lady Percy's agents. He knows he must finally destroy
the document, even if it should cost him his life - but how can he, until he
has reunited his family?
At the turn of the
twentieth century, in a rural stretch of the Pacific Northwest in the foothills
of the Cascade Mountains, a solitary orchardist named Talmadge carefully tends
the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century. A gentle,
solitary man, he finds solace and purpose in the sweetness of the apples,
apricots, and plums he grows, and in the quiet, beating heart of the land—the
valley of yellow grass bordering a deep canyon that has been his home since he
was nine years old. Everything he is and has known is tied to this patch of
earth. It is where his widowed mother is buried, taken by illness when he was
just thirteen, and where his only companion, his beloved teenaged sister
Elsbeth, mysteriously disappeared. It is where the horse wranglers—native men,
mostly Nez Perce—pass through each spring with their wild herds, setting up
camp in the flowering meadows between the trees. One day, while in town to sell
his fruit at the market, two girls, barefoot and dirty, steal some apples.
Later, they appear on his homestead, cautious yet curious about the man who
gave them no chase. Feral, scared, and very pregnant, Jane and her sister Della
take up on Talmadage’s land and indulge in his deep reservoir of compassion.
Yet just as the girls begin to trust him, brutal men with guns arrive in the
orchard, and the shattering tragedy that follows sets Talmadge on an
irrevocable course not only to save and protect them, putting himself between
the girls and the world, but to reconcile the ghosts of his own troubled past.
On the surface, Nightingale and
Flaubert have little in common. She is a woman with radical ideas about society
and God, naive in the ways of men. He is a notorious womanizer, involved with
innumerable prostitutes. But both are at painful crossroads in their lives and
burn with unfulfilled ambition. In Enid Shomer’s deft hands, the two unlikely
soulmates come together to share their darkest torments and fervent hopes.
Brimming with adventure and the sparkling sensibilities of the two travelers,
this mesmerizing debut novel offers a luminous combination of gorgeous prose
and wild imagination, all of it colored by the opulent tapestry of
mid-nineteenth century Egypt.
In 1925 Shanghai, a city of ambiguous
ethics where nothing is what it seems, Irene Blum arrives to convince Khmer
scholar and temple robber Simone Merlin to help her find a set of copper
scrolls believed to contain the lost history of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer
empire. United by a deep passion for the Khmer, the women commit a surprising
act of violence. But as they flee to Indochina, they begin to realize that
their hidden motives for finding the scrolls are strongly opposed. Traveling
from Saigon to Phnom Penh, they are joined by Irene’s love interest Marc
Rafferty; Louis Finot, a curator for the Cambodian temples; and the dying Henry
Simms, the Svengali who raised Irene and sent her to the Orient. Together they
head for the jungle, where each discovery reveals that their pasts are entwined
in ways they never could have imagined. Opposed by a self-serving French
government official and local villagers enlisted to protect the country’s great
treasure, they fight their way toward their goal, where Irene learns that
finding the scrolls means not only solving the puzzle of the Khmer's history,
but also discovering the history of her own life.
Hang down your head, Tom Dooley…The
folk song, made famous by the Kingston Trio, recounts a tragedy in
the North Carolina mountains after the Civil War. Laura Foster, a simple
country girl, was murdered and her lover Tom Dula was hanged for the crime. The
sensational elements in the case attracted national attention: a man and his
beautiful, married lover accused of murdering the other-woman; the former
governor of North Carolina spearheading the defense; and a noble gesture from
the prisoner on the eve of his execution, saving the woman he really
loved.
The majestic and haunting beauty of
the Italian Alps is the setting of the first meeting of Enza, a practical
beauty, and Ciro, a strapping mountain boy, who meet as teenagers, despite
growing up in villages just a few miles apart. At the turn of the last century,
when Ciro catches the local priest in a scandal, he is banished from his
village and sent to hide in America as an apprentice to a shoemaker in Little
Italy. Without explanation, he leaves a bereft Enza behind. Soon, Enza's family
faces disaster and she, too, is forced to go to America with her father to secure
their future. Unbeknownst to one another, they both build fledgling lives in
America, Ciro masters shoemaking and Enza takes a factory job in Hoboken until
fate intervenes and reunites them. But it is too late: Ciro has volunteered to
serve in World War I and Enza, determined to forge a life without him, begins
her impressive career as a seamstress at the Metropolitan Opera House that will
sweep her into the glamorous salons of Manhattan and into the life of the
international singing sensation, Enrico Caruso.
Shipwrecked off the coast of
Portugal on the 13th of August 1476, the 25-year-old, Genoa-born Christopher
Columbus find refuge with his younger brother Bartholomew, a map maker in
Lisbon, the very centre of exploration endeavours. Where many would find
themselves lost, the Columbus brothers find themselves on the verge of
discovery. The world has been expanding since the beginning of the 15th
century, and so has Christopher Columbus' vision...Bartholomew bears witness to
the events leading to the Indies Enterprise, and through his vivid storytelling
he invites us to join their pursuit from its very conception. Though far from
the dream they once sought, how could their passion for discovery lead to the
nightmares and horrors of genocide?
In the astonishing first book of
Anton’s two-part novel of Hisdadukh, the precocious youngest child of a
prosperous Jewish scholar learns the Torah by heart, but when she is barred
from further studies because of her gender, her sister-in-law introduces her to
the practice of magic. After marrying one of her father’s best students,
Hisdadukh is caught up with marriage and motherhood—until her happiness is
derailed by a series of tragedies, and a grieving Hisdadukh must decide if her
path lies, despite the peril, the way of sorcery.
As a midwife
working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression,
Patience Murphy’s only solace is her gift: the chance to escort mothers through
the challanges of childbirth. Just beginning, she takes on the jobs no one else
wants: those most in need—and least likely to pay. Patience is willing to do
what it takes to fulfill her mentor’s wishes, but starting a midwife practice
means gaining trust, and Patience’s secrets are too fragile to let anyone in.
It is 1864. The South’s surrender is
inevitable, and Manhattan is at the heart of the recovering nation’s surge to
prosperity. On its bustling streets crowds hustle from place to place amid a
maelstrom of carriages and horse-drawn trolleys. Vanderbilt’s new Grand Central
Depot and the glittering Ladies’ Mile shine as beacons of the city’s burgeoning
wealth. Joshua Turner returns home from the War with only one leg, but his
ambition intact, and sees opportunity in the exponential growth of vital city
workers—the managers and clerks who churn New York’s economic life. This new
middle class must live in dreary “family residences,” where everyone eats in a
shared dining room and no woman can have a key to her own front door.
Manhattan, Joshua realizes, has limited land but unlimited air. He aspires to
build the city’s first apartment houses for everyman, a daring vision that will
make him New York's first true real estate titan but will also attract the
dangerous attention of a shadowy figure from Josh’s days in a notorious
Confederate prison. Meanwhile, the irresistible and clever Mollie Brannigan,
raised by her extraordinary Auntie Eileen in perhaps the toniest bordello in
town, is resigned at age twenty-two to spinsterhood . . . till Joshua finds her
at Macy’s, the city’s largest emporium, and takes her coaching in Central Park,
while explaining why the millionaire mansions that line their route are not how
he sees the future. In Joshua’s love Mollie finds a world of
possibilities she had not dared to dream, but it is her aunt’s intervention
that makes them real. How ironic, then, that a secret Eileen thought left
behind in Ireland will force Mollie to employ all her wits to protect not just
her chance at happiness but her life.
On Canaan’s Side opens as the eighty-five-year-old Irish émigré Lilly Bere
mourns the loss of her grandson Bill. Lilly, the daughter of a Dublin
policeman, revisits her eventful life, going back to the moment she was forced
to flee Ireland at the end of the First World War. She continues her tale in
America, where—far from her family—she first tastes the sweetness of love and
the bitterness of betrayal.
London, 1781. With city streets
seething with rumors as the king battles the French, a body is dragged from the
murky waters of the Thames. Having gained a measure of celebrity as amateur
detectives for unraveling the mysteries of Thornleigh Hall, the indomitable
Mrs. Harriet Westerman and the reclusive anatomist Gabriel Crowther are once
again called on to investigate. In this brilliantly drawn novel of deduction
and forensics, they will discover that this is no ordinary drowning—the victim
is part of a plot to betray England’s most precious secrets.
Mesopotamia, AD 260. Betrayed by his
most trusted adviser, the Roman Emperor Valerian has been captured by the
Sassanid barbarians. The frail old emperor prostrates himself before Shapur,
King of Kings. Ballista looks on helplessly, but vows under his breath to
avenge those who have brought the Empire to the brink of destruction. But
first, he must decide what price he will pay for his own freedom. Ballista, the
Warrior of Rome, faces his greatest challenge yet.
Born to a Russian
family of lower nobility, Xenia is a passionate and tender dreamer who cares
little for social conventions. A free spirit, she unexpectedly falls in love
with the dashing Andrei, a handsome soldier with the Imperial choir. Though
husband and wife are devoted to each other, their perfect happiness is
overshadowed by the petty demands of life at the royal court, and by Xenia’s
growing obsession to have a child—a desperate need that is at last fulfilled
with the birth of a daughter. Yet Xenia is far from content. Fearful for her
family, she is certain that tragedy will strike—a terrible prediction that
comes true. Shattered, the sensitive twenty-six-year-old woman withdraws
into grief, undergoing a profound transformation that radically alters the
course of her life. Turning away from family and friends, she begins giving
away all of her money and possessions to the poor. Then, one day, she
mysteriously vanishes. Years later, dressed in the tatters of her husband’s
military uniform and answering only to his name, Xenia is discovered tending
the paupers of St. Petersburg’s slums. Revered as a soothsayer and blessed
healer to the downtrodden, she is feared by the royal court and it’s new
empress, Catherine, who see her deeds as a rebuke to their lavish excesses.
As the ninth century wanes, Alfred
the Great lies dying, his dream of a unified England in danger and his kingdom
on the brink of chaos. While his son, Edward, has been named his successor,
there are other Saxon claimants to the throne—as well as ambitious pagan
Vikings to the north. Uhtred, the Saxon-born, Viking-raised warrior, whose life
seems to shadow the making of England itself, is torn between his vows to
Alfred and his desire to reclaim his long-lost ancestral lands and castle in
the north. As the king’s warrior, he is duty-bound, but Alfred’s reign is
nearing its end, and Uhtred has sworn no oath to the crown prince. Despite his
long years of service, Uhtred is still loath to commit to the old king’s Saxon
cause of a united and Christian England. Now he must make a momentous decision,
one that will forever transform his life . . . and the course of history: take
up arms—and Alfred’s mantle—or lay down his sword and allow the dream of a
unified kingdom to fall into oblivion.
SEPTEMBER 2012:
The early twelfth century is a time
for ambitious men to prosper, and royal servant John FitzGilbert Marshal is one
of them. Raised high as the kin of the deceased King Henry battle each other
for England's throne, John reaps rich rewards but pays a terrible price for the
choices he makes - as do his family. His wife, fragile, naïve Aline is
hopelessly unequipped to cope with the demands of a life lived on the edge and,
when John is seriously injured in battle, her worst nightmare is realised. Sybilla,
bright, forthright sister to the Earl of Salisbury, finds herself used as a
bargaining counter when her brother seeks to seal a truce with his troublesome
neighbour, John FitzGilbert. And then there is Sybilla's small son, William,
seized hostage by the King for John's word of honour. But sometimes keeping
your honour means breaking your word...
To the Greeks who love it, it is
Constantinople. To the Turks who covet it, the Red Apple. Safe behind its
magnificent walls, the city was once the heart of the vast Byzantine empire.
1453. The empire has shrunk to what lies within those now-crumbling walls. A
relic. Yet for one man, Constantinople is the stepping stone to destiny. Mehmet
is twenty when he is annointed Sultan. Now, seeking Allah’s will and Man’s
glory, he brings an army of one hundred thousand, outnumbering the defenders
ten to one. He has also brings something new – the most frightening weapon the
world has ever seen... But a city is more than stone, its fate inseparable from
that of its people. Men like Gregoras, a mercenary and exile, returning to the hated
place he once loved. Like his twin and betrayer, the subtle diplomat, Theon.
Like Sofia, loved by two brothers but forced to make a desperate choice between
them. And Leilah, a powerful mystic and assassin, seeking her own destiny in
the flames. This is the tale of one of history’s greatest battles for one of
the world’s most extraordinary places. This is the story of people, from
peasant to emperor - with the city’s fate, and theirs, undecided... until the
moment the Red Apple falls.
With the outbreak of the American
revolution, Abigail Lovell's family is torn apart—while her schoolmaster father
is an outspoken loyalist and prominent figurehead in the community, she and her
two brothers engage in acts of espionage to undermine the British forces in
Boston. Her sickly older brother, James, operates the patriots’ spy ring while
Abigail acts as a courier, eluding increasingly aggressive British patrols.
Meanwhile, her younger brother, Benjamin, slips out of Boston to fight
alongside Abigail’s love, Ezra, in the battles at Lexington and Concord. With
the help of her friend, Rachel revere, Abigail smuggles money and supplies out
to Benjamin, Ezra, and other revolutionaries. But when a British sergeant
is found murdered, Abigail stands accused, and she now must fight to save
herself and those she loves.
Henriette d’Entragues
isn’t satisfied with simply being the mistress of Henry IV of France; she wants
a crown too. Despite his promises to marry her, the King is obliged by
political necessity to ally himself with a rich Italian princess. But Henriette
isn’t one for giving up easily. All she has to do to achieve her ambition is to
give Henry a son, and then do whatever it takes to set him on the throne . . .
Maureen O’Reilly
and her younger sister flee Ireland in hope of claiming the life promised to
their father over twenty years before. After surviving the rigors of Ellis
Island, Maureen learns that their benefactor, Colonel Wakefield, has died. His
family, refusing to own his Civil War debt, casts her out. Alone, impoverished,
and in danger of deportation, Maureen connives to obtain employment in a
prominent department store. But she soon discovers that the elegant facade
hides a secret that threatens every vulnerable woman in the city. Despite her
family’s disapproval, Olivia Wakefield determines to honor her father’s debt
but can’t find Maureen. Unexpected help comes from a local businessman, whom
Olivia begins to see as more than an ally, even as she fears the secrets he’s
hiding. As women begin disappearing from the store, Olivia rallies influential
ladies in her circle to help Maureen take a stand against injustice and fight
for the lives of their growing band of sisters. But can either woman open her
heart to divine leading or the love it might bring?
“He’s a gambler at
best. A con artist at worst,” her aunt had said of the handlebar-mustached man
who snatched Ella Wallace away from her dreams of studying art in France.
Eighteen years later, that man has disappeared, leaving Ella alone and
struggling to support her three sons. While the world is embroiled in World War
I, Ella fights her own personal battle to keep the mystical Florida land that
has been in her family for generations from the hands of an unscrupulous
banker. When a mysterious man arrives at Ella’s door in an unconventional way,
he convinces her he can help her avoid foreclosure, and a tenuous trust begins.
But as the fight for Ella’s land intensifies, it becomes evident that things
are not as they appear. Hypocrisy and murder soon shake the coastal town of
Apalachicola and jeopardize Ella’s family.
In this spellbinding history, David
Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since
James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Where other scholars have
seen the conflict as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield paints it as America’s
greatest failure: a breakdown of society caused by the infusion of evangelical
religion into the world of politics. The price of that failure was horrific,
but the carnage accomplished what statesmen could not: It made the United
States one nation and eliminated the divisive force of slavery. The victorious
North moved ahead, a land of innovation and industry. Religion was supplanted
by a gospel of economic and scientific progress, and the South was left behind.
The “fiery trial” of war transformed our country—a conflagration captured in
vivid detail in America Aflame.
Augusta Branson was
born into antebellum Southern nobility during a time of wealth and prosperity,
but now all that is gone, and she is left standing in the ashes of a broken
civilization. When her scalawag husband dies suddenly of a mysterious blood
plague, she must fend for herself and her young son. Slowly she begins to wake
to the reality of her new life: her social standing is stained by her marriage;
she is alone and unprotected in a community that is being destroyed by racial
prejudice and violence; the fortune she thought she would inherit does not
exist; and the deadly blood fever is spreading fast. Nothing is as she
believed, everyone she knows is hiding something, and Augusta needs someone to
trust. Somehow she must find the truth amid her own illusions about the past
and the courage to cross the boundaries of hate, so strong, dangerous, and very
close to home. Using the Southern Gothic tradition to explode literary
archetypes like the chivalrous Southern gentleman, the good mammy, and the
defenseless Southern belle, The
Rebel Wife shatters the myths that still cling
to the antebellum South and creates an unforgettable heroine for our time.
In the turbulent Parisian summer of
1893,Victor Legris has vowed to his fiancée to give up the dangerous hobby of
amateur sleuthing to concentrate on selling books. But a killer is at large,
leaving mysterious references to a leopard in his notes, and intent on revenge for events that
took place many years before during the Commune. When a bookbinder friend of
Victor's dies in a house fire that does not seem to be accidental, the young
bookseller feels impelled to resume his detective work and uncover the identity
of the Batignolles predator. Alongside his trusty assistant Jojo, Victor
embarks on a new investigation in the bourgeois quarters of Paris, where
scoundrels abound and streethawkers call out their wares among market stalls,
under the bloody shadow of the Commune.
Japan, 1703. On a snowy night,
forty-seven fiercely determined warriors murder the man at the center of the
scandal that turned them from samurai into masterless rōnin two
years before. Clearly this was an act of revenge—but why did they wait so long?
And is there any reason they should not immediately be ordered to commit ritual
suicide? Sano Ichirō, demoted from Chamberlain to his old post as Most
Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People, has mere days to
solve the greatest mystery of samurai legend—while his own fortunes hang in the
balance.
The
Bloodletter’s Daughter by Linda Lafferty (Sep 4th)
The year is 1606, the
golden age of Prague, cultured and financed by Rudolf II. The Emperor’s mad
bastard son, Don Julius, scandalizes the cities of Prague and Vienna and is
banished to the walled town of Cesky Krumlov in the furthest reaches of
Bohemia, and locked in the towering Rozenberk castle. By order of the Emperor,
two bloodletters - Royal Physician Mingonius and local Barber-Surgeon Pichler -
come to rid Don Julius of the murderous humors that course his veins. But it is Pichler’s daughter Marketa — a simple Bohemian
bathmaid — who captures the frenzied imagination of the lunatic Hapsburg
prince.
Jane Seymour of Wiltshire is not
meant to go to Court—not a child like her, with her lack of beauty and no
title. But family connections are enough to have her named to the bridal
retinue of Mary Tudor. At the French Court, the plain and docile Jane
meets the girl who will grow into her rival: the already charismatic and
conniving Anne Boleyn. Years later, when Jane is called to serve Katherine of
Aragon, who is fighting for her life as Queen in the face of Anne Boleyn’s open
seduction of King Henry VIII, Jane will learn the value of loyalty and honesty,
while holding fast to her convictions. And it is her unblemished soul that will
slowly rise above the chaos—and turn a king’s head...
A love story serves as backdrop for
The Map of the Sky when New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry
millionaire Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge:
to reproduce the extraterrestrial invasion featured in Wells’s War of the
Worlds. What follows are three brilliantly interconnected plots to create a
breathtaking tale of time travel and mystery, replete with cameos by a young
Edgar Allan Poe, and Captain Shackleton and Charles Winslow from The Map of
Time.
In Depression-era Key West, Mariella
Bennet, the daughter of an American fisherman and a Cuban woman, struggles to
support her family. When she is hired as a maid by Ernest Hemingway’s second
wife, Pauline, she enters a rarified world of lavish, celebrity-filled dinner
parties and elaborate off island excursions. As she becomes caught up in the
tensions and excesses of the Hemingway household, the attentions of the
larger-than-life writer become a dangerous temptation...even as reliable Gavin
Murray, a World War I veteran, draws her back to what matters most. Will
Mariella cross an invisible line with the volatile Hemingway, or find a way to
claim her own dreams? As a massive hurricane bears down on Key West, she faces
some harsh truths...and the possibility of losing everything she loves.
Abel Truman is a Civil War veteran.
He fought with the Confederates at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864 – a
battle of nearly indescribable brutality – emerging severely wounded.
Thirty-five years later, now an old and ailing man living in a driftwood shack
on the Washington coast, Abel sets out with his beloved dog on a journey over
the snowbound mountains of the Olympic Range. It’s a quest he has little hope
of completing but nonetheless must undertake to settle matters of the heart
that predate even the horrors of the war. As he travels, he recollects his war
years, and the people who have touched his life – from Jane Dao-Ming Poole, the
daughter of murdered Chinese immigrants, to Hypatia, a freed slave, and finally
the unbearable memory of the wife and child he lost as a young man. Haunted by
tragedy, loss and unspeakable violence, Abel has somehow managed to hold on to
his humanity, and it is this that opens up pockets of kindness as weigh
stations along his tortured and ultimately redemptive path.
Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin
to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot
against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own
intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate Black Masses at
night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots,
and massacres. Conspiracies rule history. From the unification of Italy to the
Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat. But what if, behind all of
these conspiracies, both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil
genius created the world’s most infamous document?
When Joanna Stafford, a young
novice, learns her cousin is about to be burned at the stake for rebelling against
Henry VIII, she makes a decision that will change not only her life, but quite
possibly the fate of a nation. Joanna breaks the sacred rule of enclosure and
runs away from Dartford Priory. But when Joanna and her father are arrested and
sent to the Tower of London, she finds herself a pawn in a deadly power
struggle. Those closest to the throne are locked in a fierce fight against
those desperate to save England's monasteries from destruction. Charged
with a mission to find a hidden relic believed to possess a mystical power that
has slain three Englishmen of royal blood in the last 300 years, Joanna and a
troubled young friar, Brother Edmund, must seek answers across England. Once
she learns the true secret of her quest, Joanna must finally determine who to
trust, and how far she’s willing to go to protect her life, her family and
everything she holds dear.
Niccolò Machiavelli, the great
"scientist" of human behaviour becomes, in effect, the first criminal
profiler, while his contemporary and sometime colleague, the erratic genius
Leonardo da Vinci, brings his observational powers to the increasingly desperate
hunt for a brilliant, terrifying serial murderer. Their foil and partner is the
exquisite Damiata, scholar and courtesan. All three know their quarry is
someone who holds enormous power, both to tear Italy apart, and destroy each of
their most beloved dreams.
Cervantes Street by
Jaime Manriquez (Sep 11th)
The
actual facts of Miguel de Cervantes's life seem to be snatched from an epic
tale: an impoverished and talented young poet nearly kills a man in a duel and
is forced into exile; later, he distinguishes himself in battle and is severely
wounded, losing the use of his left hand; on his way back to Spain his ship is
captured by pirates and he is sold into slavery in Algiers; after prolonged
imprisonment and failed escape attempts, he makes his way back home, eventually
settling in a remote village in La Mancha to create his masterpiece, the first
modern novel in Western literature: Don Quixote. Taking the bare bones
of Cervantes' life, Jaime Manrique has accomplished a singular feat: an
engaging and highly accessible take on a brilliant, enigmatic man and his
epoch. This is an archetypal tale of rivalry and revenge—featuring Cervantes's
antagonistic relationship with the man who would go on to write his own sequel
to Don Quixote—that is sure to garner comparisons to Peter
Shaffer's Amadeus, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte
Cristo, and, with its extraordinary recreation of the life and times of
Cervantes, to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
Scotland, 1561,
and a ship comes across the North Sea carrying home Mary, the young,
charismatic Queen of Scots, returning after thirteen years in the French court
to wrest back control of her throne. The Blackadder family has long awaited for
the Queen's return to bring them justice. Alison Blackadder, disguised as a boy
from childhood to protect her from the murderous clan that stole their lands,
must learn to be a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, building a web of dependence
and reward. Just as the Queen can trust nobody, Alison discovers lies, danger,
and treachery at every turn. This sweeping, imaginative, and original tale of
political intrigue, misplaced loyalty, secret passion, and implacable revenge
is based on real characters and events from the reign of Mary Queen of Scots.
Kit Livingstone stumbled upon a
powerful ley line inside the Bone House that transported him to an almost
magical place: the Well of Souls. While there, he witnessed Arthur
Flinders-Petrie, the Man Who Is Map, carry his dead wife into a pool of light
and emerge with her alive again. Could the location of this place be the secret
so jealously guarded by the Skin Map? Archaeologist Cassandra Clarke is
suddenly transported from a deserted canyon in Arizona to a busy street in
Damacus, circa 1950. Through circumstances too precise to be coincidental she
arrives at the door of the Zetetic Society—the Seekers—and is asked to join
their quest to track down Cosimo Livingstone and his grandson Kit. But joining
their cause is the last thing Cass plans to do. Meanwhile, Douglas
Flinders-Petrie—great-grandson of Arthur—ruthlessly pursues the map. Livid that
his father withheld it from him, he is determined to find and keep whatever
treasure the map holds for himself.
Following Ludlow's earlier novels
set in eleventh-century Europe, the de Hautville warrior dynasty shows no sign
of falling back into obscurity. Under Robert Guiscard, the de Hautevilles have
grown in importance and power throughout Italy and, through the Papacy, all of
Christendom. Now it is Robert’s son Bohemund’s turn to take up arms – the
opportunity to fight under the papal banner in the Holy Lands could bring him
the glory and riches he desires and which have been cruelly denied him
elsewhere.
Beatrice, a young
Irish Protestant lace maker, finds herself at the center of a fairy tale: she
is whisked away from her humdrum life by a mysterious countess to join the
Berlin household of the Metzenburgs, an enchanting, aristocratic couple whose
vast holdings of art include a priceless collection of lace. But as Beatrice is
introduced to the highly rarefied world of affluence and art collecting, the
greater drama of Germany's aggression begins to overshadow it. Retreating with
Beatrice to their country estate, the Metzenburgs do their best to ignore the
encroaching war, until the realities of hunger and illness, as well as the even
graver threats of Nazi terror, the deportation and murder of Jews, and hordes
of refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army begin to threaten their very
existence. While the Metzenburgs become the virtual lord and lady of a growing
population of men and women in hiding, Beatrice, increasingly attached to the
family and its unlikely wartime community, bears heartrending witness to the
atrocities of the age.
When a massive earthquake devastates
Japan in 1703, even the shogun's carefully regulated court is left teetering on
the brink of chaos. This is no time for a murder investigation—except when a
nobleman's daughters are found dead from incense poisoning and their father
threatens to topple the regime unless Sano Ichiro tracks down the killer.
Amid the turbulent, faction-ridden
late reign of the fearsome Henry, eager high spirited Catherine Howard caught
the king's eye—but not before she had been the sensual plaything of at least
three other men. Ignorant of her past, seeing only her youthful exuberance and
believing that she could make him happy, he married her—only to discover, too
late, that her heart belonged to his gentleman usher Tom Culpeper. As the net
of court intrigue tightens around her, and with the Tudor succession yet again
in peril because of Prince Edward's severe illness, Queen Catherine struggles
to give the angry, bloated and impotent king a son. But when her relations turn
against her, she finds herself doomed, just as her cousin Anne Boleyn was, to
face the executioner. The Unfaithful Queen lays bare the dark underbelly
of the Tudor court, with its sugared rivalries and bitter struggles for power,
where a girl of noble family could find herself sent to labor among the turnspits
in the kitchens or—should fortune favor her—be exalted to the throne.
Jane Porter is hardly a typical
woman of her time. The only female student in Cambridge University’s medical
program, she is far more comfortable in a lab coat, dissecting corpses, than
she is in a corset and gown, sipping afternoon tea. A budding
paleoanthropologist, Jane dreams of travelling the globe in search of fossils
that will prove the evolutionary theories of her scientific hero, Charles
Darwin. When dashing American explorer Ral Conrath invites Jane and her father
on an expedition deep into West Africa, she can hardly believe her luck. Rising
to the challenge, Jane finds an Africa that is every bit exotic and fascinating
as she has always imagined. But she quickly learns that the lush jungle is full
of secrets—and so is Ral Conrath. When danger strikes, Jane finds her
hero, the key to humanity’s past, and an all-consuming love in one
extraordinary man: Tarzan of the Apes.
During the 1200s in northwest
England, in one of the coldest winters in living memory, a formidable
middle-aged Irishwoman and the troupe she leads are trying to drive their three
wagons across the mountains before the heavy snows set in. Molly, her powerful
and enigmatic lover, her fey granddaughter, and her young apprentice, soon
discover that something terrible prowls the woods. As the group travels from
refuge to refuge, it becomes apparent that the mysterious evil force must be
faced and defeated—or else they will surely die. An intoxicating and
spirited blend of fantasy, mythology, and history, Something Red
features the most fascinating of characters including shapeshifters, Irish
battle queens, Norman knights, Templars, pilgrims, Saracens, a Lithuanian
noblewoman, warrior monks, strong—even dangerous—women, and ten murderous
mastiffs, as well as an epic snowstorm that an early reader described as
“one of the coldest scenes since Snow Falling on Cedars.”
Winter of the World picks up right where the first book left off, as its five
interrelated families—American, German, Russian, English, Welsh—enter a time of
enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of
the Third Reich, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World
War II, up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von
Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life engulfed by the Nazi
tide until she commits a deed of great courage and heartbreak. . . . American
brothers Woody and Chuck Dewar, each with a secret, take separate paths to
momentous events, one in Washington, the other in the bloody jungles of the
Pacific. . . . English student Lloyd Williams discovers in the crucible of the
Spanish Civil War that he must fight Communism just as hard as Fascism. . . .
Daisy Peshkov, a driven American social climber, cares only for popularity and
the fast set, until the war transforms her life, not just once but twice, while
her cousin Volodya carves out a position in Soviet intelligence that will
affect not only this war—but the war to come.
London in 1887. For
Maribel Campbell Lowe, the beautiful, bohemian wife of a maverick politician,
it is the year to make something of herself. A self-proclaimed Chilean heiress
educated in Paris, she is torn between poetry and the new art of photography. But
it is soon plain that Maribel’s choices are not so simple. As her husband’s
career hangs by a thread her real past, and the family she abandoned, come back
to haunt them both. When the notorious newspaper editor Alfred Webster begins
to take an uncommon interest in Maribel, she fears he will destroy not only
Edward’s career but both of their reputations.
It is the early 1950s. A nameless
man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and
mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him
paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the
page: the man is Augustin, the cook’s son at the manor house at Poiana, where
Safta was the privileged daughter. Born six months apart, they had a connection
that bypassed words, but while Augustin’s world stayed the same size, Safta’s
expanded to embrace languages, society, and a fleeting love one long, hot
summer. But then came war, and in its wake a brutal Stalinist regime, and
nothing would remain the same.
The Girl in the Glass description: (Sep 18th)
Meg
Pomeroy is fed up after a broken engagement, the disappearance of her
irresponsible father and the loss of a promised heirloom. When her missing
father sends her a ticket to Florence, Italy, Meg assumes he will meet her
there. Instead, she meets Sofia, a memoir-writer who claims she's the last
Medici and that the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance speak to her. As
Meg tours Florence, her perspectives on what is real-and what she wants to be
real-are challenged.
The Lincoln Conspiracy by Timothy L. O’Brien (Sep 18th)
In
late spring of 1865, as America mourns the death of its leader, Washington,
D.C., police detective Temple McFadden makes a startling discovery. Strapped to
the body of a dead man at the B&O Railroad station are two diaries, two
documents that together reveal the true depth of the Lincoln conspiracy.
Securing the diaries will put Temple’s life in jeopardy—and will endanger the
fragile peace of a nation still torn by war. Temple’s quest to bring the
conspirators to justice takes him on a perilous journey through the gaslit
streets of the Civil War–era capital, into bawdy houses and back alleys where
ruthless enemies await him in every shadowed corner. Aided by an underground
network of friends—and by his wife, Fiona, a nurse who possesses a formidable
arsenal of medicinal potions—Temple must stay one step ahead of Lafayette
Baker, head of the Union Army’s spy service. Along the way, he’ll run from or
rely on Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s fearsome secretary of war; the legendary
Scottish spymaster Allan Pinkerton; abolitionist Sojourner Truth; the
photographer Alexander Gardner; and many others.
The Secret Book of
Frida Kahlo by F.G. Haghenbeck (Sep 25th)
In a rich, luscious style bordering
on magical realism, Haghenbeck takes readers on an intriguing ride through
Frida’s life, including her long and tumultuous relationship with her lover
Diego Rivera, the development of her artistic vision, her complex personality,
her lust for life, and her existential feminism. The book also includes stories
about the remarkable people who were a part of her life, including Georgia
O'Keeffe (with whom she had an affair), Trotsky, Nelson Rockefeller, Hemingway,
Dos Passos, Henry Miller, and DalÍ.
Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore, Stella Duffy’s chronicle of this amazing woman’s early
years, delighted readers with its exquisite blend of historical detail and
vivid storytelling. Now, The Purple Shroud chronicles Theodora at the
height of her power, bringing the ancient world alive in another unforgettable,
epic saga. Justinian and Theodora are now emperor and empress, but ruling the
Roman Empire is no easy task. The empire’s borders are subject to constant
attack; unrest within cities erupts in riots, killing tens of thousands. In the
aftermath, Theodora guides Justinian to regain the people’s favor and realizes
that being the Augusta of Rome is just another theatrical role—but one she was
born to play.
On a tiny, desolate, windswept
island off the coast of Southern California, two families, one in the 1880s and
one in the 1930s, come to start new lives and pursue dreams of self-reliance
and freedom. Their extraordinary stories, full of struggle and hope, are the
subject of T. C. Boyle’s haunting new novel. Thirty-eight-year-old Marantha
Waters arrives on San Miguel on New Year’s Day 1888 to restore her failing health.
Joined by her husband, a stubborn, driven Civil War veteran who will take over
the operation of the sheep ranch on the island, Marantha strives to persevere
in the face of the hardships, some anticipated and some not, of living in such
brutal isolation. Two years later their adopted teenage daughter, Edith, an
aspiring actress, will exploit every opportunity to escape the captivity her
father has imposed on her. Time closes in on them all and as the new century
approaches, the ranch stands untenanted. And then in March 1930, Elise Lester,
a librarian from New York City, settles on San Miguel with her husband,
Herbie, a World War I veteran full of manic energy. As the years go on they
find a measure of fulfillment and serenity; Elise gives birth to two daughters,
and the family even achieves a celebrity of sorts. But will the peace and
beauty of the island see them through the impending war as it had seen them
through the Depression?
The greatest writer of them all,
brought to glorious life. How well do you know the man you love? How much do
you think you know about Shakespeare? What if they were one and the same? He is
an ordinary man: unwilling craftsman, ambitious actor, resentful son, almost
good-enough husband. And he is also a genius. The story of how a glove-maker
from Warwickshire became the greatest writer of them all is vaguely known to
most of us, but it would take an exceptional modern novelist to bring him to
life.
