Trouble brews in the tiny country village of Fairacre when it isdiscovered that Farmer Miller's Hundred Acre Field is slated forreal estate development. Alarming rumors are circulating, amongthem the fear that the village school may close. The endearingschoolmistress Miss Read brings her inimitable blend of affectionand clear-sighted candor to this report, in which a young girlfinds her first love, an older woman accepts a new role in life,and the impassioned battle to save the village from being engulfedis at the forefront of every villager's mind.
No one brings to life the Old West like Louis L'Amour. Collectedhere for the first time, these vintage frontier stories introduceyou to lawmen and loners, ranchers and renegades, gunslingers,cardsharps, bank robbers, etc. In these pages L'Amour brings tolife such classic characters as the Cactus Kid, Tensleep Mooney,One-Eared Tim, and the gunfighter Kim Sartain. These are frontiertales as only L'Amour can tell them--stories that surprise like thesharp crack of a Winchester and move like the lonely howl of thewind across an empty plain on the long ride home.
Marguerite Gautier was the most beautiful, brazen-- and expensive--courtesan in all of Paris. Despite being ill with consumption, she lived a glittering, moneyed life of nonstop parties and aristocratic balls and savored every day as if it were her last. Into her life came Armand l)uval. Young, handsome, recklessly headstrong, he was hopelessly in love with Marguerite, but not nearly rich enough. Yet Armand was Marguerite's first true love, and against her better judgment, she threw away her upper-class lifestyle for him. But as intense as their love for each other was, it challenged a reality that would not be denied。
Meet Sugar, a nineteen-year-old prostitute innineteenth-century London who yearns for escape to a better life.From the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, she begins herascent through society, meeting a host of lovable, maddening,unforgettable characters on the way. They begin with WilliamRackham, an egotistical perfume magnate whose empire is fueled byhis lust for Sugar; his unhinged, child-like wife Agnes; hismysteriously hidden-away daughter, Sophie; and his pious brotherHenry, foiled in his devotional calling by a persistentlyless-than-chaste love for the Widow Fox. All this is overseen byassorted preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthyservants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes andpersuasions. Teeming with life, this is a big, juicy must-read of a novel thathas enthralled hundreds of thousands of readers-and will continueto do so for years to come.
Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his fatheroutsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least,unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elderbrother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his fathermeasures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank hasturned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In thebizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes ofEric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground forhis brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes themysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks'celebrated first novel is a work of extraordinary originality,imagination and horrifying compulsion: horrifying, because itenters a mind whose realities are not our own, whose values of lifeand death are alien to our society; and compulsive, because thehumour and compassion of that mind reach out to us all.
Nora Roberts continues the romantic saga: the story of threewomen who shared a home and a childhood -- but grew to fulfilltheir own unique destinies.
**DEBUT FICTION** Mary Todd Lincoln is one of history's mostmisunderstood and enigmatic women. The first president's wife to becalled First Lady, she was a political strategist, a supporter ofemancipation, and a mother who survived the loss of three childrenand the assassination of her beloved husband. Yet she also ran herfamily into debt, held seances in the White House, and wascommitted to an insane asylum. In Janis Cooke Newman's debut novel,Mary Todd Lincoln shares the story of her life in her own words.Writing from Bellevue Place asylum, she takes readers from hertempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family through theyears after her husband's death. A dramatic tale filled withpassion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity andredemption, Mary allows us entry into the inner, intimate world ofthis brave and fascinating woman.
The editors of the best-selling rediscovered Tolkien novelRoverandom present an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition ofTolkien's beloved classic Farmer Giles of Ham, complete with a map,the original story outline, the original first-editionillustrations by Pauline Baynes, and the author's notes for anunpublished sequel. Farmer Giles of Ham is a light-hearted satirefor readers of all ages that tells the tale of a reluctant hero whomust save his village from a dragon. It is a small gem of a talethat grows more delightful with each rereading.
On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag ofeccentrics live in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea,they belong to one another. There is Maurice, a homosexualprostitute; Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man; but most of allthere's Nenna, the struggling mother of two wild little girls. Howeach of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of thisperfect little novel.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, TheSoul of a New Machine was a bestseller on its first publication in1981. With the touch of an expert thriller writer, Tracy Kidderrecounts the feverish efforts of a team of Data General researchersto create a new 32-bit superminicomputer. A compelling account ofindividual sacrifice and human ingenuity, The Soul of a New Machineendures as the classic chronicle of the computer age and themasterminds behind its technological advances. "A superb book," said Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art ofMotorcycle Maintenance. "All the incredible complexity and chaosand exploitation and loneliness and strange, half-mad beauty ofthis field are honestly and correctly drawn." The Washington PostBook World said, "Kidder has created compelling entertainment. Heoffers a fast, painless, enjoyable means to an initialunderstanding of computers, allowing us to understand thecomplexity of machines we could only marvel at before, and toappreciate the skills
There are few authors who can weave nail-biting thrills,edge-of-your-seat drama, and romantic suspense as masterfully asJulie Garwood. Now she ratchets up the tension with "Murder List,"in which evil is on the hunt- and proves to be methodicallyorganized and chillingly successful. When Chicago detective AlecBuchanan is offered a prime position with the FBI, it is theperfect opportunity to leave the Windy City and follow in hisbrothers' footsteps to the top echelons of law enforcement. Butfirst he must complete one last assignment (and one that he is nottoo happy about): acting as a glorified bodyguard to hotel heiressRegan Hamilton Madison. The gorgeous exec has become entangled insome potentially deadly business. Someone has e-mailed her agraphic crime-scene photo-and the victim is no stranger. Regansuspects that the trouble started when she agreed to help ajournalist friend expose a shady self-help guru who preys onlonely, vulnerable women. In fact, the smooth-as-an-oil-slick Dr.Lawrence Shields may
Mackenzie Allen Phillips's youngest daughter, Missy, has beenabducted during a family vacation, and evidence that she may havebeen brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in theOregon wilderness. Four years later, in this midst of his greatsadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God,inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his betterjudgment he arrives at the shack on wintry afternoon and walks backinto his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change hislife forever.
The Foundation has managed to preserve humanculture and shortenthe period of chaotic barbarism after the Galactic Empire began todecay. But the Foundation still faces great challenges in itsstruggle to survive.
In the stillness of a golden September afternoon, deep in thewilderness of the Rockies, a solitary craftsman, Grady Adams, andhis magnificent Irish wolfhound, Merlin, step from shadow intolight...and into an encounter with mystery. That night, a pair ofsingular animals will watch Grady's isolated home, waiting to maketheir approach. A few miles away, Camillia Rivers, a local veterinarian, beginsto unravel the threads of a puzzle that will bring to her door allthe forces of a government in peril. At a nearby farm, long-estranged identical twins come togetherto begin a descent into darkness...In Las Vegas, a specialist inchaos theory probes the boundaries of the unknowable...On a Seattlegolf course, two men make matter-of-fact arrangements formurder...Along a highway by the sea, a vagrant scarred by the pastbegins a trek toward his destiny. In a novel that is at once wholly of our time and timeless,fearless and funny, Dean Koontz takes readers into the momentbetween one turn of the world and the next, acros
Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac tobe the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare,classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father'shysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. Oneof the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-centuryFrench provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whomnothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of thehuman animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R.Jameson Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor ofComparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Hispublications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures ofthe Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
In the form of warm, relaxed letters to a close friend, Lewismeditates on many puzzling questions concerning the intimatedialogue between man and God. Lewis also considers practical andmetaphysical aspects of private prayer, petitionary prayer, theLords Prayer, and other forms of prayer. A beautifully executed anddeeply moving book (Saturday Review).
Narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl with a ruthless regard fortruth, The Last Life is a beautifully told novel of lies andghosts, love and honor. Set in colonial Algeria, and in the southof France and New England, it is the tale of the LaBasse family,whose quiet integrity is shattered by the shots from agrandfather's rifle. As their world suddenly begins to crumble,long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before hewas even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed,a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue-the familybusiness-to its knees. Messud skillfully and inexorably describeshow the stories we tell ourselves, and the lies to which we cling,can turn on us in a moment. It is a work of stunning power from awriter to watch.
