Kitty Fane has an affair, and when her husband, a bacteriologist, finds out, he forces her to go with him to a cholera epidemic in the hopes that she will contract the disease and die. Once she is surrounded by all the desolation and death, Kitty begins to come to self-realization, and also learns how to love her husband. Unfortunately for both of ...more
It began with Benny Hogan and Eve Malone, 2 inseparable young Irish women, growing up in the village of Knockglen. Benny, an only child, yearning to break free from her adoring parents and Eve, an orphan, abandoned to be raised by nuns, seemed an unlikely pair. Together, Eve and Benny knew the sins and secrets behind every villager's lace curtains....more
Ria lived on Tara Road in Dublin with her dashing husband, Danny, and their two children. She fully believed she was happily married, right up until the day Danny told her he was leaving her to be with his young, pregnant girlfriend. By a chance phone call, Ria meets Marilyn, a woman from New England unable to come to terms with her only son's de...more
It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical sto...more
Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country," Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nations historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of thre...more
A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begin...more
First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life style founded both on jazz and drug-induced visions.
Jane Austen's last and most melancholy novel was published posthumously in 1818. In PERSUASION, Austen creates a strong, mature, and independent heroine, Anne Elliot. Having foolishly broken off an engagement eight years earlier to Frederick Wentworth, a penniless naval officer, Anne at the age of 27 has remained unmarried--and secretly devoted to ...more
Here is Stephen King's most gripping and unforgettable novel -- a tale of grief and lost love's enduring bonds, of haunting secrets of the past, and of an innocent child caught in a terrible crossfire. Four years after the sudden death of his wife, forty-year-old bestselling novelist Mike Noonan is still grieving. Unable to write, and plagued by v...more