First published in 1940, the story covers the period from 1913 to 1919. This is the beginning of a monumental 7,340 page novel, the story of Lanny Budd, a young American, beginning in Europe in 1913. It is also an intimate record of a great world which fell victim to its own civilization. A new world was about to be born.

    On the eve of making the most momentous decision of his life, while he is contemplating a loveless marriage with a woman his friends have compared to a cold poultice, he is on his way home, a little worse for drink, and finds a perfect opportunity for escape by her boring destiny. He discovers a beautiful young fugitive climbing out of a window by means of knotted sheets, dressed in boy's clothing lovely Penelope Creed is fleeing from London. She is a brilliant London heires with and lavish life, and a proposed marriage to her repulsive fish-lipped cousin, a man she loathed. She has a shimmering dream of a love she had known once--and lost. Discovered by Sir Wyndham, he can't allow her to travel to the countryside all alone, so he offers himself as her protector.And with her in flight across a landscape of excitement was a man like no other she had known-- handsome, sophisticated, but cynical. They had met by accident, been drawn together by danger. And now only his masked emotions and the shifting impulses of her own wild young heart would tell what their destiny would be.... When their stagecoach overturns, they find themselves embroiled with thieves, at the center of a murder investigation, and finally, in love.

    Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here, in the first novel of Conrad Richter's Awakening Land trilogy, the Lucketts, a wild, woods-faring family, lived their roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation. This novel gives an excellent feel for America's lost woods culture, which was created when most of the eastern midwest was a vast hardwood forest---virtually a jungle. The Trees conveys settler life, including conflicts with Native Americans, illness, hunting, family dynamics, and marriage.

    But this award-winning biography offers a more humane and measured perspective on the life of this tormented woman. With sympathy, Prescott examines just how Mary, who was swept to the throne on a wave of popular acclaim, fell so far in her countrymen's esteem that just five years after her coronation, her death was greeted with universal relief.

    It opens in 1854 when Simeon Crowther was the Master of the Bankdam Mills. But Bankdam, though it was destined to become the biggest concern in the Ram Valley, was then only a small mill.Simeon Crowther had two sons, as different as chalk from cheese. Zebediah was, as someone said, a 'slimy toad'; but Joshua had a ripely Yorkshire sense of humour and a youthful, almost puckish, quality of spirit. The divergence between these two characters marks the beginnings of the feud that so nearly brought Bankdam to ruin.As the fortunes of the Crowther family are told, scene after scene is stamped in living colours. There is the terror of the mill fire: there is the appalling scene whent he machinery drops through the upper floor, trapping Joshua and countless others in its wreckage; there are family parties, and garden parties; scenes in London in the hectic gaiety of the Great War; and scenes in the Russian Revolution where young Edwin Crowther's career in the Navy takes him.All through the story is felt the impact of history on industry. But nothing can change Bankdam Mills, and the Crowthers of Bankdam live on in the pages of this grand novel.