Sara Kent is the beloved and vital white girl who loved David from the moment she first saw him, but they struggle over David's belief that a marriage for them would not be right in the violent world he had to confront. First published in 1966, this epic has become one of the most loved American bestsellers.

    Vyry bears witness to the South’s antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family’s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker’s novel brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light. Jubilee churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history.

    In James Goldman’s classic play The Lion in Winter, domestic turmoil rises to an art form. Keenly self-aware and motivated as much by spite as by any sense of duty, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine maneuver against each other to position their favorite son in line for succession. By imagining the inner lives of Henry, Eleanor, and their sons, John, Geoffrey, and Richard, Goldman created the quintessential drama of family strife and competing ambitions, a work that gives visceral, modern-day relevance to the intrigues of Angevin England. Combining keen historical and psychological insight with delicious, mordant wit, the stage play has become a touchstone of today’s theater scene, and Goldman’s screenplay for the 1968 film adaptation won him an Academy Award. Told in “marvelously articulate language, with humor that bristles and burns” (Los Angeles Times), The Lion in Winter is the rare play that bursts into life on the printed page.

    Forester's classic seafaring tales about Horatio Hornblower from the author of The Good Shepherd, now a major-motion picture starring Tom Hanks'A joyous creation, a perfection in words. Young Hornblower is, simply, one of the most complete creations of character in fiction' Conn Iggulden, The IndependentJoin Horatio Hornblower and as he sets sail on a world of adventure, fighting against the ruthless Napoleonic France, taking command in the West Indies, and leading his squadron through the vicious seas.Hornblower shows his relentless courage time and time again in the face of battle, tackling times of trouble with his signature strength, resourcefulness, and with his squadron by his side.This omnibus edition contains:· Flying Colours · The Commodore · Lord Hornblower· Hornblower in the West Indies

    No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule--"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"--as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, " The Raj Quartet." "The Jewel in the Crown" opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence.

    It seems remote from the march of progress. But as storm clouds gather over Europe, Paul learns that no part of England, however remote, can escape the challenge of the times.

    In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community.

    But of all her high-placed suitors, there was none Abigail could love. Abigail was kept busy when her pretty and naive niece Fanny falls head over heels in love with Stacy Calverleigh, a good-looking town-beau of shocking reputation and an acknowledged seductor. She was determined to prevent her high-spirited niece from becoming involved with the handsome fortune-hunter. The arrival to Bath of Stacy's uncle seemed to indicate an ally, but Miles Calverleigh is the black sheep of the family. Miles Calverleigh had no regard for the polite conventions of Regency society. His cynicism, his morals, his manners appalled Abigail. He also turned out to be the most provoking creature Abigail had ever met - with a disconcerting ability to throw her into giggles at quite the wrong moment. Will Abigail overcome Mile's indifference towards his nephew and help Abigail foil Stacy's plans?

    To save the long-term future of their village, the people in the Italian village of Santa Vittoria decide to hide over a million bottles of their famous (and expensive) wine from the occupying Nazis.

    Spanning six decades, these three novels follow a man and his family as they struggle to adapt to life in a new world. From the death of Queen Victoria through the swinging sixties, this acclaimed saga is an unforgettable story of a farming family and a vanishing way of life.  Long Summer Day: Lt. Paul Craddock returns to England after the Boer War to resume civilian life. His father has died, leaving Craddock heir to a scrap-metal business. But instead of continuing the family business, he purchases an auctioned-off thirteen-hundred-acre estate, Shallowford, where he will be changed by his love for two women: fiercely independent Grace Lovell and lovely, demure Claire Derwent.  Post of Honour: Through hard work and love of the land, Craddock has transformed his sprawling estate and enjoys a peaceful country life with his wife and three children. But war has begun its inevitable march across England, and this remote corner of Devon cannot escape its destruction. As the Great War ends and another threatens to erupt, Craddock’s faith and the strength he derives from his family must sustain him and his village through trying, tumultuous times.  The Green Gauntlet: Though Craddock’s village has endured despite the sorrows of war, he has new perils to face. Emerging property laws threaten his livelihood, dividing his family over the future of his beloved Shallowford. For his sons and daughter, the fifties and sixties will be a time of discovery and change that will resonate in the lives of their own children.

    While preparing to wed the beautiful Bidyunmala, Devaraya is threatened by a treacherous brother within and enemies preparing for war without; worse still, Bidyunmala seems to be in love with Arjunvarma, a man Devaraya has come to trust. And so begins Saradindu Bandyopadhyay's classic tale of intrigue, love and war, set on the banks of the river Tungabhadra in fourteenth-century India.

    Greece, The Mask of Apollo is narrated by Nikeratos, a tragic actor who takes with him on all his travels a gold mask of Apollo, a relic of the theater's golden age, which is now past. At first his mascot, the mask gradually becomes his conscience, and he refers to it his gravest decisions, when he finds himself at the center of a political crisis in which the philosopher Plato is also involved. Much of the action is set in Syracuse, where Plato's friend Dion is trying to persuade the young tyrant Dionysios the Younger to accept the rule of law. Through Nikeratos' eyes, the reader watches as the clash between the two looses all the pent-up violence in the city.

    In 1940 Harinxma, then a young tugboat officer, escapes to Britain. The Kwel company has managed to get away much of its fleet and personnel, one jump ahead of the advancing Germans, and sets up to continue operations from London. Harinxma gets his first command, at an earlier age and under much more difficult conditions than he would otherwise have had, specifically acting as a "rescue boat" for the often suicidal Allied convoys to Murmansk.

    John Emmerson was a lonely man.  He had a wife, a son, friends, but he was isolated from all the people and events about him by the tragedy of his past.  Then he met Cissie, and for the first time his loneliness eased a little.Cissie was everything his wife Ann was not.  She was warm, and compassionate, and generous.  And she was quick to sense the needs of a desolate, unhappy man.But Cissie was also a young widow:  poor, and with a young son to support.  And John Emmerson was one of the town's leading solicitors--a man of importance whose every move was watched by the local dignitaries...

    In this story of the Texas frontier, Capps dramatizes the capture by a Comanche band of a ten-year-old white girl and her five-year-old sister from the upper reaches of the Brazos River a decade before the Civil War. As the narrative progresses, Helen Morrison slowly—and almost unbeknownst to herself—goes from being a frightened, rebellious white girl to becoming “a woman of the people.” Like many of the people who figure in true-life Indian captivity narratives, Helen adopts the ways of the Comanches, marries a member of her small band, and becomes a major figure in tribal life.A Woman of the People parallels in some ways the real story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was taken by Comanches, married Peta Nocona, and became the mother of the celebrated Quanah Parker, the last great chief of the Comanches. But unlike the real-life Cynthia Ann Parker story, where many mysteries abound, the novel takes the reader inside the mind of the main character, and we are allowed to grow with her as she forgets her white heritage and Helen and becomes Tehanita (Little Girl Texan).

    She is able to comfort and befriend the little girl through all the political intrigues and dangers of court life, and to share with her the bitterness of Richard’s overthrow by his cousin Bolingbroke. The tragic story of Isabella of France is beautifully told through the sharp, but gentle eyes of Isabella Clinton and the book gives a vivid picture of life in England at the court of Richard II.

    He knows the lives and loves of folk who continue to live the way their forbears did, with their own code for morality, their own wonderful, pungent humor. The boy is Rafe, a kid with a forthright outlook on life, a family that gives him a heck of alot of trouble and a natural affinity for fishing lines, shotguns, and trapping. The man is Pete Cornshucks, former Army sergeant, full blooded Cherokee, incomparable woodsman, maker of the finest white lightning in OK, and Rafe's best friend. Rafe tells the story of a season in the lives of these two-of Pete's beautiful squatter girl friend who has four children and a hunk of trouble called Luwark-of Rafe's continual and mutinous struggles with a world which fails to appreciate him and wishes to treat him as a child instead of the hunter and hero he knows himself to be." Must have been a good book. Found it selling on eBay for $499.

    She was also the wife of the first Castellan of Pembroke, and so formed a link between the old Celtic and the new Norman ways of life. The golden hive, symbol of her house, represented the honey dues rendered to each Welsh King as his right. When she was eleven, Nesta was captured by the English King Rufus and taken to Romsey Abbey, to be educated with other royal wards. There, three years later, Henry of Coutances, William the Conqueror's fourth son, came; and he and Nesta fell in love.But Nesta was destined to marry Gerald de Windsor and to help him govern the people of Pembrokeshire, who still paid allegiance to Rhys ap Tewdwr's child. From this marriage, and from her love affairs with King Henry III and other men, Nesta became the mother of the great Norman-Welsh family, the Geraldines, who were to conquer Ireland at the end of the century.

    Her cousin has grown up in the city feeling helpless due to a leg injury. She and her cousin swap sandals -- trade places -- in order to discover new perspectives.

    Her relatives, her teachers, her schoolmates, even her own mother, all made her aware of that. For Rose's father was of an alien race, and her perfect beauty bore unmistakable traces of her legacy from him. — Now Rose was deeply, desperately in love -- with a man who claimed not to care about the color of her skin. She tried to tell herself that she at last had found a haven from the viciousness of a narrow prejudiced world. Yet all the while she was steeling herself against the cruel disillusionment that was sure to come.

    Captain McDonald McKay was in very deep trouble - with his profession, with the woman he loved, and, above all, with himself. When the DC-7 crashed in flames, he had been at the controls; now he was the only witness to the mysterious error which had claimed 24 lives.