Mathematics teacher Hector Mackilwraith, stirred and troubled by Shakespeare's play, falls in love with the beautiful Griselda Webster. When Griselda shows that she has plans of her own, Hector despairs and tries to commit suicide on the play's opening night.

    Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.

    From the incestuous union of the two beautiful children of the Duke Grimald of Flanders a boy is born. Left to die at sea, the child is eventually rescued & brought up in holiness on the channel islands. Only after marrying his mother does the child come to realise the unwitting - and witting - extent of his crime against nature.

    William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities—the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love—that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.

    Realising that she and Ryan are strongly attracted to each other, he at first relishes the simple challenge of stealing her from his rival; but after the discovery that Esther possesses a reasonable sum of money, he sets in motion a plan that is ruthlessly calculated to destroy her.

    Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding time until he can secure passage to England. Adrift and deeply lonely, Felix has no choice but to room in a boardinghouse run by Miss Bohun, a relative he has never met. Miss Bohun is a holy terror, a cheerless miser who proclaims the ideals of a fundamentalist group known as the Ever-Readies—joy, charity, and love—even as she makes life a misery for her boarders. Then Mrs. Ellis, a fascinating young widow, moves into the house and disrupts its dreary routine for good.Olivia Manning’s great subject is the lives of ordinary people caught up in history. Here, as in her panoramic depiction of World War II, The Balkan Trilogy, she offers a rich and psychologically nuanced story of life on the precipice, and she tells it with equal parts compassion, skepticism, and humor.

    . . They are very old. A museum might be glad of them. . . . There are some pictures too,” Mrs. Hovenden brought out with a fresh effort, “oil paintings that were in the rector’s family.” The kindness of Dr George Sandilands towards an elderly patient, and her insistence on repaying him with the detritus of her attic, sets in motion a comedy of errors that rocks the art world. Dr Sandilands finally accepts a stack of begrimed paintings, to the horror of his eldest daughter, a stern housekeeper. But his younger daughter is prepared to be swept up in the romance of old treasures, and her boss, an amateur art connoisseur, develops a theory about the artworks and clings to it like a dog with a bone. Enter an art expert who’s not above some shady maneuvers, his adoring secretary, the director of the local art museum, and a sleazy London dealer.Doris Langley Moore has packed her unpredictable, compulsively readable plot with subtlety, wit, and insight, and with an array of characters both lovable and so delectably nefarious that they’re begging for their just deserts. All Done by Kindness is a rollicking masterpiece of tight plotting and unexpected machinations. This new edition features an introduction by Sir Roy Strong.

    exciting” tale (Chicago Sunday Tribune).   Pennsylvania, 1913. The four Wittmann brothers manufacture steel precision tools. Jochen (Joe) is a ruthless businessman who seeks to improve the bottom line at any cost. Friedrich (Fred) dabbles in Socialism but would never sacrifice his dividends. Wilhelm (Willie) prefers to collect art rather than visit the factory floor. Only Karl (Charles), a widower, has the vision to keep the family business in the black.   Now, as the winds of war sweep across Europe, anti-German sentiment turns the family’s allies against them, and war profiteers threaten to remake the entire steel industry into a merchant of death. But Charles’s greatest worry is that his son will be shipped overseas to die.   As Charles struggles against powerful forces inside and outside the Wittmann family, he finds an ally in Willie’s neglected wife, Phyllis. Who can predict if their unlikely romance is cause for hope or a sign of impending disaster?   A stirring family saga and a brilliant exposé of the military-industrial complex, The Balance Wheel ranks alongside Dynasty of Death and Captains and the Kings as one of Taylor Caldwell’s finest accomplishments.

    The first of three volumes of 'The Complete Short Stories'.

    His omniscient eye took in the surfaces of cities, the nuances of speech, dress, and manner, and, above all, the microscopic interactions, hesitancies, betrayals, and self-betrayals that are the true substance of relationships. The entirely new Portable Henry James provides an unparalleled range of this great body of work: seven major tales, including Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, "The Beast in the Jungle," and "The Jolly Corner"; a sampling of revisions James made to some of his most famous work; travel writing; literary criticism; correspondences; autobiography; descriptions of the major novels; and parodies by famous contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Graham Greene.