Bertrice Martin—a widow, some seventy-three years young—has kept her youthful-ish appearance with the most powerful of home remedies: daily doses of spite, regular baths in man-tears, and refusing to give so much as a single damn about her Terrible Nephew. Then proper, correct Miss Violetta Beauchamps, a sprightly young thing of nine and sixty, crashes into her life. The Terrible Nephew is living in her rooming house, and Violetta wants him gone. Mrs. Martin isn’t about to start giving damns, not even for someone as intriguing as Miss Violetta. But she hatches another plan—to make her nephew sorry, to make Miss Violetta smile, and to have the finest adventure of all time. If she makes Terrible Men angry and wins the hand of a lovely lady in the process? Those are just added bonuses. Author’s Note: Sometimes I write villains who are subtle and nuanced. This is not one of those times. The Terrible Nephew is terrible, and terrible things happen to him. Sometime villains really are bad and wrong, and sometimes, we want them to suffer a lot of consequences.

    This is a novel by the author of Hold Tight.

    After losing everyone but her sister and surviving the Great Fire of 1861. Grace found herself in the uniform of her dead Confederate brother, Henry, her sister donning the gray of their little brother, Will. Both fought at Antietam but only one survived.After the war Grace, still living her life as Henry, tries to find work during spring planting near Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Henry finds himself on a farm owned by a blind widow, Virginia Klaising. As Henry's secret becomes harder to conceal the two realize they have something precious - an unspoken candor that reveals the soul.

     Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

    A young woman who has spent her entire life in a small, dusty town off the Interstate, working at her pop's mercantile, has her life thrown into chaos when a vivacious, cowboy-booted trucker, rolls into town.

    Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women-of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

    But the tribal shaman has a vision that Anpo is wicakte - a two-souled person embodying both male and female spirits. She will become a great warrior and a great asset to her people. During a vision quest, Anpo finds that her life will be intertwined with the lives of a sacred white buffalo and a pale skinned woman with yellow hair, yet both will be wounded by her actions. Kathleen McGlashan Stevens has been captured by renegade Indians, and thrust into a terrifying and foreign culture where she must learn to survive. The sacred white buffalo brings Anpo and Kathleen together. As their relationship develops, Anpo wonders: Can she change her destiny, or is she fated to wound the woman she loves?

    The friends become closer as they wait for the Lord to return to their very own Garden of Eden, and Dilys feels she has found the right path at last.But Dilys is wary of their leader's zealotry and suspicious of those who would seem to influence her for their own ends. As her feelings for Grace bud and bloom, the Society around her begins to crumble. Faith is supplanted by doubt as both women come to question what is true and fear what is real.

    While trying to decide what to do with her life next and at the urging of her uncle, Melanie heads to Rochester, New York, to stay temporarily with her cousin Samantha. She hopes to use her business savvy in an attempt to help Sam sort out the financial woes of her small bookstore. During her stay, Melanie meets and becomes close to the family that owns the property on which Samantha lives, the charming Benjamin Rhodes, a distinguished, successful businessman, as well as his beautiful and intriguing daughter Taylor. Surprised by what and how she feels for each of them, Melanie is soon forced to face the facts and re-examine what's really important to her in life, career and love.

    When the only romance in her life consists of Hallmark movie marathons, she’s pretty sure things could not get more discouraging. When a knock sounds at the door, Holly suddenly finds herself face-to-face with a stranger. A hot, handsome butch named Nic. When the chemistry sparks between them, Holly is faced with a tantalizing new dilemma – will she be naughty or nice? Need a little something to warm you up for a spell on a cold winter’s night? This steamy short story is exactly what you need. *** Includes a preview of KC Luck’s full-length novel “Welcome to Ruby’s” ***

    Even though a car accident caused the optical illusion, Erin’s skills as a doctor were outshone by her luminous smile. Katie begins to devise a series of excuses to trek to the small town where Erin lives and works.According to Katie’s complex rating system Erin has great promise. She’s beautiful, bright, athletic and good-hearted. Erin professes to love her job and is happy with small town life. But Katie thinks that Erin is secretly a risk-taker who craves excitement—the kind of excitement that Katie would love to provide. The first time Katie sees Erin flying down a ski slope she’s hooked, and their first kiss seals the deal.That’s when the trouble begins. Erin’s nearly an indentured servant. The town paid for her education and she promised to serve as their doctor for ten years. Ten long years attached to a place that’s only sixty miles but seems light years away from Katie’s beloved Boston.Something tells them that they could be good together, and the mutual attraction is undeniable. But one or both of them is going to have to make some massive changes before they can let the sparks fly.

    Clever, rich, and beautiful, Ada Averley treats Rose as an equal. And Rose could use a friend. Especially now that she, at barely sixteen, has risen to the position of ladies' maid. Rose knows she should be grateful to have a place at a house like Somerton. Still, she can't help but wonder what her life might have been had she been born a lady, like Ada.For the first time in a decade, the Averleys have returned to Somerton, their majestic ancestral estate. But terrible scandal has followed Ada's beloved father all the way from India. Now Ada finds herself torn between her own happiness and her family's honor. Only she has the power to restore the Averley name-but it would mean giving up her one true love ... someone she could never persuade her father to accept.Sumptuous and enticing, the first novel in the At Somerton series introduces two worlds, utterly different yet entangled, where ruthless ambition, forbidden attraction, and unspoken dreams are hidden behind dutiful smiles and glittering jewels. All those secrets are waiting ... at Somerton.

    Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Blackwater Lightship is a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Tóibín explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself.

    As a little girl in South Carolina, she prefers playing Tarzan to playing Jane. As a teenage beauty queen she spikes her Cokes with spirits of ammonia and baffles her elders with her Freedom Riding sympathies. As a young woman in the 1960s and '70s, she hypnotizes her way to Harvard, finds herself as a lesbian, then very nearly loses herself to booze and shamans. And though the wry, rebellious, and vision-haunted heroine of this exhilarating novel may sometimes seem to be living a magnolia-scented Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Blanche McCrary Boyd's The Revolution of Little Girls is a completely original arid captivating work.

    Holly tells herself that the reason she hasn’t asked her girlfriend to move in (after four years of dating) is that she’s too busy–but it isn’t true. A very book-obsessed librarian, Holly has buried herself in so many romantic and magical stories, that at night, she dreams of a woman who will sweep her off her feet–something her indifferent girlfriend has never done. But one night, during an unusually vicious storm, magic and romance appear in Holly’s backyard in the form of a mysterious, gorgeous woman…wielding a sword. The dashing stranger’s name is Virago. She claims that she’s a warrior on the hunt for a great and terrible beast; that she, and the beast, slipped through a portal from their world into ours. Holly isn’t sure what to believe, but she is now responsible for a (possibly crazy) swordswoman who is bewildered by modern-day conveniences like escalators, but not by the chivalry of sweeping a woman off her feet. Can Holly help Virago find her own world again, or will that falling-in-love thing get in the way? And, of course, there’s the tiny problem of the beast Virago wounded that is now seeking revenge…