The Duke of Ruin When Lord Greene wagers his daughter's hand in marriage in a card game, no one is less surprised the woman herself. The only thing that shocks Olive is that the man that he has gambled her away to is none other than The Duke of Ruin. Rumours abound that the Sixth Duke of Everleigh callously murdered his late wife and killed her lover in a duel --and now Olive is to become his bride. Ruan Ashford took one look at Olive Greene and knew that he had to have her in his bed. The beautiful, auburn-haired temptress will make a perfect Duchess; there's only one problem - his new wife despises him. When a chance arises for Olive to disappear she readily grabs hold of it, and soon the Duke of Ruin is hunting the Cornish countryside for his runaway bride. When he finds her can he convince her that he's not the dreadful villain the world thinks him to be and that his love for her is real? The Lord of Heartbreak Miss Jane Deveraux is in a bind; her brother, Viscount Jarvis, has married and his new wife does not want her bookish sister-in-law encroaching on their wedded bliss. The Viscountess makes it very clear that Jane must find a husband, but at five and twenty the confirmed spinster doesn’t have many suitors lining up to claim her hand. What Jane needs is a large sum of money, so that she can buy the local boarding house, and live out her days holding intellectual saloons for the egalitarian set. Though where she’ll find this money is anyone’s guess… James Fairweather, Lord Payne is the heir to the Ducal seat of Hawkfield. Tall, handsome and with a roguish charm that has women falling at his feet, he should be living the easy life of an entitled bachelor. The only problem is that his father has tired of his rakish ways and declares that unless Payne cleans up his act he will be disinherited. What Payne needs is a respectable —dare he say boring— woman whom he can parade around for a season to convince his father that he has changed his ways. The only person who fits the bill is his friend’s sister Jane, who reluctantly agrees to go along with the charade —for a price, of course. The Marquess of Temptation Since her father’s death, Miss Hestia B. Stockbow has been living a lie. Working as a companion, under an assumed name, all she wants to do is keep her head down and forget about the scandalous tragedy that haunts her past. There’s only one problem… After two delicious, stolen kisses, the usually icy and aloof Alexander Delaney, Marquess of Falconbridge, finds himself entranced by Belinda Bowstock, a lowly paid companion. When he discovers that she is, in fact, his missing ward, Alex realises there's only one thing he can do: Marry the chit and help her solve the mystery of her father's suspicious death. The Captain of Betrayal At the age of eight and twenty, Polly Jenkins has happily resigned herself to the life of a spinster. Many years ago, a young man broke her heart, and she has guarded it fiercely ever since. Polly's life, on the coast of Cornwall, is one of peaceful happiness--until, that is, Captain James Black arrives at her door. The young man she once knew is gone, replaced by a dashing Captain--one who is determined to marry her, and who won't take no for an answer...

    I was their best friend's little sis.  Now I'm all grown up - and they've taken notice. After a plane crash, we're left stranded on an island. But danger lurks in the lush green forest... And I'm left wondering if my fantasy will turn into a nightmare.    Despite the fear of never being rescued, I can't help but be excited.  I want them.  All of them.  And from the looks of it, they want me too.  They're more than just my brother's best friends. They're the stars of my teenage dreams.  And now, my four hot bosses. But this tropical oasis is filled with dangerous secrets. And I might not live to play out my greatest fantasy ever. Can we survive paradise and find our way home to true bliss?

    That’s all the notice America gets of a fast-approaching solar storm so unprecedented in scale it sets the geomagnetic scientists in a panic. Many citizens don’t have the resources, or even the concern, to take preparatory measures for the overhyped-sounding warnings that life as they know it is about to be over. Joel McConnell, a self-made Washington DC businessman and survival hobbyist, is not one of those. But bugging out with his culture-loving girlfriend before the solar flare hits proves to be a too much of a challenge on such short notice. With the power grid suddenly destroyed, most modern electronics fried, and cities quickly descending into utter turmoil, they find the 500-mile journey to Joel’s well-stocked rural retreat a maze littered with opportunistic criminals and increasing hostility. That isn’t all. It soon becomes evident the sun storm did more than plunge the western world into darkness and civil unrest. It left something equally sinister behind. Something that feeds the human compulsion for disunity to such extremes it makes the recent political divisiveness in America look like harmonic brotherhood by comparison. With the effects worsening daily, Joel learns the highway is but one treacherous adversary he must defeat. Others can sprout where you least expect them.

    

    An Off the Grid lodge owner in Fish Lakes, Alaska, Tom enthralls roomfuls of guests every year from the Lower 48 and around the world with tales of his adventures, foibles, and SNAFUs in 44 years living in the Alaskan wilderness. From his start as a Pennsylvania farmboy who ran off to join the United States Air Force, to his arrival in Alaska with less than a hundred dollars in his wallet and a growing family in his back seat, to his forty years as a Bush pilot and his accidental introduction to the fishing lodge business, to his multiple brushes with death, hardship, and questionable characters, Tom Brion has a story to cover it all. A pioneer in sustainable homesteading and off-the-Grid living, Tom Brion built his first lodge in Alaska on five acres in the Lake Creek area, in 1979, and continues to this day building and working heavy machinery 60 miles from any road. Born in 1941, Tom has collected 74 years of humorous, heart-wrenching, and sometimes mind-blowing stories of traveling, hunting, and exploring the backcountry of Alaska in the pilot’s seat of a Vietnam-era Cessna Birddog. A biography in the form of short life stories, Tom Brion’s memoir takes us to a rural Bush life where people live off the land, drill their own wells, put out their own forest fires, and depend on their neighbors to pick up their mail. Surrounded by nature, Tom continues to fly, plow, run his bulldozer, and wrangle his subsistence fishwheel up the river every year in the Skwentna area of Alaska, where temperatures in winter drop to 45 below zero and summers can see entire months without rain. Follow him in this (mostly) nonfiction anthology of (somewhat) true stories from the Last Frontier as he gives the straight scoop about bears, outhouses, farming, flooding, fishing, moose, guns, and aviation in the 49th State.An avid hunter, outdoorsman, fisherman, and jack of all trades, Tom documents his life with photos and illustrations that detail an epic adventure from start to finish.

    She met midlife agita not head-on, but ass-on, fulfilling a childhood curiosity about donkeys by answering a for-sale ad for a Large White Saddle Donkey in the American Donkey and Mule Society's magazine, The Brayer. Hilarity ensues, alongside life-threatening injuries and spirit-enriching insight. As listeners walk with Winslow and Caleb the donkey through training traumas, expert-baffling antics, and humiliating races, they also share in the author's gradual understanding of Caleb's true, undeniable gifts: a willingness to speak truth to power, to trust, and to forgive. Winslow incorporates these lessons into her life, and as Caleb and Winslow learn to thrive, listeners not only cheer them on but also learn a thing or three about being true to their own pure and powerful self.

    In a few terrible seconds the life of a family is shattered. And a mother's quest beings - to save her maimed daughter and a horse driven mad by pain. It is an odyssey that will bring her to...THE HORSE WHISPERERHe is the stuff of legend. His voice can calm wild horses and his touch heal broken spirits. For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubled ears, such men were once called Whisperers. Now Tom Booker, the inheritor of this ancient gift, is to meet his greatest challenge.Annie Graves has traveled across a continent with her daughter, Grace, and their wounded horse, Pilgrim, to the Booker ranch in Montana. Annie has risked everything - her career, her marriage, her comfortable life - in her desperate belief that the Whisperer can help them. The accident has turned Pilgrim savage. He is now so demented and dangerous that everyone says he should be destroyed. But Annie won't give up on him. For she feels his fate is inextricably entwined with that of he daughter, who has retreated into a heartrending, hostile silence. Annie knows that if the horse dies, something in Grace will die too.In the weeks to come, under the massive sky of the Rocky Mountain Front, all their lives - including Tom Booker's - will be transformed forever in a way none could have foretold. At once an epic love story and a gripping adventure, The Horse Whisperer weaves an extraordinary tale of healing and redemption - a magnificent emotional journey that explores our ancient bonds with earth and sky and hearts untamed. It is a stirring elegy to the power of belief and self-discovery, to hopes lost and found again.

    Europe’s youngest democracy is on its knees. Millions are mourning the death of the nation’s founding father, the saintly Tomáš Masaryk. Across the border, the Third Reich is menacing – and plotting to invade.In the Czechoslovak heartlands, vast crowds have gathered to watch the threatened nation’s most prestigious sporting contest: the Grand Pardubice steeplechase. Notoriously dangerous, the race is considered the ultimate test of manhood and fighting spirit. The Nazis, as usual, have sent their paramilitary elite: SS officers schooled to be Hitler’s most ruthless enforcers. Their mission: to crush – yet again – the “subhuman Slavs”. The local cavalry officers have no hope of stopping them.But there is one other contestant: a silver-haired countess riding a little golden mare…The story of Lata Brandisová is one of the strangest and most inspiring in all sport. Born into privilege, she spent much of her life in poverty. Modest and shy, she refused to accept the constraints society placed on her because of her gender. Instead, with quiet courage, she repeatedly achieved what others said was impossible. The scandal of her first attempt to ride in Pardubice reverberated across Europe. Ten years later, she became her nation’s figurehead in its darkest hour. Then came retribution…

    In this ambitious, incandescent debut, Malcolm Brooks animates that time and untamed landscape, in a tale of the modern and the ancient, of love and fate, and of heritage threatened by progress.Catherine Lemay is a young archaeologist on her way to Montana, with a huge task before her—a canyon “as deep as the devil’s own appetites.” Working ahead of a major dam project, she has one summer to prove nothing of historical value will be lost in the flood. From the moment she arrives, nothing is familiar—the vastness of the canyon itself mocks the contained, artifact-rich digs in post-Blitz London where she cut her teeth. And then there’s John H, a former mustanger and veteran of the U.S. Army’s last mounted cavalry campaign, living a fugitive life in the canyon. John H inspires Catherine to see beauty in the stark landscape, and her heart opens to more than just the vanished past. Painted Horses sends a dauntless young woman on a heroic quest, sings a love song to the horseman’s vanishing way of life, and reminds us that love and ambition, tradition and the future, often make strange bedfellows. It establishes Malcolm Brooks as an extraordinary new talent.

    Some are adventurers seeking danger from the back of their horses. Others are travelers discovering the beauties of the countryside they slowly ride through. A few are searching for inner truths while cantering across desolate parts of the planet. Then there is Messanie Wilkins. She was acting on orders from the Lord! In 1954, at the age of 63, Wilkins had plenty to worry about. A destitute spinster in ill health, Wilkins had been told she had less than two years left to live, provided she spent them quietly. With no family ties, no money, and no future in her native Maine, Wilkins decided to take a daring step. Using the money she had made from selling homemade pickles, Wilkins bought a tired summer camp horse and made preparations to ride from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. Yet before leaving she flipped a coin, asking God to direct her to go or not. When the coin came up heads several times in a row, one of America's most unlikely equestrian heroines set off. What followed was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable equestrian journeys. Accompanied by her faithful horse, Tarzan, Wilkins suffered through a host of obstacles including blistering deserts and freezing snow storms, yet never lost faith that she would complete her 7,000 mile odyssey. "Last of the Saddle Tramps" is thus the warm and humorous story of a humble American heroine bound for adventure and the Pacific Ocean. The classic tale is amply illustrated with photographs.

    This edition contains Thelwell's invaluable advice to aspiring equestrians on how to get into the saddle and stay there; each item illustrated with inimitable and deadly clarity

    Now his methods are available for the first time in a reader-friendly, highly illustrated book, and you, too, can learn the program that teaches "everyday people"—regardless of riding style, age, or ability—how to better communicate with their mounts.