Here, historian Alexander Ivanov reveals their fears and betrayals, privilege and debauchery, conspiracies and rivalries, love and tragedy as they forged Russia into one of the world's greatest empires. No ruler in history has embodied the oppressive domination of these rulers more vividly than Alexander Ivanov's opening subject, Tsar Ivan IV, the first of all the Russian tsars, known to history as Ivan the Terrible. Although a gifted ruler who did much to unite and improve the conditions in his primitive country, Ivan was also a notorious sadist who delighted in torturing and murdering anyone who displeased him. Ivan's death in 1584 ushered in the Time of Troubles, thirty-five years of famine, plague, and war that crippled the nation. A series of rulers attempted to cope with the devastation, beginning with Ivan's successor Boris Godunov. Finally, grasping for stability, Russia's nobles begged young Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of Ivan's beloved wife Anastasia, to take the throne. Michael successfully united the war-torn and ravaged nation and founded a dynasty that would rule for 300 years. The Romanov line produced Russia's most brilliant yet most unconventional sovereign: Peter the Great, a towering figure of a man whose restless, creative mind led him on an inexorable quest to modernize and civilize the still backward nation. The reforms he enacted so enraged nobles and peasants alike that Peter had to quash a series of rebellions to keep his crown. Ruthlessly stifling dissent and massacring rebels, he ultimately cowed the Russian people into submission, achieving a legacy that nearly equaled his ambitions. It was left to a woman - and a foreigner, at that - to lead the nation further out of the darkness. German princess Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst, known to the world as Catherine the Great, absorbed the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and applied them to a country built on the backs of millions of serfs. However ineffective some of her policies, in the end, she made Russia a major player on the European stage. Serfdom was finally abolished in the nineteenth century, but it would be decades before Russian peasants could own land of their own and learn to farm it productively. The boyars and tsars clung to power until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The sad fate of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, marked the end of the absolute power that Ivan the Terrible had so exploited. The abuses would continue but under a new and drastically different form of government.

    Her husband and elder son rode off to save slavery in the Confederate Cavalry. Their plantation would now be controlled by a brutish slave master and sadistic slave overseers. Would their slaves revolt? Would Yankee armies attack and destroy their way of life? The slave master already had designs on Clare Ellen Fairchild and couldn’t wait until her husband rode off to war and hopefully die for his Cause. It was April, planting season. The very long and very hot summer awaited them. Clare Ellen was told that this war would be over by September and to ‘not worry her pretty little head’ about it. Clare Ellen was told wrong. She and her children should have worried their pretty little heads.

    

    She’s tough, opinionated, bossy, and she’s got a bone to pick with nearly everyone in her life.Set in the fictitious Eastern North Carolina small town of Shelbington, Angeline has been given a terminal diagnosis, with mere months left to live. Upon learning of this news, her adult children and grandchildren come home for one last visit. There is no love lost between any of the family members, and they all have secrets that they voluntarily or involuntarily reveal throughout the course of the novel, culminating in an explosive family dinner at which the biggest bombshells are dropped.Told in first-person narratives by the main protagonist and other characters, the story uses humor to touch on a number of hot-button issues, from race relations and racial profiling to LGBTQ issues, to the #MeToo movement, and to the subjugation of religion for profit.As Bette Davis once said in the 1950 movie All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

    166 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more – everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of I Know This Much Is True. This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb.

    It was released on June 2014. Ng’s novel managed to beat the likes of Stephen King and Hilary Mantel for the 2014 Amazon Book of the Year Award. Her debut novel has also won the 2014-2015 Asian/ Pacific American Award for Literature in Adult Fiction and the 2014 Alex Award. Currently, Everything I Never Told You is sold in 15 territories worldwide. Celeste Ng’s family thriller is a highly recommended and critically acclaimed work of fiction. Read more.... Download your copy today! for a limited time discount of only $2.99! Available on PC, Mac, smart phone, tablet or Kindle device. © 2015 All Rights Reserved by Unlimited Press Works, LLC

    Presidential candidate. Murderer. Unpunished is a tale of murder, ambition, corruption, and the redemptive power of love. Leonard Pilcher, a scion of entitlement and privilege, is a congressman, presidential candidate...and a murderer. As an American pilot interned in Sweden during WWII, he kills one of his own crewmen and gets away with it, without suspicion. Two people have witnessed the murder--American airman Joe Gelardi and his secret Swedish lover, Pola Nilsson-MacLeish--but they cannot speak out without paying a devastating price. Tormented by their guilt and separated by a vast ocean after the war, Joe and Pola maintain the silence that haunts them both...until 1960, when Congressman Pilcher's campaign for his party's nomination for president gains momentum. As he dons the guise of war hero, one female reporter, anxious to break into the "boy's club" of TV news, fights to uncover the truth against the far-reaching power of the Pilcher family's wealth, power that can do any wrong it chooses--even kill--and remain unpunished. Just as the nomination seems within Pilcher's grasp, Pola reappears to enlist Joe's help in finally exposing Pilcher for the criminal he really is. As the passion of their wartime romance rekindles, they must struggle to bring Pilcher down before becoming his next victims.

    It is the story of the struggles, simple joys and wisdom surrounding a young girl growing up in the 1940's in Appalachia.

    He was born without a conscience and remorse is an alien concept. Will he ever find out the truth about the past that shaped who he really is?Cassie refuses to live up to the expectations of her family, instead choosing to have fun with her flat mates and go home with various deviant men.Her best friend, Lisette, on the other hand, just wants a quiet predictable life with her steady boyfriend Jarred. But can Lisette find a way to fix their mediocre love life?Police Sergeant Lynn Gough knows exactly what she wants – and that’s her childhood crush Pete. The only thing getting in the way is his fiancée, Tamika. Lynn knows about Tamika’s dirty secrets however, and will stop at nothing to get rid of her.Rita wants children, but her husband Lewis is not so sure. Rita’s traumatic childhood continues to impact her relationships as an adult. While she battles with her inner demons, Lewis finds other ways of occupying his time. Will Rita learn to address the past to save her future?Explore how sex, lies and love impact our complex web of relationships, and discover how deeply our choices can impact others.

    When Amy visits her husband Hugh at Beckett's Park Hospital, he doesn't recognise her. Broken after serving four devastating years in the First World War, Hugh is a shadow of the man he once was. Can he ever again be the man Amy knew and loved?Barnsborough, 1912. The first time Hugh and Amy meet, the connection between them is instant and electric. While a librarian's assistant and a collier might not be the most conventional pair, the two come together over a love of books that quickly turns into more. Neither suspects their families have secrets that threaten to tear them apart...True love's path is rarely simple... but can Hugh and Amy find their way back to each other?

    When one of the Duke's former lovers manipulates it so that Raff and Catherine are caught in a compromising situation the pair are forced into a hasty marriage of convenience, one that Catherine fears will end in disaster. Raff William James D'Alton, Sixth Duke of Albright had always been a huge admirer of wives --provided that they belonged to other men, of course. When his old love takes her revenge by forcing him into an unwanted marriage with a dowdy spinster, Raff vows that he will not let an inconvenient thing like a bride ruin his bachelor lifestyle. However, as time passes Raff and Catherine begin to realise that the sparks that fly between the pair have more to do with attraction than tension and that this inconvenient marriage might just have a happy ending --if only they'll allow it.

    He has been accused of a reprehensible crime and up until this moment everything she thought about him and their life together could well be a lie. When she digs into his whereabouts, Ava comes face to face with her own past indiscretions and realizes that her past may be coming back to haunt both of them.Inside V is a novel of trust and deception, a dark look inside of a marriage that started as an affair, and the deep distrust that evolves from that initial infidelity. A must read for fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

    Her parents have died, her food is dwindling and the rent is due. When a stranger arrives bearing a note from an uncle, inviting Katka to join him and his wife in America, she leaves all that she has held dear to rebuild her life across the ocean. On the voyage to New York, she becomes friends with the stranger and begins to fall in love. But at Ellis Island, they are separated when he is detained by authorities as a suspected anarchist. Alone, Katka continues her journey to her uncle’s house on the rough and tumble Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Soon she is immersed in a lively community of iron miners and begins publishing an underground newspaper about their struggles and the heroism of the women on the Iron Range, as they are swept into a tumultuous strike that will change their lives forever. “Under Ground” is a work of fiction inspired by true events.

    To make up for that missed final conversation - and in the hopes of impressing beautiful nurse Sophie - he engages in some good-willed acts of deception- posing as the neglectful relatives of lonely old people in the Peggy Day Aged Cared Home. But when he meets Tamara, a frail and sick 76-year-old with a son she hasn't seen in twelve years, who will really be deceiving who? The Good Son is a story about people fulfilling each other's needs, sometimes unexpectedly. It is about love and fear and relationships, and how we treat the elderly people in our lives. And it is about the difference between blood relatives and the families that we make by choice rather than by birth. And, like all good stories, it involves a road trip.

    But when a new businessman in the form of Joseph Dawson enters their lives, both Charlotte and her father decide he's the man for her and, within six months, Charlotte marries the dashing mill owner from Accrington.Then a young mill worker is found dead in the swollen River Ribble. With Joseph's business nearly bankrupt, it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and Joseph is not the man he pretends to be. Heavily pregnant, penniless and heartbroken, Charlotte is forced to face the reality that life may never be the same again . . .