She does so without thinking about the consequences until it’s too late. By the end she realises the man she wants to marry is not in any position to marry her and never will be. Well let’s think about it, he’s not in any position to marry anyone. The Catholic Church don’t allow their priests to get married let alone have secret affairs with desperate women. This isn’t your standard love story, it’s a dark and intense tale of life for one woman in 1960’s Manchester and to some extent what life is/was like for priests of the Roman Catholic Church.

    Court is a sometimes-unpleasant waltz, especially for the unwary, but Vianne treads its measured steps well.Unfortunately, the dance has changed. Treachery is afoot in gilded and velvet halls. A sorcerous conspiracy is unleashed, with blood, death, and warfare close behind. Vianne must flee, carrying the Great Seal of Arquitaine with her. This is the one thing the conspirators need to rule, and they won’t rest until they have it. A life of dances, intrigues, and fashion has not prepared Vianne for this. Nor has it prepared her for Tristan d’Arcenne, Captain of the King’s Guard and player in the most dangerous games conspiracy can devise. Yet to save her country and avenge her Princesse, Vianne will become what she must and do whatever is required.A Queen can do no less.

     The night of the Great Fire, as seventeen-year-old Delia watches the flames rise and consume what was the pioneer town of Chicago, she can't imagine how much her life, her city, and her whole world are about to change. Nor can she guess that the agent of that change will not simply be the fire, but more so the man she meets that night...Leading the way in rebuilding after the fire, Marshall Field reopens his well-known dry goods store and transforms it into something the world has never seen before: a glamorous palace of a department store. He and his powerhouse coterie--including Potter Palmer and George Pullman--usher in the age of robber barons, the American royalty of their generation.But behind the opulence, their private lives are riddled with scandal and heartbreak. Delia and Marshall first turn to each other out of loneliness, but as their love deepens, they will stand together despite disgrace and ostracism, through an age of devastation and opportunity, when an adolescent Chicago is transformed into the gleaming White City of the Chicago's World's Fair of 1893.

    So why does one woman occupy his mind night and day? He is being trusted to deliver a group of mail-order brides from Massachusetts all the way to the Washington Territory. Karen is one of them. She's beautiful, smart and has two young children that should scare Adam off faster than an angry rattlesnake. He was burned at the alter, left standing with his heart broken and the whole world laughing when his fiancee eloped with his best friend. A woman is more trouble than he needs. But he's the moth and she's the flame. He knows he's going to get burned. But allowing her to marry another is out of the question. And when a deranged woman from Karen's past threatens the soft-hearted woman he can't help but fall in love with--and her two precious little ones--Adam discovers that walking through fire doesn't burn anymore, not if it gets him what he really needs...his own family.

    He must, however, work a deal with her. She needs money to save her ranch and he needs access to the spring on her property. Seems simple, right? But nothing’s ever easy with Pearl. The woman is steely and stubborn, but she’s lovely too, with a carefully concealed, vulnerable side. As much as he tries not to notice, thoughts of Pearl distract him plenty. She stirs all sorts of protective notions. He yearns to shield her from the dangerous outlaws that lurk in the nearby canyons. When whispered rumors turn into deadly threats, Levi vows to do whatever it takes to keep Pearl safe.

    Sunday lives for Saturday nights, when she makes the most of her Betty Grable looks at the Athenaeum Dance Hall. But Sunday's recklessly lived life is changed dramatically when, one summer morning in 1944, the laundry receives a direct hit from one of Hitler's V-1s, and she finds she is - and it seems permanently - deaf...

    Boston native Dr. John Carson is their only hope. Molded by a lifetime of pain and loss, John is impersonal and withdrawn, and treats symptoms instead of people. When he arrives in Templeton, he finds he must work with Sarah Bethel, the late doctor's daughter who has been treating the ill, and his staunch attitude is challenged. She is bright, caring, dedicated to her neighbors, and has a temper that matches his! He is mesmerized by the woman whose fiery spirit infuriates him and inherent compassion intrigues him. Will Sarah's kindness be enough to heal the scars of the past and allow John to open his heart and create a new future?

      This story is the true account of Inge Katz; the striking daughter of a successful businessman who meets and falls in love with a handsome fellow inmate. But when he gets shipped “Out East” to a Death Camp, she goes years not knowing if he is alive or dead. Her love for this man endures against all odds – from Nazi rifles, to starvation, to disease, to assaults of allied fire.   But as time passes without word or confirmation of his survival, should she remain loyal, or, as everyone suggests, move on with another?

    The two sisters have their own secrets, hiding difficult childhoods yet still maintaining an air of superiority and righteousness with those around them. Living with them is their brother, Saville, an adult but with the mind of a seven year old. The little girl’s arrival soon turns their world upside down. Great plans are laid for their good-looking, headstrong niece. Harris is going to marry well. Everything changes when World War Two breaks out. Harris falls in love with a man who only has his own interests at heart. She scandalises and disgraces her family with her obsessive behaviour, making herself a laughing stock in the close-knit town. But Harris is not to be put down. She begins to build a successful business with the support of her aunts and her close friend, Bonny. She eventually meets and agrees to marry the respectable local solicitor to the happiness of her aunts, but at the altar, she hears her lost love enter the church…. And once again, she shows her true colours. When tragedy strikes, Harris fights to regain respectability in the eyes of those who care for her but has Harris learned any lessons from her obsessive past…?

     It is the day before Empire Day – 4th July - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the fifty-six delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776. It is nearly two hundred years since George Washington was killed and his Continental Army was destroyed in the Battle of Long Island and now New England, that most quintessentially loyal and ‘English’ imperial fiefdom – at least in the original, or ‘First Thirteen’ colonies - is about to celebrate its devotion to the Crown and the Old Country, of which it still views, in the main, as the ‘mother country’. Yet all is not roses. Since 1776 in a world of empires the British Empire has grown and prospered until now, it stands alone as the ultimate arbiter of global war and peace. The Royal Navy has enforced the global Pax Britannia for over a century since the World War of the 1860s established a lasting but increasingly tenuous ‘peace’ between the great powers. Nonetheless, while elsewhere the Empire may be creaking at the seams, struggling to come to terms with a growing desire for self-determination; thus far the Pax Britannica has survived – buttressed by the commercial and industrial powerhouse of New England stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific North West - intact for all that barely a year goes by without the outbreak of another small, colonial war somewhere... This said, the British ‘Imperial System’ remains the envy of its friends and enemies alike and nowhere has it been so successful as in North America, where peace and prosperity has ruled in the vast Canadian dominions and the twenty-nine old and recent colonies of the Commonwealth of New England for the best part of two centuries. In Whitehall every British government in living memory has complacently based its ‘American Policy’ on the one immutable, unchanging fact of New England politics; that the First Thirteen colonies will never agree with each other about anything, let alone that the sixteen ‘Johnny-come-lately’ new (that is, post-1776) colonies, protectorates, territories and possessions which comprise half the population and eight-tenths of the land area of New England, should ever have any say in their affairs! New England is a part of England and always will be because, axiomatically, it will never unite in a continental union. Notwithstanding, in the British body politic the myths and legends of that first late eighteenth-century rebellion in the New World still touches a raw nerve in the old country, much as in former epochs memories of Jacobin revolts, Oliver Cromwell and the Civil War still harry old deep-seated scars in the national psyche. Empire Day might not have originally been conceived as a celebration of the saving of the first British Empire and but as time has gone by it has come to symbolise the one, ineluctable truth about the Empire: that New England is the rock upon which all else stands, an empire within an empire that is greater than the sum of all the other parts of the great imperium ruled from London. In past times a troubling question has been whispered in the corridors of power in London: what would happen to the Empire – and the Pax Britannica – if the British hold on New England was ever to be loosened? Generations of British politicians have always known that if the question was ever to be asked again in earnest it has but one answer.

    They hoped it would be over by Christmas... Britain is at war and the proximity of the docks means that life in and around London's Turnbury Buildings is hard and dangerous. Chances are taken, people have secrets, hearts are broken. And feelings about foreigners are running high. Sixteen-year-old Freddie Jarrett is secretly seeing a girl from the local Chinese community - a relationship that would be frowned on by both families, despite the fact that they all support the fight for freedom from oppression. And his sister Grace has her own secret to hide. A secret that no one outside the immediate family must ever know. As the threat of the Luftwaffe looms over the docks, the community is threatened with being torn apart by prejudice, fear and separation, and the disturbing loss of stability that brings with it the feeling that it is only what happens today that counts for anything...

    Anna Denton is not like the other prospectors traveling to the Yukon on the promise of riches. It’s duty—not profit—that calls her into the wild unknown. With her family nearing financial ruin, Anna has agreed to marry Henry Bradwell, the wealthy King of the Klondike.She meets Will and Silas, childhood friends, on the steamer north. After the ship docks in a lawless Alaska town, Anna’s chaperones run afoul of local criminals, leaving her stranded. Will and Silas agree to escort her the hundreds of treacherous miles to Dawson City—the gateway to the goldfields—and her betrothed, a man she doesn’t know.Upon their arrival, Bradwell warmly welcomes them all. But as a brutal winter sets in, relations sour, and Anna is caught between the promise her family made to the power-hungry Bradwell and her feelings for Will. Anna and her companions soon find themselves in a deadly game where few can be trusted and where the greatest danger in the frozen wilderness of the Klondike is man himself.

    A wave of fear sweeps across the barren prairies of central North Dakota in April of 1920 with the tragic news that seven members of a farm family and their hired boy have been brutally murdered at their home just north of Turtle Lake in McLean County. A massive search for the killers begins immediately in the midst of an intense statewide election campaign. Three weeks later, eager investigators encouraged by nervous politicians get a signed confession from one of the prime suspects in the case. He is sentenced that same day to life in the state penitentiary in what the New York Times referred to then as ''the most rapid administration of justice in the country.'' From the beginning, the man denies his guilt and says his confession was obtained under duress, intimidation and fear. In November, his lawyers file a motion in district court asking that his plea of guilty be withdrawn and for a trial upon the merits. Their motion is strengthened when some new evidence is discovered on the Wolf family farm only days before the motion is filed. Some ninety years later, people in the area still recall the words the convicted man was supposed to have said: ''My eyes have seen but my hands are clean!''

    Now, Margaret George, the highly acclaimed bestselling historical novelist, has turned her intelligent, perceptive eye to the myth that is Helen of Troy.Margaret George breathes new life into the great Homeric tale by having Helen narrate her own story. Through her eyes and in her voice, we experience the young Helen's discovery of her divine origin and her terrifying beauty. While hardly more than a girl, Helen married the remote Spartan king Menelaus and bore him a daughter. By the age of twenty, the world's most beautiful woman was resigned to a passionless marriage until she encountered the handsome Trojan prince Paris. And once the lovers flee to Troy, war, murder, and tragedy become inevitable. In Helen of Troy, Margaret George has captured a timeless legend in a mesmerizing tale of a woman whose life was destined to create strife and destroy civilizations.

     E. Barrington tells the romantic history of the most beautiful and vivid of them all - his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Anne rises to fame when she captures the heart of King Henry. He is married to Katharine of Aragon, but she is six years his senior, and though she has provided him with sons throughout their marriage, they have all died. Henry is desperate for an heir, and he becomes captivated by the mysterious and shrewd Anne Boleyn. But Christian law stands in his way, and their courtship is put on hold as he battles those in power to gain a divorce from Katharine. And the moment Anne finally gets what she wants - the crown - is also the moment her downfall begins… Barrington’s classic novel portrays Anne as shrewd, lovely, ambitious, generous, disillusioned, and resolved to capitalize her beauty for her own ends. This is the story of Anne, but also of the days of Anne - when the question over a woman’s virtue was paramount in the great game of kings and kingdoms… E Barrington is a pseudonym of Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862 – 3 January 1931), a British-born novelist who became the first prolific, female fantasy writer in Canada. Her other historical novels include ‘Glorious Apollo: The Life of Lord Byron’, ‘Queen of Hearts: A Novel of Marie Antoinette’ and ‘The Laughing Queen: A Novel of Cleopatra’. Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.