The young would clash on the bloody battlefields of Bull Run and Fredericksburg, while in intrigue-ridden Washington and Richmond strong-willed men and beautiful women would defend their principles with their lives...or satisfy illicit cravings with schemes that could destroy friends and enemies alike. This surging drama is the second part of the trilogy that includes NORTH AND SOUTH and HEAVEN AND HELL. "Craftsmanship nears artistry....A coherent and penetrating vision of the seamy underside of war." (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

    Two men, aided by her father, hustle her mother away without a word, leaving a stunned Sarah staring after them. Thus begins Sarah’s journey into a world of secrets, a world of great responsibility and little guidance. Along the way, “The Blue Car,” set in western North Carolina in 1952, explores when to keep a promise and when to break it, and whether people can really change. Book club discussion questions included.

    When a cleaning sweep of a New York City apartment building brings this lost treasure to light, both the diary and its owner are given a second life.Recovered by Lily Koppel, a young writer working at the New York Times, the journal paints a vivid picture of 1930s New York—horseback riding in Central Park, summer excursions to the Catskills, and an obsession with a famous avant-garde actress. From 1929 to 1934, not a single day's entry is skipped.Opening the tarnished brass lock, Koppel embarks on a journey into the past, traveling to a New York in which women of privilege meet for tea at Schrafft's, dance at the Hotel Pennsylvania, and toast the night at El Morocco. As she turns the diary's brittle pages, Koppel is captivated by the headstrong young woman whose intimate thoughts and emotions fill the pale blue lines. Who was this lovely ingénue who adored the works of Baudelaire and Jane Austen, who was sexually curious beyond her years, who traveled to Rome, Paris, and London?Compelled by the hopes and heartaches captured in the pages, Koppel sets out to find the diary's owner, her only clue the inscription on the frontispiece—"This book belongs to . . . Florence Wolfson." A chance phone call from a private investigator leads Koppel to Florence, a ninety-year-old woman living with her husband of sixty-seven years. Reunited with her diary, Florence ventures back to the girl she once was, rediscovering a lost self that burned with artistic fervor.Joining intimate interviews with original diary entries, Koppel reveals the world of a New York teenager obsessed with the state of her soul and her appearance, and muses on the serendipitous chain of events that returned the lost journal to its owner. Evocative and entrancing, The Red Leather Diary re-creates the romance and glitter, sophistication and promise, of 1930s New York, bringing to life the true story of a precocious young woman who dared to follow her dreams.

    Her parents have always doted on her siblings, Sally and James, leaving no time for her. Kate harbours a dark secret, a deep longing for her cousin. Feelings she must suppress in this deeply staunch Irish-Catholic community – even if they are reciprocated.Crazed by her infatuation, Kate is left with no option, other than to up-roots once more and seek out a new life, far away from the temptation of Tim Monroe.Will Kate find true love, or will distance make the heart grow fonder?

    He was put to work every day in a German factory, where he labored alongside Jewish prisoners from a nearby camp called Auschwitz. The stories they told him were horrifying. Eventually Avey's curiosity, kind-heartedness, derring-do, and perhaps foolhardiness drove him to suggest--and remarkably manage--switching places with two of the Jewish prisoners in order to spend a couple of harrowing days and nights inside. Miraculously, he lived to tell about it.Surely deserving of its place alongside the great World War II stories, this is an incredible tale of generosity, courage, and, for one Jewish prisoner whom Denis was able to help, survival. Amazingly, breathtakingly, it is told here for the first time.

    All this seems far removed from Kami, a boy who quietly goes about his everyday life in his farm village until one day he trips over the unconsious body of a warrior hidden in the long grass.That discovery will lead him on an adventure across the warring kingdoms, facing assassins and enemy soldiers as he journeys to the capital to face the new Shogun. Through his travels he aspires to become a samurai, and in his many challenges he eventually comes to understand what it means to be one.

     Intelligent, charming and handsome, Jean-Patrice has Paris at his feet. But when he embarks on a passionate affair with the beautiful wife of a superior, his brilliant career in the Civil Service goes south. Packed off to the equatorial colony of Gabon to avoid a scandal, Jean-Patrice is plunged from the City of Light into the Heart of Darkness. In the company of cannibals, ghosts, witchdoctors and a gorilla named Chloe, he is forced to revise everything he has learned and find the true meaning of courage and love. Told with humor and compassion, this is the story of a young man's coming of age in the last months of the 19th Century. Also by Marius Gabriel: THE MASK OF TIME ‘Keeps you reading while your dinner burns… Great fun.’ Cosmopolitan THE SEVENTH MOON ‘Few thrillers have as strong a sense of atmosphere and adventure as this fascinating tale.’ Chicago Tribune

    Rosie is having a difficult pregnancy, while Johnny has fallen and fractured his skull on a trip to Orkney with the Home Guard. Meanwhile, Ann Neill is looking forward to meeting Greg again when he gets a much-needed break from his work at Bletchley Park, but she soon realizes that they are drifting apart. When the war finally ends, Danny Ryan does not return, although they think they see him on a cinema newsreel one day...and when Granddad becomes ill they are in crisis once again.

    Eventually, rescued from her despair by tall, dark and handsome George Rowley who fell in love her, Myrtle started a new life and had seven more children. She buried the grief of losing her first children deep within and kept her pain secret. JB and her siblings were unaware of the existence of Myrtle’s first three children until after she died. Desperate to know how such a thing could happen to a devoted and caring mother, JB went on a journey to find out. What she discovered was a heartbreaking story of loss. It was a long time before JB was able to work out that her mother kept her early life and her first family secret out of misplaced guilt and shame. To redress that, JB decided to tell the whole world her mother’s secret. Whisper My Secret is a proud declaration that Myrtle did nothing deserving of guilt or shame.

    As the marriage begins, Guyon is angry and Judith is terrified. He is experienced in both love and war, and is hostile about marrying this child and surrounding himself with such a nest of political vipers. Judith, having watched her father abuse her mother, expects her own marriage to include rape, beatings, and humiliation. What gradually develops between them is a trust and respect that eventually blooms into a passionate love. Their story is tightly interwoven with a tenuous political situation as brothers battle for the kingdom and the barons divide themselves between the factions.The Running VixenUpon his return home to Wales in 1126, Adam de Lacey rediscovers his love for Heulwen, his stepsister, but she has agreed to marry Adam's foe, Warrin de Mortimer, a man involved in a plot against the king. By the author of The Wild Hunt.

    In 1941, Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Berliner, made an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews were being rounded up for deportation, forced labor, and extermination. Marie took off her yellow star, turned her back on the Jewish community, and vanished into the city.In the years that followed, Marie lived under an assumed identity, forced to accept shelter wherever she found it. Always on the run, never certain whom she could trust, Marie moved between almost twenty different safe-houses, living with foreign workers, staunch communists, and even committed Nazis. Only her quick-witted determination and the most hair-raising strokes of luck allowed her to survive.

    After more than three decades in the minor leagues as a player and coach, he was promoted to head coach of the Washington Capitals in 2007. Boudreau revived the Caps, written off as dead, to a division championship and received the Jack Adams award as the National Hockey League’s Coach of the Year in June 2008. His story is an entertaining odyssey of triumph, disappointment, and perseverance, stretching from Toronto to Washington. As a pro rookie, Boudreau had a cameo appearance in Slap Shot with star Paul Newman. Today Boudreau coaches superstar Alexander Ovechkin and a young Washington club poised to become an elite NHL team vying for the Stanley Cup. Boudreau stole the limelight at the 2008 NHL Awards Show with his self-deprecating and folksy manner, which has made him a popular personality at every stop he’s made. Hockey fans know there’s only one Boudreau.

    But everything changes when Abbie is twelve and their emotional, spirited mother casts them into a crisis for which no one is prepared. Six years later the Morris family have rebuilt their lives, and when Abbie and Beatie, Abbie's adored elder sister, set off for the county fair, the world seems a good place. But their new-found happiness is not to last. A chance encounter with Louis, a personable, handsome stranger, leads to tragedy and has repercussions that threaten to destroy Abbie's peace of mind for ever. Abbie struggles to forget what happened that night, to get on with her life, but when she meets charming, honourable Arthur - and re-encounters Louis - it becomes clear that she might never recover from the night they stayed so long at the fair...

    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!''

    For young housemaid, Anwen Rhys, life is hard in the Welsh mining village of Dorcalon, deep in the Rhymney Valley. She cares for her ill mother and beloved younger sister Sara, all while shielding them from her father’s drunken, violent temper. Anwen comforts herself with her love for childhood sweetheart, Idris Hughes, away fighting in the Great War.Yet when Idris returns, he is a changed man; no longer the innocent boy she loved, he is harder, more distant, quickly breaking off their engagement. And when tragedy once again strikes her family, Anwen’s heart is completely broken.But when an explosion at the pit brings unimaginable heartache to Dorcalon, Anwen and Idris put their feelings aside to unite their mining community.In the midst of despair, can Anwen find hope again? And will she ever find the happiness she deserves?