A Cottage Full of Secrets


Jane Lovering - 2022
    But for all the lovingly handmade curtains, and the hot dinners ready on the table for her husband, Stella’s dreams of married life jar painfully with the truth.Fifty years later, the cottage is a new beginning for Tamzin. Determined to get away from her previous life, she makes the move to the wild and vast Yorkshire countryside. When Tamzin finds a sepia photo of a woman, Stella, standing in the cottage’s garden, there’s a sadness in her eyes that Tamzin recognises.  As the cottage reveals more of its secrets, Tamzin is desperate to find out whether Stella got her happy ending.  And as she gradually makes new friends, and starts to win over her mysterious neighbour Euan, Tamzin dares to dream about her own happy ending too…

Curious: True Stories and Loose Connections


Rebecca Front - 2014
    And sometimes they're a whole lot odder than you can possibly imagine.Rebecca Front has always drawn on experiences from her life in her award-winning acting and comic writing. In her debut book, she reveals herself as a master storyteller: sharp, witty, honest and highly attuned to the absurdities of life and the oddities of human nature.By turns poignant, comic and uplifting, CURIOUS is a book of stories, all of them true, though sometimes perhaps a little bent out of shape in the telling.We learn, among other things, why a Mexican wave is a symbol of oppression, how to navigate a conversational cul-de-sac with a French vegan train driver, and why keeping a pet rabbit on a lead is perfectly normal.This is a beguiling celebration of the curiosities of everyday life, and of what it is to be curious - in every sense of the word.

Silver Nutmeg


Norah Lofts - 1947
    Evert Haan, grown wealthy on black-market trading, sent to Holland for Annabet. When she arrived racked by rheumatic fever, he ordered her killed. But Annabet lived to recover her health and beauty and to find a dangerous love with an Englishman.

Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief


Donna Kossy - 1994
    A rich compendium of looniness!

Falling Softly


Maria Duffy - 2016
    David is steady and reliable, and Holly knows he'll give her a wonderful life. The kind of life she's always wanted. Right?Then her new neighbour moves in.Josh O'Toole is also approaching the festive season with joy. He loves his teaching job. He's about to have a baby with his adored girlfriend Stephanie, and they've just moved into a new home to begin their life as a family.But as Josh and Stephanie settle into their new house across the road from Holly and David's, things begin to get complicated ... Falling Softly is a sparkling, heart-warming story about first love, and how life has a habit of turning out in the way we least expect it to.

Plender


Ted Lewis - 1971
    Growing up together in the small town of Barton-Upon-Humber in Lincolnshire, England, Peter Knott is everything that Brian Plender wishes he were. Knott is suave, good-looking, an exemplary student and popular. The friendship they maintain is as important to Plender as it is forgettable to Knott, and eventually leads to a lasting humiliation for Brian.Years later Brian Plender is a dangerous man. A private investigator who specializes in extortion, blackmail, and intimidation, Plender is a manipulative psychopath capable of anything should it improve his status. Knott meanwhile is a family man adrift, beholden to his wife for money, which he makes photographing catalogs for her father’s large mail order company. His wandering eye and a taste for younger women, lingerie—something his wife doesn’t altogether go for—and access to a parade of girls looking to break into modeling has led Knott through a series of sordid affairs.When at a bar, which he uses to set up marks, Plender spots Knott with a girl too young to be his wife and he decides to follow the pair and see what happens. At first it's out of curiosity but soon it turns to a darker, more opportunisitic motivation. What follows is an edge-of-your-seat trip into a nightmare that manages to be both incredibly creepy and eerily profound.

The Joy of the Snow


Elizabeth Goudge - 1974
    Childhood in the cathedral city of Wells, summer holidays in Guernsey, and reminiscences of Edwardian clothes, nannies and aunts mark this autobiography by the popular novelist and writer of children's book and short stories.

Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind


Harold Bloom - 2019
    Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.

When Broken Hearts Meet


Arushi Vats - 2018
    They become friends. Avanti is a conflicted girl, shattered in the tussle between her past and present and Suhaas is the typical prince charming who has two sides, one which he keeps to himself and the other which he shows to everyone. As their story proceeds ahead, both of them begin to feel affinity for each other. But deep in the realms of their hearts dwells chaos that occurs because of their past relationships. Avanti and Suhaas's friends make efforts to unite them as they know that they love each other. Eventually, it's up to Suhaas if he will confess his love or not but the important question arises here is, will Avanti find the courage to leave behind her tumultuous past and embrace her love story?

Mushrooms on the Moor


F.W. Boreham - 1915
    Fascinating, entertaining, and insightful, these essays cover many subjects and are delivered with the gentle eloquence Boreham is famous for. A mustread for fans of Boreham's beautiful work and worthy of a place on any bookshelf. Contents include: “A Slice of Infinity”, “Readymade Clothes”, “The Hidden Gold”, “'Such a Lovely Bite'”, “Landlord and Tenant”, “The Corner Cupboard”, “With the Wolves in the Wild”, “Dick Sunshine”, “Forty!”, “A Woman's Reason”, “The Handicap”, “Gog and Magog”, “My Wardrobe”, “'Pity my Simplicity”, “Tuning From the Bass”, et cetera. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, highquality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author. First published in 1919.

Rent-A Husband (The Abbott Brothers, #1)


Everly Ashton
    Which is all fine and good except for the part where we both agreed not to let anything ‘real’ creep into our arrangement.But then certain parts of me start to crave certain parts of her and things become even more complicated because we both have our own reasons for wanting what we have to remain make-believe only.

A Blessing in the Virus


Emma Maas - 2020
    But the Amish know that greater is He that is in you than is in the world…The Millers have their hands full. A large family and even larger worries. The virus hits a weak point for Joseph and Ruth Miller; their history with illness grips them with worry. As talk spreads and routines change, most of the community continue to be who they are and move forward with their lives. Trusting God, life continues on. Yet the change warrants vigilance and new precautions.But not all changes are unwelcome. Caleb Fischer, born and raised Amish, left to study medicine. Now he returns years later to a different Amish community, and Eve Miller takes notice, and the two quickly become close, but not without difficulties.Despite it all, the Miller family stays united and strong, despite their added worry for their youngest with her own medical history. But as events unfold and the virus advances, new relationships are formed, and love may blossom in the strangest of times, and places.And for some, they’ll never be the same again…Read this warm, romantic, Amish tale of family, perseverance, and love, by Emma Maas today.

Arkady


Patrick Langley - 2018
    From abandoned tower blocks to gleaming skyscrapers, their city is brutal, beautiful and divided. As anti-government protests erupt across the teeming metropolis, the brothers sail in search of the Red Citadel and its promise of a radical new way of life. A striking portrait of the precarity of modern urban living, and of the fierce bonds that grow between brothers, Patrick Langley’s debut Arkady is a brilliant coming-of-age novel, as brimming with vitality as the city itself.

The Five Mouse Brothers


Rachel Yu - 2011
    But then...One brother, falsely accused of thievery, must face the "Wheel of Doom." What will they do to rescue him from his fate? Fortunately, an ingenious plan with the help of their family secret may just save the day. Join the mouse brothers on this fun and entertaining adventure, adapted from a classic Chinese folktale.If you enjoyed The Five Mouse Brothers, then check out The Five Mouse Sisters, now available.AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:Best-selling author Rachel, 16 years old, is a young high school student from California who spends her free time using her vivid imagination to write stories. She has an unquenchable passion for science fiction and fantasy. In fact, A Dragon Named Dragon, is inspired by one of her favorite books, Dark Lord of Derkhom, by Diana Wynne Jones. A Dragon Named Dragon children's picture book is Rachel's first endeavor to the literary world.Rachel was recently featured on MTV Geek.geek-news.mtv.com/2012/01/23/meet-the-sixt...3081 KB

All Is Not Enough


Meg Hutchinson - 2007
    With mounting disbelief, Regan Trent realises that the death of her beloved mother has left her totally at her stepfather's mercy. But mercy is a foreign concept to Sherwyn Huntley. To this ruthless man, Regan is simply an obstacle between him and the Trent fortune. Denied a place at her mother's funeral, cruelly separated from her younger brother, promised in marriage to a sadistic pervert, Regan prefers to take her chance in the wide world. But Huntley will stop at nothing to achieve his cruel ambitions . . .