Two strangers unite in this novel of family secrets. When London journalist Eleanor-Rigby Donovan receives an anonymous letter alluding to a crime committed by her deceased mother, her life is turned upside down. It points her to a bar on the Baltimore Harbor, where she finds a stranger who has received the same mysterious letter about his own mother. Together, Eleanor-Rigby and this young man, George-Harrison Collins, embark on a quest through the shadowy past of the Stanfields, a moneyed Maryland family full of unimaginable secrets. These secrets will transport them back decades, across continents, and to a mysterious crime long buried…until now.

    And he has also been the one writer of any time for whom I felt any love.”—Norman MailerParis. May, 1968. This is the Paris of the barricaded boulevards of rebelling students’ strongholds, of the literati, the sexual anarchists, the leftists—written chillingly of a time in French history closely paralleling America in the late ’60s. The reader sees, feels, smells and fears all the turmoil of the frightening social quicksand of 1968.James Jones (1921–1977) established himself as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century with his WWII trilogy, From Here to Eternity (National Book Award winner), The Thin Red Line and Whistle.

    Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story—part shocking reality, part feverish dream —of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen—and pages that burn bright with a rare intensity.

    Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech. Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

    He governs his realm with an iron hand, but he cannot rule his own family: his sons are weak and their wives adulterous; while his red-blooded daughter Isabella is unhappily married to an English king who prefers the company of men.A web of scandal, murder and intrigue is weaving itself around the Iron King; but his downfall will come from an unexpected quarter. Bent on the persecution of the rich and powerful Knights Templar, Philip sentences Grand Master Jacques Molay to be burned at the stake, thus drawing down upon upon himself a curse that will destroy his entire dynasty ...

    Cain's first novel - the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston and the inspiration for Camus's The Stranger - is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder.

    'Durrell is a magician. He juggles with glittering words, he conjures up "cloud capped towers, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples," he entrances, intrigues and impresses.' The TimesAvignon: the kingdom of kings and Popes, capital of the historic South of France, heart of legendary Provence. The entwined lives of a group of friends - and lovers - are transformed forever by the outbreak of World War II. But their dramatic present only plunges them further into the darkness of an ancient past, as they become entangled in buried plots, gnostic cults, religious rituals, and a mysterious hunt for hidden Knight's Templar treasure. From Hitler's Europe to the medieval world, French chateaus to Egyptian deserts, The Avignon Quintet is an epic symphony of ecstasy and terror, madness and memory, passion and death. Consisting of five majestic novels - Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian and Quinx - it is a wild, wise masterpiece that could only be written by the literary master of his century, Lawrence Durrell.'Entrancing ... Swooning ... Charged with Durrell's strange magic.' Guardian'An enigmatic and secretive work, a cluster of dark passages and gaudy treasure-filled caves ... Inventive gusto and fictive extravagance ... Sensational.' London Review of Books'Splendid ... Reckless all-or-nothing writing.' Sunday Telegraph 'A virtuoso, capable of extraordinary feats.' New York Times 'Pungent and teasing ... There is some insidious power in him that keeps one reading.' Observer What readers are saying: 'As if Proust had written Raiders of the Lost Ark ...Templars, gnostics, handsome princes, asylums, madness, Freudians, southern France, Egypt, ancient tombs, castles, exotica, erotica, incest, ghosts, gypsies, ascetics, spies, Nazis, secret societies, bordellos, feasts, Nubian lesbians, assassins disguised as nuns, literary doppelgangers, convents, hidden treasure, suicide, and art.''Mystery, love, incest, war, espionage, gypsies, mysticism, secret rituals: a masterful writer.' 'Magnificent ... An incredible level of writing that should be experienced by everyone who loves modern literature.''A masterpiece ... Unlike anything I've ever read.' 'The master at his peak.' 'The writing is spectacular, unlike anything today.' 'Deeply complex, very clever use of language and gripping. Highly recommended.' 'Hairs suddenly rise on the back of the neck ... Read with a glass of wine.'

    There's Alex, miserable in his cold and calmly professional marriage, unable to leave because of his two children. Next comes Andrew, recently home from ten years in America, leaving an ex-wife and a beloved daughter on the other side of the world. And finally there's Barbara, the enchanting and lustrous object of their affections, formally self-possessed but strangely aimless and unfulfilled.With elegance and acuity, Madeleine St John chronicles their progress through numerous false starts, reversals, and misapprehensions. The result is a deeper understanding of longing and its significant companion -- loss.

    Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.

    When she comes of age, Eleanor is married to Frances Tait, a missionary, and she is delighted to have a husband who shares her passion for helping others. It is not long before Eleanor starts a family of her own. But when Mr Tait’s work takes their family far from home, her children face dangers that Eleanor could never have imagined. She will need to put her family first, before everything else, if she wants to protect them… A gripping saga from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Coal Miner's Daughter

    A novel tells the story of a man who leads an ordinary, uneventful life, until overnight he becomes the trustee of his 10-year-old niece, and involved in the search for some missing money.

    That single tragedy set off a whole series of events, resulting in the Spanish Armada's defeat of England and subsequent demise of Protestantism. Now it's the 20th century, and the Church of Rome reigns supreme. People live a pastoral existence of guilds and farming, with technology held back to the level of the steam locomotive and primitive radio. Still, science cannot be held back forever...a revolution is building.

    During the preparation for the trial, he discovers to his horror that his defense may result in acquittal. As a lawyer, John is bound by his oath to the state to maintain secrecy, to guarantee a fair trial, and to safeguard the law; yet keeping that oath could lead to the murderer's release. Should he abandon the case? Only if he's willing to suffer the state's disciplinary action. Maybe that would be easier to face than the growing anger of the community. Or the disappointment and disbelief of his own family.

    'If you marry into glass' Pierre Labbe warns his daughter, 'you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world'. But crashing into this world comes the violence and terror of the French Revolution, against which the family struggles to survive.Years later, Sophie Duval reveals to her long-lost nephew the tragic story of a family of master craftsmen in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on her own family's tale of tradition and sorrow, Daphne du Maurier weaves an unforgettable saga of beauty, war, and family.

    He longed to sell his first novel, leave his teaching post at a dangerous slum school--and explore the mysteries of women. A lusty novel of a man in love with life's infinite possibilities.