Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau is forced to leave her glittering life of parties and champagne to become a parlor maid in England. She arrives at Tyneford, the great house on the bay, where servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn. But war is coming, and the world is changing. When the master of Tyneford's young son, Kit, returns home, he and Elise strike up an unlikely friendship that will transform Tyneford—and Elise—forever.

    It is the beginning of an unshakeable bond between Elizabeth and Aisling O'Connor, a friendship which will endure through twenty turbulent years of change and chaos, joy and sorrow, soaring dreams and searing betrayals...Writing with warmth, wit and great compassion, Maeve Binchy tells a magnificent story of the lives and loves of two women, bound together in a friendship that nothing could tear asunder - not even the man who threatened to come between them forever.

    Her work as an actress has temporarily come to a halt. She believes there is no finer place to be "at liberty" than the sun-drenched isle of Corfu, the alleged locale for Shakespeare's The Tempest. Even the suspicious actions of the handsome, arrogant son of a famous actor cannot dampen her enthusiasm for this wonderland in the Ionian Sea.But the peaceful idyll does not last long. A series of incidents, seemingly unconnected - but all surrounded in mystery - throws Lucy's life into a dangerous spin, as fear, danger and death - as well as romance - supplant the former tranquility. Then a human corpse is carried ashore on the incoming tide... And without warning, she found she had stumbled into a nightmare of strange violence, stalked by shadows of terror and sudden death.

    Just a few years later, romance and these differences erupt simultaneously with the war in Europe. In a fit of fury and boyish pride, Riley enlists in the army and finds himself involved in the transformative nightmare of the twentieth century.While Riley and his commanding officer, Peter Locke, fight for their country and their survival in the trenches of Flanders, Peter's lovely and naive wife, Julia, and his cousin Rose eagerly await his return. But the sullen, distant man who arrives home on leave is not the Peter they knew. Worried that her husband is slipping away, Julia is left alone with her fears when Rose joins the nursing corps to work with a pioneering plastic surgeon treating wounded and disfigured soldiers.Only eighteen at the outbreak of the war, Nadine and Riley want to make promises to each other—but how can they when their future is out of their hands? Youthful passion is on their side, but then their loyalty is tested by terrible injury, and even more so by the necessarily imperfect rehabilitation that follows.Moving among Ypres, London, and Paris, this emotionally rich and evocative novel is both a powerful exploration of the lasting effects of war on those who fight—and those who don't—and a poignant testament to the power of enduring love.

    Dorothy Strachey’s classic Olivia captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle. Julie, and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Mlle. Julie and the other head of the school, Mlle. Cara, in its final months. “Although not strictly autobiographical, Olivia draws on the author’s experiences at finishing schools run by the charismatic Mlle. Marie Souvestre, whose influence lived on through former students like Natalie Barney and Eleanor Roosevelt. Olivia was dedicated to the memory of Strachey’s friend Virginia Woolf and published to acclaim in 1949. Colette wrote the screenplay for the 1951 film adaptation of the novel. In 1999, Olivia was included on the Publishing Triangle’s widely publicized list of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels of the 20th Century. “Dorothy Strachey (1865-1960) was the sister of the novelist Lytton Strachey and a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group…….Olivia, originally published under a pseudonym, is her only novel.” -- Amazon.com

    This is the story of a trip backward in time in which a nostalgia for the quaint turns into a hideous nightmare.

    Macabre, unsettling and deliciously enjoyable, these stories make the perfect bedtime read – but be warned, once you've started reading you won't be able to stop . .

    Mr Mulliner, his vivid imagination lubricated by Miss Postlethwaite the barmaid, has fabulous stories to tell of the extraordinary behaviour of his far-flung family: in particular there's Wilfred, inventor of Raven Gypsy face-cream and Snow of the Mountain Lotion, who lights on the formula for Buck-U-Uppo, a tonic given to elephants to enable them to face tigers with the necessary nonchalance. Its explosive effects on a shy young curate and then the higher clergy is gravely revealed. Then there's his cousin James, the detective-story writer, who has inherited a cottage more haunted than anything in his own imagination. And Isadore Zinzinheimer, head of the Bigger, Better & Brighter Motion Picture Company. Tall tales all - but among Wodehouse's best.

    Set in 18th century Naples, based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, and peopled with many of the great figures of the day, this unconventional, bestselling historical romance from the National Book Award-winning author of In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.

    The famous story opens with a blinding snowstorm trapping a small group of owners and guests in an isolated estate, recently re-purposed as a country inn. Although not aware of it, they are also trapped by a homicidal maniac! Out of this deceptively simple set-up, Agatha Christie fashioned one of her most ingenious puzzlers which, in turn, provided the basis for "The Mousetrap," the longest-running play in history.The book includes this classic and eight more deliciously clever gems (solved to perfection by Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple and Harley Quin). The inimitable Christie at her inventive best - proving her reputation as "the champion deceiver of our time." The New York TimesThe collection includes: 1. Three Blind Mice; 2. Strange Jest; 3. The Tape-Measure Murder; 4. The Case of the Perfect Maid; 5. The Case of the Caretaker; 6. The Third Floor Flat; 7. The Adventure of Johnny Waverly; 8. Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds; and 9. The Love Detectives. Of the nine, the 1st is an Agatha Christie standalone - not part of any series. Following that are Miss Marple in #2, #3, #4, and #5; Hercule Poirot in #6, #7, and #8, and the intriguing Mr. Harley Quin in #9. Librarian's note: this entry is for the collection as a whole: "Three Blind Mice and Other Stories." Entries for each of the individual short stories, including the title story, can be found elsewhere on Goodreads.

    The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal ..!" These two short novels raise the curtain on an entrancing new world for all who love Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Trollope's "Barsetshire Chronicles". The setting is Carlingford, a small town not far from London in the 1800s. The cast ranges from tradesmen to aristocracy and clergy ... The Rector opens as Carlingford awaits the arrival of their new rector. Will he be high church or low? And--for there are numerous unmarried ladies in Carlingford--will he be a bachelor? After fifteen years at All Souls the Rector fancies himself immune to womanhood: he is yet to encounter the blue ribbons and dimples of Miss Lucy Wodehouse. The Doctor's Family introduces us to the newly built quarter of Carlingford where young Dr Rider seeks his living. Already burdened by his improvident brother's return from Australia, he is appalled when his brother's family and sister-in-law, Nettie, follow him to Carlingford. But the susceptible doctor is yet to discover Nettie's attractions--and her indomitable Australian will.

    The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men as they try to come to terms with needs and impulses that can start a terrifying train of events. Sexual attraction is shown as a game that often turns sour, an experience that brings with it painful insights and releases uncertainty, panic, vanity and a constant need for reassurance. Thus a young couple on holiday start a game of pretence that threatens to destroy their relationship, two middle-aged men go in search of girls they don't really want, a young man renews contact with an older woman who feels humiliated by her ageing body, an elderly doctor uses his beautiful wife to increase his attraction and minister to his sexual vanity. In Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera shows himself, once again, as a master of fiction's most graceful illusions and surprises.

    Author of the New York Times bestsellers “Let the Great World Spin” and “Transatlantic,” McCann has been called “a giant among us” (Peter Carey), “dazzlingly talented” (O: The Oprah Magazine), and “that rare species in contemporary fiction: a literary writer who is an exceptional storyteller” (The Independent). He’s received a National Book Award, an Oscar nomination, and a slew of international prizes. His talents are on full display in his new short story, “Gone,” a deeply affecting literary thriller about a mother and son, alone in a cottage on the west coast of Ireland, and the search that ensues when the boy—whom she adopted years before, deaf and with “already a whole history written in him”—goes missing. He slips away in early morning, down to the cold sea with his new Christmas wetsuit, and as the hours and days drag on, the coast guard, police, dogs, fishermen, farmers, and schoolchildren holding hands search the sea and walk the fields while the television crews and detectives come and go, the police at the cottage seeming to “ghost into one another: almost as if they could slip into one another’s faces.” The mother, Rebecca, now under suspicion, is racked with guilt over the decisions that led to her son’s disappearance, and tormented by the judgment of others: "You bought what? A wetsuit? Why in the world? What sort of mother? How much wine did you drink?" For Rebecca, “every outcome was unwhisperable.” “Gone” is a charged narrative that propels you forward, heart in your throat, and a moving, intimate look at life’s struggles toward grace and a kind of redemption.

    If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don't know how to explain.In the early Seventies a glamorous and androgynous couple known collectively as Evie/Stevie appear out of nowhere on the isolated concrete campus of a new university. To a group of teenagers experimenting with radical ideas they seem blown back from the future, unsettling everything and uncovering covert desires. But the varnished patina of youth and flamboyant self-expression hides deep anxieties and hidden histories. For Adele, with the most to conceal, Evie/Stevie become a lifelong obsession, as she examines what happened on the night of her own twentieth birthday and her friends' complicity in their fate. A set of school exercise books might reveal everything, but they have been missing for nearly forty years. From summers in Cornwall to London in the twenty-first century, long after they have disappeared, Evie/Stevie go on challenging everyone's ideas of what their lives should turn out to be.