And her heart belongs to her beloved cousin, Michael. Polly knows that one day they'll be man and wife. But a terrible secret is to change everything: Michael is her half-brother, the fruit of an incestuous relationship between her father and his own sister; Michael's mother. The lovers are rent apart and Polly is left to bear the responsibility of the farm alone; for her father kills himself, unable to live with his shame. Life is now a battle for survival, and Polly wonders if she will ever find happiness. But the answer to her prayers is closer than she thinks...

    Villagers whisper the tale, but her father refuses to discuss it. All the while, she dreams of the world beyond—of travel and adventure and romance.When a relative offers to host her in London, Lilly discovers the pleasures and pitfalls of fashionable society and suitors, as well as clues about her mother. But will Lilly find what she is searching for—the truth of the past and a love for the future?

    Many new archaeological materials have been recovered since its publication in 1975, requiring changes in the earlier descriptions and interpretations of Philippine prehistoric society and culture." -- www.kabayancentral.com

    Greeley outdoes his previous triumphs with Irish Gold, a contemporary, fresh and exciting novel of suspense and love. Nuala Anne McGrail, a student at Dublin's Trinity College, is beautiful the way a Celtic goddess is beautiful - not that Dermot Michael Coyne of Chicago has ever seen one of those in his twenty-five years - unless you count his grandmother Nell, who left Ireland during the Troubles with her husband Liam O'Riada, and who would never tell why they left. Somebody else remembers, though - or why is Dermot set upon by thugs?

    Only four chambers, but with infinite space like memory, where there is room even for those whom we do not love. Fish-Hair Woman is a novel of many rooms running between love and war. In 1987 the Philippine government fights a total war against communist insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella the Fish Hair Woman, trawls the corpses from the water, which now tastes of lemongrass. She falls in love with the visiting Australian writer Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict. Ten years later, his son Luke is reading this story in a mysterious manuscript sent to Australia with love letters. Tony left Australia when Luke was six. Now at nineteen, he travels to the Philippines because his father is supposedly dying. On arrival he is caught in a web of betrayal that spins into the dark, magical tale of the manuscript. What is fact, what is fiction? Luke meets Stella, who could be Tony’s lover — or the Fish Hair Woman? But where is Tony? Whose story is being told? Who is telling the story? Poetic and eclectic in style, this epic tale threads a multitude of voices and stories from the Philippines to Australia, to Hawai’i, and to the reader’s world. The pool of grief, and of joy, is yours, mine, ours.

    She also has a stammer. But when the enigmatic and eminently eligible Earl of Rule offers for her oldest sister’s hand – a match that makes financial and social sense, but would break her heart – it is Horatia who takes matters into her own impetuous hands. Can she save her family’s fortune? Or is she courting disaster? Witty, charming, elegant, and always delightful, Georgette Heyer – the undisputed queen of Regency Romance – brings the whole period to life with deft precision and glorious characters.

    With Adam playing Santa while draped in Mrs. Starkadders's shawls, the family shares their traditional "Christmas pudding"-a mélange containing random objects of doom foretelling the coming year: a coffin nail for death, a bad sixpence for financial ruin, and a menthol cone to indicate that the lucky recipient will go "blind wi' headache." These lively tales will delight anyone who loves Stella Gibbons and her signature wit.

    Penelope with her mother and brother struggles to maintain their vast and crumbling ancestral home while postwar London spins toward the next decade's cultural revolution. Penelope wants nothing more than to fall in love and when her new best friend Charlotte a free spirit in the young society set drags Penelope into London with all of its grand parties she sets in motion great change for them all. Charlotte's mysterious and attractive brother Harry uses Penelope to make his American ex-girlfriend jealous with unforeseen consequences and a dashing wealthy American movie producer arrives with what might be the key to Penelope's and her family's future happiness. Vibrant witty and filled with vivid historical detail The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is an utterly unique debut novel about a time and place just slipping into history.

    It is widely considered as a classic in Philippine literature. It is divided into 5 chapters: Paco, Macho, La Vidal, The Chinese Moon, and Doctor Monson.This is a novel, not be confused with the short story collection of the same name.

    In love since childhood with Thomas Fraser, when she hears that he's been killed in America, she marries the Duke of Gordon with disastrous results. But Fraser, very much alive, returns to England to claim her love. In addition to telling a heart-wrenching love story, Island of the Swans also paints a fascinating portrait of a powerful and controversial woman and the tumultuous era in which she lived. Patroness of poet Robert Burns, advisor to King George, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Jane Maxwell was a towering figure in her own time and is an unforgettable heroine. (20100126)

    With Dream Jungle, she achieves a new level of narrative daring.Set in a Philippines of desperate beauty and rank corruption, Dream Jungle feverishly traces the consequences of two seemingly unrelated events: the discovery of an alleged lost tribe and the arrival of a celebrity-studded American film crew filming an epic Vietnam War movie. Caught in the turmoil unleashed by these two incidents are four unforgettable characters--a wealthy, iconoclastic playboy, a woman ensnared in the sex industry, a Filipino-American writer, and a jaded actor--who find themselves drawn irrevocably together in this lavish, sensual portrait of a nation in crisis.

    Adrian is rich, innocent, handsome—the son of a leading family; Anna has been widowed in the rebel struggle and was herself detained and tortured by the military; Eliza, the beautiful daughter of a courtesan, is now the object of the perverted desires of the depraved Colonel Amor, Anna's tormentor.As the heat of the carnival brio rises, so do intimations of revolution, for somewhere in the jungle the rebel leader Guevara is plotting a terrorist act: a bomb will be placed at the speakers' stand timed to explode when the governor appears. Anna makes contact with the rebels, while Eliza plots to kill Amor for what he has done to her friend. And Adrian is captured and drugged by the colonel.As the tension builds, the novel moves back in time, in the Book of Numbers, on a headlong, magical, sometimes hallucinatory reprise of Filipino history and the history of the families of the three young people. We learn of the Japanese atrocities, Filipino greed and treachery, American coldness and venality. We learn how Adrian's fortune was made, how Anna became the strange and silent thinker she is, how Eliza is distantly related by European blood to Anna. And we meet characters whose literally fabulous—a woman who forces icons to respond prayers, a distillery owner who is also master of forty-two ways of self-indulgence, a self-contained maid who determines her master's fat, a boy who falls in love with saxophone, a teenage Chinese girl with bound feet who dreams of the return of the Manchu Dynasty, a German chemist unable to brew beer...Finally, in the Book of Revelations, we reawaken to the present: once again we are at the festival on K_____, about to witness the novel's shattering conclusion, its terrifying finale.Like Isabel Allende's The House of The Spirits, Ninotchka Rosca's novel is both a work of art and a powerful illumination of an entire culture and a country in conflict. Her achievement is timeless as well as masterful.

    Lords of the great clans schemed against each other, served by aristocratic samurai bound to them by a rigid code of honor. Bennosuke is a high-born but lonely teenager living in his ancestral village. His mother died when he was a young boy, and his powerful warrior father Munisai has abandoned him for a life of service to his Lord, Shinmei. Bennosuke has been raised by his uncle Dorinbo, a monk who urges the boy to forgo the violence of the samurai and embrace the contemplative life. But Bennosuke worships his absent father, and when Munisai returns, gravely injured, Bennosuke is forced to confront truths about his family's history and his own place in it. These revelations soon guide him down the samurai's path—awash with blood, bravery, and vengeance. His journey will culminate in the epochal battle of Sekigahara—in which Bennosuke will first proclaim his name as Mushashi Miyamoto. This rich and absorbing epic explores the complexities of one young man's quest while capturing a crucial turning point in Japanese history with visceral mastery, sharp psychological insight and tremendous narrative momentum.

    But for Miss Temple, Roger Bascombe’s cruel rejection will ignite a harrowing quest for answers, plunging her into a mystery as dizzying as a hall of mirrors—and a remote estate where danger abounds and all inhibitions are stripped bare.Nothing could have prepared Miss Temple for where her pursuit of Roger Bascombe would take her—or for the shocking things she would find behind the closed doors of forbidding Harschmort Manor: men and women in provocative disguise, acts of licentiousness and violence, heroism and awakening. But she will also find two allies: Cardinal Chang, a brutal assassin with the heart of a poet, and a royal doctor named Svenson, at once fumbling and heroic—both of whom, like her, lost someone at Harschmort Manor. As the unlikely trio search for answers—hurtling them from elegant brothels to gaslit alleyways to shocking moments of self-discovery-- they are confronted by puzzles within puzzles. And the closer they get to the truth, the more their lives are in danger. For the conspiracy they face—an astonishing alchemy of science, perverted religion, and lust for power—is so terrifying as to be beyond belief.

    From the best-selling author of Liverpool Daisy and Three Women of Liverpool.A BOOK WHICH WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH, CRY, AND HAVE YOU ABSOLUTELY GRIPPED TILL YOU FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS.CANADA 1960sMeet Mrs Olga Stych, daughter of an immigrant Ukrainian pig farmer. She has finally made it to the top of the social order in Tollemarche, a small town in Canada’s Bible Belt.But to get there, she has not only had to see off her most determined rival, she has neglected her son Hank. He’s a latchkey kid.As a member of the Committee for the Preservation of Morals, Olga mounts a passionate campaign against the latest ‘immoral’ bestseller. But the author of the book turns out to be her own son Hank…Olga’s fall delights her rivals. And throughout the whole affair, Hank continues to draw strength and support from the one woman who has believed in his work and inspired his love…WILL HER RISE AND FALL SHOW HER ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT REALLY MATTERS IN LIFE?