A self-made American goes to Europe to enjoy his fortune and becomes engaged to a French widow from a noble family. Depicts the contrast between American and European culture.

With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...

"The tragic story of Michael Henchard and his painful quest to be forgotten -- an unforgettable tale of love, greed, and loss"--Page 4 of cover.

Elfride Swancourt is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Corwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began A Pair of Blue Eyes during the beginning of his courtship of his first wife, Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and...

Hailed as a masterpiece in Britain, this epic novel is at once a great love story, a riveting political thriller, and a profound analysis of modern Iran. It is the spring of 1974, and John Pitt, a young Englishman, sets off for the hippie East, stopping in Iran. There, in the lovely city of Isfahan, he meets the enchanting and spirited Shirin, an Iranian schoolgirl of seventeen. They fall desperately in love, marry in secret, and are forced into...

In the five years since Julia visited her aunt and uncle's home in Malibu, her life has been turned upside down by her daughter's death. She expects to find nothing more than peace and solitude as she house-sits with only her dog, Bonnie, for company. But she finds herself drawn to the handsome man who oversees the lemon orchard. Roberto expertly tends the trees to support his extended Mexican family. What connection could these two people share?...

Impulsively buying a puppy on the Internet after the heartbreak of watching the love of her life marry another, Van is dismayed when her purchase produces a one-hundred-pound German shepherd whose unlikely friendship introduces her to a ruggedly handsome veterinarian.

On a winter night in 1964, Dr. David Henry is forced by a blizzard to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy. Yet when his daughter is born, he sees immediately that she has Down's Syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. But Caroline,...

Raheen and her best friend, Karim, share an idyllic childhood in upper-class Karachi. Their parents were even once engaged to each others' partners until they rematched in what they call "the fianće swap." But as adolescence distances the friends, Karim takes refuge in maps while Raheen searches for the secret behind her parents' exchange.