An unconventional parlor maid upends the lives of an aristocratic family in prewar England
 
Cluny Brown refuses to know her place in society. Last week, she took herself to tea at the Ritz. Then she spent almost an entire day in bed eating oranges. So, to teach her discipline, her uncle, a plumber who has raised the orphaned girl since she was a baby, sends her into service as a parlor maid at one of England’s stately...

Scotland Yard's Adam Dalgliesh leaves London to vacation in Norfolk and becomes enmeshed in the hunt for the perpetrator of a series of murders of young women, which continues even after the murderer's capture.

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the skies break into a sudden and reckless storm. All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster. or the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer—which they never did while the men were alive....

The story centers around two newlyweds, Edward and Florence Mayhew both virgins who must struggle through their internal battles with sexual anxiety.

"Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of...

The fourth of Trollope's Palliser novels, Phineas Redux is one of his most spellbinding achievements. Trollope shows a remarkably prescient sense of the importance of intrigue, bribery, and sexual scandal, and the power of the press to make or break a political career. He is equally skilled in portraying the complex nature of Phineas's romantic entanglements with three powerful women: the mysterious Madame Max, the devoted Laura Kennedy, and the irrepressible...

A picaresque historical novel by Charles Reade, published in 1861 and set in late medieval Holland and Europe. The novel focuses on the story of a young scribe and illuminator named Gerard Eliason and his love for Margaret Brandt, daughter of a poor scholar. Interacting with them is a cast of vividly drawn characters and various historical personages. The overarching theme through all of their adventures is the conflict between man's obligations to...

A.S. Byatt's books shimmer with all the hues of her critically acclaimed talent and imagination. In The Matisse Stories, this Booker Prize-winning author offers three elegant tales that explore the subtle interplays between mind and eye, heart and hand. In the first, Medusa's Ankles, a fashionable woman watches her life take on darker, more ominous shades in the mirror of a beauty salon. In the next, Art Work, an eccentric housekeeper's alarming eye...

Lucy Snowe is a stoic young Englishwoman. Beset by adverse circumstances, on a momentary whim she travels to Belgium to seek her livelihood as a teacher in a girls' boarding school. There, surrounded by giddy pupils, under the control of the cunning school matron, wooed by an eccentric professor, and visited by the ghost of a nun, Lucy begins her adventure in true gothic fashion.

"Scandal strikes the peaceful cathedral town of Barchester where Septimus Harding, the warden of the charitable foundation of Hiram's Hospital, is accused of financial wrongdoing. A kindly and naive man, he finds himself caught between the forces of entrenched tradition and radical reform amid the burgeoning materialism of Britain in the 1850s."-- Provided by publisher.