The heroine, Mary Masters, is the daughter of an attorney, and has been raised as a gentlewoman. Her stepmother is from a lower social order; believing it best for Mary, she pressures her strongly to accept a proposal from Lawrence Twentyman, a prosperous young yeoman farmer with aspirations to gentility. While Mary respects Twentyman for his excellent qualities, she feels that she cannot love him, as a wife should a husband. She admires Reginald...

A spirited woman survives the sinking of the Titanic only to find herself embroiled in the tumultuous aftermath of that great tragedy. Tess is one of the last people to escape into a lifeboat. When an enterprising reporter turns her employer, Lady Duff Gordon, into an object of scorn, Tess is torn between loyalty and the truth.

The story of 17-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Over six turbulent months, she fills three diaries with sharply funny yet poignant entries and manages to find herself hopelessly in love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle" and the heart of the reader.

Reverent Septimus Harding is wardne of the alms-house at Barchester providing charity for twelves of the town's neediest and an income for himself to the town's way of thinking. John Bold, even though he is in love with the Reverend's daughter, decides to look into this apparent misuse of church funds.

"In the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and with Britain on the brink of economic ruin, a young English couple takes a tennis vacation in Antigua. There they meet Dima, a Russian who styles himself the world's number one money launderer. Dima wants, among other things, a game of tennis. Back in London, the couple is subjected to an all-night interrogation by the British Secret Service, which also needs their help. Their acquiescence will lead...

Freddie Watson is a stilted young man who has not gotten over older brother George's disappearance on the Western Front during WWI. It is now 10 years since the Armistice, and Freddie, after a stay in a mental institution, has come to the French Pyrenees to find peace. While motoring through a snowstorm, he crashes his car and ends up in the small village of Nulle, where he meets a beautiful young woman named Fabrissa. In the course of an evening,...

"Lady Georgiana Rannoch, thirty-fifth in line for the British throne, knows how to play the part of an almost royal-but now she's off to Hollywood, where she must reprise her role as sleuth or risk starring in an all-too-convincing death scene ... My mother, the glamorous and much-married actress, is hearing wedding bells once again-which is why she must hop across the pond for a quickie divorce in Reno. To offer my moral support, and since all expenses...

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse— a desk job— Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—...

Aiden Wainwright was the son of a wagon maker in a small country town where nothing interesting ever happened, until a chance encounter with a strange relic changed him forever. Obsessed with unravelling the mystery of his experience, Aiden turns from his friends and family and studies the arcane arts, discovering within himself a spark of intellect he never imagined. But his resourcefulness and courage are put to the test when he travels to a

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"A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor-these form a series of events that change the orphan Pip's life forever, as he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens's haunting novel depicts Pip's education and development...