After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of the guillotine.
read more
Considered by many critics to be Charles Dickens’s most psychologically acute self-portrait, Great Expectations is without a doubt one of Dickens’s most fully-realized literary creations.
Work on Great Expectations commenced in late September of 1860 at what proved to be a peak of emotional intensity for its author. Two years before, Dickens had separated from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years, and several weeks prior to the beginning of this novel, Dickens had burned all his papers and correspondence of the past twenty years at his Gad’s Hill estate. This action, in retrospect, can be viewed as a sort of spiritual purge (think of Pip’s burnt hands/Miss Havisham on fire)—an attempt to break decisively from the past in order (paradoxically) to fully embrace it,
read more
It is 1176 and the King of England’s daughter is to marry the King of Sicily. As war and plague run rampant across the continent, King Henry II entrusts the life of his princess on a journey bound for Palermo to medieval forensic pathologist Adelia Aguilar, his mistress of the art of death. She is initially unwilling to accept until the Plantagenet uses Adelia’s daughter as a bartering tool, holding the child hostage until she completes the mission. A caravan is assembled including Adelia’s most treasured confidant, the Arab eunuch Mansur, her lover Rowley, and an Irish admiral, O’Donnell.
read more
June Han was orphaned as a girl by the Korean War. Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage, where they vied for the attention of Sylvie Tanner, a beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary. As Lee masterfully unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another.
read more
“If you leave Opi, you’ll die with strangers,” Irma Vitale’s mother always warned. Even after her beloved mother’s passing, 20-year-old Irma longs to stay in her Abruzzo mountain village, plying her needle. But too poor and plain to marry and subject to growing danger in her own home, she risks rough passage to America and workhouse servitude to achieve her dream of making dresses for gentlewomen.
In the raw immigrant quarters and with the help of an entrepreneurial Irish serving girl, ribbon-decked Polish ragman and austere Alsatian dressmaker, Irma begins to stitch together a new life .
read more
In 1898, the dashing British adventurer Ewart “The Leopard” Grogan was head-over-heels in love—but he needed the approval of his beloved’s skeptical, aristocratic stepfather. To prove his worth, the 24-year-old Cambridge dropout set out on an epic quest to become the first person to walk the length of Africa, “a feat hitherto thought by many explorers to be impossible” (New York Times).
A little over a century later, journalist Julian Smith also found himself madly in love with his girlfriend of seven years…but terrified by the prospect of a lifelong commitment. Inspired by Grogan’s story,
read more
