“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 .
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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,
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In a crumbling apartment building in post-Soviet Russia, there’s a ghost who won’t keep quiet.
Mircha fell from the roof and was never properly buried, so he sticks around to heckle the living: his wife, Azade; Olga, a disillusioned translator/censor for a military newspaper; Yuri, an army veteran who always wears an aviator’s helmet; and Tanya, a student of hope, words, and color.
Tanya carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, a place that holds a fantastic and terrible collection of art knockoffs created with the materials at hand,
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Pao is about to marry the wrong woman. Seven years after he immigrates to Jamaica from China, he meets Gloria, a beautiful Jamaican prostitute who steals his heart. But Pao’s beloved mentor, Zhang, from whom he inherited the Chinatown “family business,” does not approve of Gloria. So Pao decides to marry Fay Wong, the elegant daughter of one of Kingston’s richest Chinese men. Suddenly Pao is running not only the Chinatown underworld, but also many legitimate businesses too, thanks to his profitable marriage.
But Fay is miserable in Chinatown; she plots an escape to England, taking her two children with her.
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In 1559, a young woman painter flees a scandal involving one of Michelangelo’s students, and is taken to the Spanish court, where she becomes the young queen’s confidante and lady-in-waiting. Through her keenly trained eye, readers watch a love triangle unfold involving the queen, the king, and his half brother-a dangerous gamble that risks the lives of the queen and all those who keep her secrets.
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Maria Jameson is having an affair—a passionate, life-changing affair. She asks: Is it possible to love two men at once? Must this new romance mean an end to love with her husband?
For answers, she reaches across the centuries to George Sand, the maverick French novelist who took many lovers. Immersing herself in the life of this revolutionary woman, Maria struggles with the choices women make and wonders if women in the nineteenth century might have been more free, in some ways, than their twenty-first-century counterparts.
Here, Rosalind Brackenbury creates a beautiful portrait of the ways in which women are connected across history.
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