52-year-old Lily Crisp has traveled from Idaho to a coastal village in southern France in order to reassess her life. Her cattle-ranching husband of 26 years died suddenly two years before, and Lily, still processing that loss and complications from a love affair she had ten years earlier, takes up residence in the French farmhouse that has been in her husband’s family for generations. To make sense of both past and present, she turns to her old portable typewriter, Madame Olivetti, with whom she shares her secrets, pounding out on creaky keys a story about love and loss, courage and betrayal,
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First published in 1920 and now a major motion picture starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Chéri is one of Colette’s most admired novels. By turns sensual and intensely emotional, the love affair captured in this sparkling work raises timeless questions about the nature of power and longing in relationships. Known as Chéri, Fred Peloux is a young playboy under the spell of Léa de Lonval, a courtesan twice his age. Once famous for her beauty and charisma, she must confront the reality of her fading good looks, along with Chéri’s intention to marry a wealthy girl. Yet Chéri is deeply attached to Léa,
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“Men will want you like they want a glass of rum…One man will love you. But you won’t love him. You will destroy his life. The one you love will break your heart in two.”
So says the soothsayer, when predicting young Celia’s future. Raised in the tropics of Tobago by an aunt she loves and an uncle she fears, Celia has never felt that she belonged. When her uncle–a man the neighbors call Allah because he thinks himself mightier than God–does something unforgivable, Celia escapes to the bustling capital city.
There she quickly embraces her burgeoning independence,
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Casting Off:
1. Ending a knitted work.
2. Releasing lines holding a boat to its mooring.
3. Letting go…
Rebecca Moray leaps at the chance to leave the States and study Irish sweater-making on a tiny island off the coast of Galway. The town is so close-knit that everyone immediately knows of Rebecca and her daughter, Rowan, and why they are there. What they don’t know is that Rebecca’s really looking to escape an abusive relationship, one that perhaps a million miles can’t even heal….
Local fisherman Sean Morahan hates strangers—and people around town know to keep their distance,
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An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time. The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.
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In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African,
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