Topping the best-seller charts in Britain and published to much acclaim in the United States, The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. To a charity ball where the other girls came dressed as virginal white swans, the striking debutante Lady Diana Manners made a late appearance as a black swan. The Ballets Russes arrived in London for the first time and people swarmed to Covent Garden to see Nijinsky’s gravity-defying leaps.
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Sue Monk Kidd’s ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the town’s fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees,
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Author of the number one bestseller The World Is Flat and one of America’s most respected columnists, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman has transformed the way we see the world, and he has transformed the way we talk about the most important issues of our time. With Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman is poised to spark his most powerful conversations yet, taking on the interlinked woes of skyrocketing fuel costs, diminishing natural resources, and a planet that seems unable to sustain us in the future. But Friedman is no naysayer. On the contrary: he is optimistic that the twenty-first century can become a time of extraordi nary achievement—from tackling the energy crisis to lifting scores of the earth’s inhabitants from poverty.
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From the national bestselling author of Whistling in the Dark, comes Land of a Hundred Wonders, which introduces yet another unforgettable character…
Brain damaged after a tragic car accident that took both her parents, Gibby is now NQR (Not Quite Right)—a real challenge for a fledgling newspaper reporter. When she stumbles upon the dead body of the next governor of Kentucky, Buster Malloy, she figures that solving the murder might be her best chance to prove to everyone that she can become Quite Right again. But Gibby is about to uncover a world of corruption,
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Barry Unsworth, a writer with an “”almost magical capacity for literary time travel”” (New York Times Book Review) has the extraordinary ability to re-create the past and make it relevant to contemporary readers. In Land of Marvels, a thriller set in 1914, he brings to life the schemes and double-dealings of Western nations grappling for a foothold in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire.
Somerville, a British archaeologist, is excavating a long-buried Assyrian palace. The site lies directly in the path of a new railroad to Baghdad, and he watches nervously as the construction progresses,
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Plain and dutiful and a passionate Catholic, Mary Tudor is overjoyed when she becomes Queen of England. After the misery of her childhood, when her father, Henry VIII, rejected her and her mother, Mary feels at last that she is achieving her destiny. And when she marries Philip of Spain, her happiness is complete.
But Mary’s delight quickly turns sour as she realizes that her husband does not love her—indeed, that he finds her devotion irritating. Desperate for a baby, she begins to believe that God is punishing her. Her people are horrified at the severity of the measures she takes and begin to to turn against their queen,
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