At just twenty-three years old, Shauna Reid weighed 351 pounds. Spurred into action by the sight of her enormous white knickers billowing on the clothesline, she created the hugely successful blog “”The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl.”” Hiding behind her Lycra-clad, roly-poly alter-ego, her transformation from couch potato to svelte goddess began.
Today, eight thousand miles, seven years, and 175 pounds later, the gloriously gorgeous Shauna is literally half the woman she used to be. Hysterically funny and heart-wrenchingly honest, The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl includes travel tales from Australia to Paris to Red Square, plus romance when she meets the man of her dreams in a Scottish pub.
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Garnering rave reviews for her wickedly fun novels, Beth Kendrick always finds a fresh take on the laws of attraction. Now she tackles the laws of retraction in a rollicking ride through Mayfair Estates, a swanky gated community where no one says “”I do”” without signing on the dotted line first. But for three Mayfair couples, the pre-nup causes more woes than windfalls. When Ellie’s Prince Charming turns out to be a cheater, she discovers that a man who is good at hiding his affair will be even better at hiding his assets. A successful attorney, Mara still hasn’t walked down the aisle with her fiancée,
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The chance discovery by a young peasant woman that she is a descendant of the noble family of d’Urbervilles is to change the course of her life. Tess Durbeyfield leaves home on the first of her fateful journeys, and meets the ruthless Alec d’Urberville. Thomas Hardy’s impassioned story tells of hope and disappointment, rejection and enduring love.
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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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Reeling from the loss of her mother, plagued with a bad case of writer’s block (and don’t even talk about that extra twenty pounds), Renata DeChavannes feels as though everything is just plain wrong. And that was before the tabloids caught her sweetheart, filmmaker Ferg Lauderdale, sharing an intimate squeeze with Hollywood’s hottest young tamale.
But the granddaughter of the formidable Honora DeChavannes possesses more hell than belle in her backbone—and she’s about to reclaim it. Heading south to Honora’s home on the Gulf Coast, Renata is determined to stop feeling like a wilted gardenia and emerge as the unstoppable kudzu her beloved grandmother proudly proclaimed she would be.
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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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