An American boy goes to live with his grandfather in England where he becomes heir to a title and a fortune.

McCullough mixes famous and obscure names and delivers capsule biographies of everyone to produce a colorful parade of educated, Victorian-era American travelers and their life-changing experiences in Paris.

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...

Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature written by American humorist Mark Twain. It was written during 1870-71 and published in 1872 as a prequel to his first book The Innocents Abroad (1869). This book tells of Twain's adventures prior to his pleasure cruise related in Innocents Abroad. Roughing It follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West during the years 1861-1867. After a brief stint as a Confederate...

Drawing on never-before-seen documents and told from a unique insider's viewpoint, the CNN anchor tells the story of his legendary family and their remarkable influence.

The gripping story of an epic prairie snowstorm that killed hundreds of newly arrived settlers and cast a shadow on the promise of the American frontier. January 12, 1888, began as an unseasonably warm morning across Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, the weather so mild that children walked to school without coats and gloves. But that afternoon, without warning, the atmosphere suddenly, violently changed. One moment the air was calm; the next...

Lucien Chardon, an aspiring young author, leaves his small provincial hometown and attempts to succeed in Parisian literary circles of the early nineteenth century.

Describes the Great Irish Potato Famine that began in 1845 and discusses how the combined forces of bacterial infection, political greed, and religious intolerance started a disaster that killed twice as many people as died during the American Civil War.

Four members of a nineteenth-century London social club journey to places outside the city and become involved in romantic adventures and a few legal scrapes.

Regarded as one of Arnold Bennett's finest works, The Old Wives' Tale was first published in 1908. It tells the story of sisters Constance and Sophia Baines, both very different from one another, and follows their lives from youth into old age. Bennett's inspiration was an encounter in a Parisian restaurant: "an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous

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