Hidden in the depths of eighteenth-century London, a secret apothecary shop caters to an unusual kind of clientèle. Women across the city whisper of a mysterious figure named Nella who sells well-disguised poisons to use against the oppressive men in their lives. But the apothecary's fate is jeopardized when her newest patron, a precocious twelve-year-old, makes a fatal mistake, sparking a string of consequences that echo through the centuries. Meanwhile...

In the small town of West Annett, Maine in the 1950's, the minister Tyler Caskey is still grieving two years after the death of his wife. One daughter, Jeannie is sent upstate to live with his overbearing mother. The other Katherine has become antisocial. Tyler turns to his housekeeper Connie Hatch when her teacher suggests Katherine speak to the school counselor. This starts gossip about Katherine's stability and Tyler's possible affair with the...

The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife's death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child -- a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well -- heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddeness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother;...

From a tormented orphan with a clubfoot, Philip Carey grows into an impressionable young man with a voracious appetite for adventure and knowledge. His cravings take him to Paris at age eighteen to try his hand at art, then back to London to study medicine. But, even so, nothing can sate his nagging hunger for experience. Then he falls obsessively in love with a waitress, embarking on a disastrous relationship that will change his life forever....

The first Miss Marple mystery, one which tests all her powers of observation and deduction. "Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe," declared the parson, brandishing a carving knife above a joint of roast beef, "would be doing the world at large a favor!" It was a careless remark for a man of the cloth. And one which was to come back and haunt the clergyman just a few hours later - when the Colonel is found shot dead in the clergyman's study. But...

In 1761 a King and Queen met for the very first time. They were married within hours. Born a German Princess, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was beautiful, headstrong, and fiercely intelligent-- not the attributes the British Court had been seeking in a spouse for the young King George III. But her fire and independence were exactly what she needed, because George had secrets with the potential to shake the very foundations of the monarchy. Thrust...

""Trollope did not write for posterity," observed Henry James. "He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket." Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. "I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial...

Laura, newly married and ever conscious she may be living in the shadow of her husband Alec's first wife, decides to take a holiday with his family in Cornwall. Through the long hot summer days she is slowly charmed by the beautiful old house and the people she learns to know and love. In time her uneasy spirit is soothed by the sparkling, brilliant sea, and her restless heart finally calmed. But is this new-found tranquillity too good to be true?...

Celebrating the 1866 holiday season at the side of his fiancée, amateur sleuth Charles Lenox is drawn into the double-homicide case of two reporters, an investigation that is complicated by a police ruling that the killings are unrelated.

"She was given two choices ... Georgiana Bridgerton isn't against the idea of marriage. She'd just thought she'd have some say in the matter. But with her reputation hanging by a thread after she's abducted for her dowry, Georgie is given two options: live out her life as a spinster or marry the rogue who has ruined her life. Enter Option #3. As the fourth son of an earl, Nicholas Rokesby is prepared to chart his own course. He has a life in Edinburgh,...