For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott's March girls: hardworking eldest sister Meg, headstrong, impulsive Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. With their father away at war, and their loving mother Marmee working to support the family, the four sisters have to rely on one another for support as they endure the hardships of wartime and poverty. We witness the sisters growing up and figuring out what role...

A writer travels to a fishing village to complete her book and becomes close friends with many residents including her popular housemate, Mrs. Almira Todd. Throughout her stay, the writer is, inundated with personal stories from her colorful neighbors. In The Country of the Pointed Firs, a Boston native travels to a small Maine town called Dunnet Landing. She finds room and board with an older woman named Almira Todd, a widow and local herbalist....

At once a romantic history of the mighty Mississippi River, an autobiographical account of Twain's early steamboat days, and a storehouse of anecdotes and sketches, this stirring account of America's vanished past is the raw material from which Twain wrote his finest novel--"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". A new introduction is provided by Twain biographer, Justin Kaplan.

Kate Chase Sprague was born in 1840 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second daughter to the second wife of a devout but ambitious lawyer. Her father, Salmon P. Chase, rose to prominence in the antebellum years and was appointed secretary of the treasury in Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, while aspiring to even greater heights. Beautiful, intelligent, regal, and entrancing, young Kate Chase stepped into the role of establishing her thrice-widowed father in Washington...

While you were sleeping... With her brother Thomas injured on the battlefront in the Colonies, orphaned Cecilia Harcourt has two unbearable choices: move in with a maiden aunt or marry a scheming cousin. Instead, she chooses option three and travels across the Atlantic, determined to nurse her brother back to health. But after a week of searching, she finds not her brother but his best friend, the handsome officer Edward Rokesby. He's unconscious...

After a disappointing year in New York City, Emma Cross has returned to Newport, Rhode Island, determined to report on hard news. For now she's covering the social event of the season at Ochre Court, a coming-out ball designed to showcase Cleo Cooper-Smith, who will be on display as Cleopatra in an elaborate tableau vivant. As Cleo ascends to her throne the recently installed modern electricity goes out, plunging into room into darkness. When the...

Martin Chuzzlewit's wealthy grandfather forces him to emigrate to America after the selfish Martin falls in love with the wrong girl; upon his return, Martin seems to prove his worth.

"Overwhelmed by the responsibilities of running a ranch on her own, Laurel Tracey decides to hire a convict--a man who's just scary enough to take care of squatters and just desperate enough to agree to a one year post. The years following the war have been hard on Laurel Tracey. Both her brother and her father died in battle, and her mother passed away shortly after receiving word of their demise. Laurel has been trying to run her two hundred acre...

During the early days of the Civil War, the Pruitt family takes in two mysterious young ladies who have fled New Orleans to come north to Illinois.