From the day she arrives at the Biltmore, Tillie Reese is dazzled--by the riches of the Vanderbilts and by Mack Danvers, a mountain man turned footman. When Tillie is enlisted to help tame Mack's rugged behavior by tutoring him in proper servant etiquette, the resulting sparks threaten Tillie's efforts to be chosen as Edith Vanderbilt's lady's maid. After all, the one rule of the house is no romance below stairs.
But the stakes rise even higher when Mack and Tillie become entangled in a cover-up at the town orphanage. They could both lose their jobs, their aspirations ...and their hearts.
“Russo Morin has created a wonderful heroine and painted a brilliant portrait of a neglected court.” -Publishers Weekly
From her earliest days, Genevieve Gravois has known one fact above all: Francois I, king of France, is her enemy. Raised by her embittered aunt after her parents' deaths, Genevieve has been schooled in things no woman should know: how to decipher codes, how to use a dagger and a bow, and how to kill. For Henry VIII has a destiny in mind for the young girl--as his most powerful and dangerous spy.
When the time is ripe, Genevieve enters the magnificent world of the French court. With grace to match her ambition, she becomes maid of honor to Anne de Pisseleau, King Francois's mistress. Yet neither the court--which teems with artistry and enlightenment as well as intrigue--nor Francois himself are at all what Genevieve expected. And with her mission, her life, and the fate of two kingdoms at stake, she will be forced to make deadly decisions about where her heart and her ultimate loyalties lie.
Winner: Reviewer's Choice Award, Single Title Reviews 2010 "One of the best written novels of Venice I have ever read." Historical Novel Reviews
The Murano glassmakers of Venice are celebrated and revered. But now three are dead, killed for attempting to leave the city that both prized their work and kept them prisoner. For in this, the 17th century, the secret of their craft must, by law, never leave Venetian shores. Yet there is someone who keeps the secret while defying tradition. She is Sophia Fiolario, and she, too, is a glassmaker. Her crime is being a woman...
Sophia is well aware that her family would be crushed by scandal if the truth of her knowledge and skill with glass were revealed. But there has never been any threat...until now. A wealthy nobleman with strong connections to the powerful Doge has requested her hand in marriage, and her refusal could draw dangerous attention. Yet having to accept and cease her art would devastate her. If there is an escape, Sophia intends to find it.
Now, between creating precious glass parts for one of Professor Galileo Galilei's astonishing inventions and attending lavish parties at the Doge's Palace, Sophia is crossing paths with very influential people; including one who could change her life forever. But in Venice, every secret has its price. And Sophia must decide how much she is willing to pay to protect herself, her family...and the secret of the glass.
Katherine wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t found the last letter…
Katherine Arthur’s dying mother arrives on her doorstep, forcing her to relive a past she wanted to forget. When Katherine was young, the Arthur family had been affluent city dwellers until shame sent them running for the prairie, into the unknown. Taking her family, including young Katherine, to live off the land was the last thing Jeanie Arthur had wanted, but she would do her best to make a go of it. For Jeanie’s husband Frank it had been a world of opportunity. Dreaming, lazy Frank. But, it was a society of uncertainty — a domain of natural disasters, temptation, hatred, even death.
Ten-year-old Katherine had loved her mother fiercely, put her trust in her completely, but when there was no other choice, and Jeanie resorted to extreme measures on the prairie to save her family, she tore Katherine’s world apart. Now, seventeen years later, Katherine has found the truth — she has discovered the last letter. After years of anger, can Katherine find it in her heart to understand why her mother made the decisions that changed them all? Can she forgive and finally begin to heal before it’s too late?
Based on a true story of a mother and daughter's historic walk from Spokane, Washington to New York City in 1896 in an effort to save the family farm. Clara, the daughter, tells this story of family disappointment and betrayal, love and loss as she breaks from her traditional Norwegian family. On her journey, she discovers what family truly means and why it is a word that comes to us from the Latin Famalus meaning "servant." It's a story of family schism, reconcilliation and grace.
Honor and conviction clash with loyalty and love in this award-winning Civil War novel that pits brother against brother. Winner of the coveted John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction, Noble Cause chronicles the clash of a Confederate cavalry officer with a Union spy as they defend their beliefs, their country, and their honor. Called “a riveting piece of historical fiction” by the Midwest Book Review and often compared to Gone with the Wind, Noble Cause takes readers across the rolling hills of northern Virginia in a page-turning tale of courage and love.
This is the tale of Colonel Alexander Hunter, a dauntless and daring Confederate cavalry officer, who, with his band of intrepid outcasts, becomes a legend in the rolling hills of northern Virginia. Inspired by love of country and guided by a sense of duty and honor, Hunter must make a desperate choice when he discovers the woman he promised his dying brother he would protect is the Union spy he vowed to his men he would destroy. Readers will discover the fine line between friends and enemies when the paths of these two tenacious foes cross by the fates of war and their destinies become entwined forever.
Between the years 1630-1668, the French gem merchant, Jean Baptiste Tavernier made six voyages to Persia and India. His true exploits by land and sea go far beyond the ink and paper exploits of fictional adventurers. Tavernier met and did business with some of the world's most powerful princes and romanced some of the most beautiful women. Sometime during his later voyages, Tavernier acquired a magnificent 116 carat blue diamond. Upon his return to France, he sold the diamond to Louis XIV, for the equivalent of 147 kilos of pure gold. The Sun King made him Baron of Aubonne. The remains of Tavernier s blue gem is known today as the Hope Diamond, but for the first 200 years of its history it was called simply The French Blue.
With Vietnam looming like a scythe over an entire generation, University of Minnesota sophomore David Noble bolts from an antiwar teach-in his girlfriend coaxes him to and enlists in the marines. Her pride wounded by his rush to war, Jackie Lundquist ignores David's letters from Vietnam, where he serves out his enlistment burrowed into the blood-red clay of Khe Sanh, surviving a brutal siege before returning home to find Jackie immersed in a counterculture world of drugs and militancy. To Jackie, the faltering war in Vietnam is a failure of national conscience; to David it is a failure of national honor. But neither her rise to fame as the growing antiwar movement's alluring Radical Queen nor David's defiant counter-protest activities in support of the war can extinguish their passion for one another. Their love endures, even while fighting on opposite sides of the defining issue of their time, the New Left and New Right battling for a generation's political soul--a battle that rages still. Both their tumultuous affair and the Age of Aquarius itself cartwheel into the decade's last great rock festival: Altamont, the death rattle of the Sixties, where shame and honor collide, and tragedy awaits redemption.
First they tried to deny her. Then they tried to destroy her. But she survived to discover nuclear fission and spark the race for the atomic bomb.
Imagine if you would, a story of greed and betrayal, intrigue and danger, war and destruction, the slaughter of the innocents on a biblical scale and the collapse of empire. And imagine at the centre of it all one little woman, brilliant but shy, victimized but resolute, and ultimately vindicated. What a story that would make! Well, you don't have to imagine it, because that is the Lise Meitner story. And I didn't have to invent any of it . . . it's all true.
Thomas has war fever in 1862 as he marches toward the Yankee invaders in Tennessee. But his accidental run into a beautiful Southern Belle makes him question his own motives for being in the war, his thoughts on slavery, secession, and his own death. Troubled by his emotions and in learning of the death of one of his brothers at Wilson's Creek, he is also wounded in a small skirmish with Louisiana Unionists. Now only being carried by the camaraderie of his fellow Texas soldiers, he and his regiment march toward southern Tennessee to meet an unknown Northern enemy next to a small community and church named Shiloh, where Thomas will learn what it means to give all you can for your country. Will Thomas survive the battle to make it home again, or will this be the life he never knew?
A haunting saga of dedicated love, old promises and conflicts of patriotism set in the turbulent Middle East. A British Army officer returns to the Mediterranean Island of Cyprus to discover he has a son from a passionate love affair eighteen years before. Real and terrifying problems surface. His seventeen year old son is now a terrorist fighting for independence from British colonial rule. His former love has disappeared. There's more.
A Greek assassin from Salonika is on Cyprus. His mission? To assassinate the British Governor and a mysterious "Third Man" as well as sabotage UN talks. The problem is compounded when the officer finds his son has joined the assassin's special team in the mountains which is being hunted by crack regiments of the British Army. The entire story is one man's fight to keep a promise over incredible odds and get his son and the mother back together.
The saga is set against an actual historical background of Cyprus in its last turbulent days as a British Colony with Turkish Cypriots fighting Greek Cypriots who are in turn fighting the British for their independence.
Childhood friends Aldric and Edmund grow up to fulfill their destinies, with Edmund uniting all the tribal regions into one kingdom with him as king and Aldric as king's champion. Then, marriage for Edmund leads to betrayal, and Aldric becomes a wandering warrior desirous of revenge and with disillusionment shaking his belief in God and goodness. Anneliese enters his life with the promise of redemption ... until tragedy strikes again. A broken man, Aldric assumes reign as king with revenge driving him onward. Will he ever know peace and gain happiness?
Aldric & Anneliese is an action-adventure novel set in medieval Europe. Aldric & Anneliese is a tale of nation building, kings, knights, fair ladies, battles won and lost, triumph, betrayal, tragedy, revenge, redemption, and great loves. It is a story for the ages.
In 1959, thousands of grade-school kids became wide-eyed fans of the Cleveland Indians baseball team for the first time. They thrilled to the power of Rocky Colavito, the dash of Minnie Minoso, the antics of Jimmy Piersall, and the gutsy pitching of Cal McLish. Eight year-old Andy reveled in this new, wonderful world of home runs, wild crowds, and a pennant race into late summer in a sports-mad steel town along Lake Erie. Would it always be like this? Andy and his classmates at Audubon Elementary School believed it would go on forever, until one fateful April day.
The stunning saga of the Cherokees, told here like never before, fills these pages with remarkable historic events and larger than life heroes and villains of America's most powerful tribe. Delve into richly described scenes of treachery and triumph, lust and love, with such unforgettable characters as Sequoyah, Sam Houston, Rich Joe Vann, the Beloved Woman Nancy Ward, John Ross, Stand Watie and the outlaw Tom Starr. Feel the desperation left by the Trail of Tears and the inter-tribal murders that followed in the wilderness of Indian Territory. See the lines of division erupt again as the Cherokees are inescapably plunged into the American Civil War. And hear, perhaps for the first time, the voices of their African captives as they rise from the carefully concealed wound that was Cherokee slavery. Three years in the making, Secret History of the Cherokees spans over one-hundred years of Cherokee and American history. From the birth of the Cherokee slave-holding republic in 1808 to the high tide of the Civil War in Indian Territory, Secret History of the Cherokees tells the hidden stories of how the Cherokees came to be the largest and most diverse of North American Indian nations. The result of exhaustive research, close examination of the culture and incisive analysis, Secret History of the Cherokees is certainly Cherokee history as it has never before been written. Robert J. Conley (author of A Cherokee Encyclopedia and The Cherokee Nation - a History) writes of the novel - "There has never been anything quite like it before and there probably never will be again." Secret History of the Cherokees is a historical novel without naivety or sentimentality. Equal parts Twain, Faulkner, Forrest Carter and Cormac McCarthy, the novel is a postmodern southern western with a strong feminist sensibility and multicultural focus. Secret History of the Cherokees contains scenes and language intended for adult readers.
When she is chosen to bear the Messiah who will be the next King of Israel, teenage Mary knows that she has found favor with God. But things go wrong in ways she can never imagine. The story of the mother of Jesus of Nazareth is the story of a woman of first century Palestine, a wife, and a mother, who though two thousand years removed has so much in common with women of today. It is the relationship of a mother and son so much like a mother and son today.
In the story, Mary manages to avoid an arranged marriage, survive a desert escape from the evil King Herod, raise seven children, endure the loss of her husband, and keep her energetic family together as a single parent. But when Jesus challenges the status quo and angers the religious and political authorities, she begins to lose control. She struggles to bring her sons under control. Then when Jesus is arrested during the Passover festival, her dangerous and frantic nighttime race to save him begins. She finds herself helpless against the Jewish authorities acting on Rome’s behalf. When Jesus is turned over to the Romans to meet the same fate as so many political rebels of the time, Mary must watch her own son be crucified. This is the story that she will tell you in her own words. Then she will tell you how she survived her own grief, anger, and remorse. Mary’s Story is a Christian story, a Jewish story, and a mother’s story.
