"Winn Van Meter is heading for his family's retreat on the pristine New England island of Waskeke. Normally a haven of calm, for the next three days this sanctuary will be overrun by tipsy revelers as Winn prepares for the marriage of his daughter Daphne to the affable young scion Greyson Duff. Winn's wife, Biddy, has planned the wedding with military precision, but arrangements are sideswept by a storm of salacious misbehavior and intractable lust:...

English upper middle-class life among three inter-related families. The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family -- their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs -- mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules...

Ned Constantine and his family abandon hectic New York for a tranquil New England village where they unknowingly become part of the secret Harvest Home ritual.

Oldtown Folks (1869) is a historical novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Although her career peaked with the publication of abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Stowe continued to work as a professional writer throughout her life. A tale of family, faith, and perseverance, Oldtown Folks displays her impressive imaginative range and admirable moral outlook while illuminating aspects of early American life that would otherwise be consigned to history....

Elfride Swancourt is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Corwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began A Pair of Blue Eyes during the beginning of his courtship of his first wife, Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and...

William Trevor is truly a Chekhov for our age, and a new collection of stories from him is always a cause for celebration. These twelve stories include:The waiter who divulges his shocking life of crime to his ex-wife. A woman repeats the story of her parents' unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy.The schoolgirl who regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her. A middle-aged couple meet in a theatre bar for a squalid blind date.The...

The mysterious financier Augustus Melmotte buys a great house in London, where he succeeds in persuading many prominent Londoners to invest in his fictitious railroad, the South Central Pacific and Mexican. Melmotte also attempts to secure for himself a place in the House of Commons and to marry his daughter to a titled aristocrat. Trollope's masterpiece is a scathing indictment of the materialism and greed that permeated the Victorian Age.

"The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in London's funding-deprived schools; Carole, one of Shirley's former students, works hard to earn a degree from Oxford and becomes an investment banker; Carole's mother Bummi works as a cleaner and worries about...

Famed English playwright and novelist John Galworthy, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, first gained critical and popular acclaim for a series of novels and short stories called The Forsyte Saga, which followed multiple generations of a nouveau riche family of aristocrats. Fraternity focuses on the intricate dynamics of family relationships and romantic entanglements, rendered in Galsworthy's inimitably nuanced style.

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