Reading list
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (Virago Modern Classics)
 | author: Elizabeth Taylor asin: 1844083217 binding: Paperback list price: $13.95 USD amazon price: $11.16 USD |
Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1)
 | author: Stephenie Meyer asin: 0316015849 binding: Paperback list price: $10.99 USD amazon price: $6.04 USD |
"Softly he brushed my cheek, then held my face between his marble hands. ''Be very still,'' he whispered, as if I wasn''t already frozen. Slowly, never moving his eyes from mine, he leaned toward me. Then abruptly, but very gently, he rested his cold cheek against the hollow at the base of my throat. " As Shakespeare knew, love burns high when thwarted by obstacles. In Twilight, an exquisite fantasy by Stephenie Meyer, readers discover a pair of lovers who are supremely star-crossed. Bella adores beautiful Edward, and he returns her love. But Edward is having a hard time controlling the blood lust she arouses in him, because--he''s a vampire. At any moment, the intensity of their passion could drive him to kill her, and he agonizes over the danger. But, Bella would rather be dead than part from Edward, so she risks her life to stay near him, and the novel burns with the erotic tension of their dangerous and necessarily chaste relationship.Meyer has achieved quite a feat by making this scenario completely human and believable. She begins with a familiar YA premise (the new kid in school), and lulls us into thinking this will be just another realistic young adult novel. Bella has come to the small town of Forks on the gloomy Olympic Peninsula to be with her father. At school, she wonders about a group of five remarkably beautiful teens, who sit together in the cafeteria but never eat. As she grows to know, and then love, Edward, she learns their secret. They are all rescued vampires, part of a family headed by saintly Carlisle, who has inspired them to renounce human prey. For Edward''s sake they welcome Bella, but when a roving group of tracker vampires fixates on her, the family is drawn into a desperate pursuit to protect the fragile human in their midst. The precision and delicacy of Meyer''s writing lifts this wonderful novel beyond the limitations of the horror genre to a place among the best of YA fiction. (Ages 12 and up)
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
 | author: Eva Rice asin: 0525949313 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $24.95 USD |
Eva Rice, daughter of the famed lyricist Tim Rice, has written a captivating and wonderfully stylized novel about a group of friends in postwar London’s glamorous and daring young society.
With mannered prose dripping in the charm of 1950s London, TheLost Art of Keeping Secrets centers around Penelope, the wide-eyed daughter of a legendary beauty, Talitha, who is unable to move beyond the loss of her charmed husband to the war. Penelope, with her mother and brother, struggles to maintain their vast and crumbling ancestral home—and the lifestyle to which they have grown accustomed—while postwar London spins toward the next decade’s cultural revolution.
Penelope wants nothing more than to fall in love. When her new best friend, Charlotte, a free spirit in the young society set, drags Penelope into vibrant young London with all of its grand parties, she sets in motion great change for them all. Charlotte’s mysterious and attractive brother Harry plots to use Penelope to make his American ex-girlfriend jealous, with unforeseen consequences, until a dashing, wealthy American movie producer arrives with what might be the key to Penelope’s—and her family’s—future happiness.
Vibrant, witty, and filled with vivid historical detail, The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets is an utterly unique debut novel about a time and place just slipping into history.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Classics)
 | author: Thomas Hardy asin: 0141439599 binding: Paperback list price: $8.00 USD amazon price: $8.00 USD |
Edited with Notes by Tim Dolin and an Introduction by Margaret R. Higonnet
At Mrs Lippincote's (Virago Modern Classics)
 | author: Elizabeth Taylor asin: 1844083098 binding: Paperback list price: $13.95 USD amazon price: $11.16 USD |
Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic
 | author: Irene Gammel asin: 0312382375 binding: Hardcover list price: $27.95 USD amazon price: $18.45 USD |
In June 1908, a red-haired orphan appeared on to the streets of Boston and a modern legend was born. That little girl was Anne Shirley, better known as Anne of Green Gables, and her first appearance was in a book that has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 35 languages (including Braille). The author who created her was Lucy Maud Montgomery, a writer who revealed very little of herself and her method of crafting a story. On the centenary of its publication, Irene Gammel tells the braided story of both Anne and Maud and, in so doing, shows how a literary classic was born. Montgomery’s own life began in the rural Cavendish family farmhouse on Prince Edward Island, the place that became the inspiration for Green Gables. Mailmen brought the world to the farmhouse’s kitchen door in the form of American mass market periodicals sparking the young Maud’s imagination. From the vantage point of her small world, Montgomery pored over these magazines, gleaning bits of information about how to dress, how to behave and how a proper young lady should grow. She began to write, learning how to craft marketable stories from the magazines’ popular fiction; at the same time the fashion photos inspired her visual imagination. One photo that especially intrigued her was that of a young woman named Evelyn Nesbit, the model for painters and photographers and lover of Stanford White. That photo was the spark for what became Anne Shirley. Blending biography with cultural history, Looking for Anne of Green Gables is a gold mine for fans of the novels and answers a trunk load of questions: Where did Anne get the “e” at the end of her name? How did Montgomery decide to give her red hair? How did Montgomery’s courtship and marriage to Reverend Ewan Macdonald affect the story? Irene Gammel's dual biography of Anne Shirley and the woman who created her will delight the millions who have loved the red haired orphan ever since she took her first step inside the gate of Green Gables farm in Avonlea.
Rose Cottage: A Novel
 | author: Mary Stewart asin: 0449000613 binding: Mass Market Paperback list price: $6.99 USD amazon price: $6.99 USD |
At the request of her beloved grandmother, war widow Kate Herrick returns to the idyllic English countryside and the tiny thatched dwelling of her childhood, Rose Cottage, where she must retrieve some valuable papers hidden in a secret safe. Yet Kate is intrigued to discover the mysterious documents have been stolen.
While eccentric villagers buzz with sightings of strange lights and ghostly apparitions around Rose Cottage, Kate uncovers a web of family resentment, jealousy, and revenge as tangled as the rambling vines in its garden. The twisted trail leads to a stunning revelation that opens the door to her own shrouded past--and an unexpected chance at love. . . .
Anybody Any Minute
 | author: Julie Mars asin: 0312378696 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $18.96 USD |
Ellen Kenny has a big mouth and a penchant for telling the truth, which is why she’s just been fired from yet another high-profile NYC job. Determined to make the most of this unexpected free time, she heads to Montreal to visit her sister. On the way, she spots a tumbledown upstate farmhouse---one she’s seen in her dreams for years---and impulsively buys it on a hefty credit card advance. Over her husband’s protests, Ellen decides to drop out of the rat race and spend the summer living out her woman-who-runs-with-the wolves fantasy, communing with nature---her own included---in an effort to confront middle age and figure out how on earth she got there. Rather than peacefully tend her garden and puzzle things out, however, Ellen soon becomes embroiled in the exceedingly unique problems of two redneck, social misfit neighbors---an ex-biker and an aging chainsaw sculptor---while taking care of a narcoleptic dog and a child who doesn’t speak English.
With Ellen’s quest for meaning and her concern for the welfare of others driving the plot, Anybody Any Minute is deeply layered, heartbreaking . . . and hilarious.
The Keep
 | author: Jennifer Egan asin: 1400079748 binding: Paperback list price: $13.95 USD amazon price: $11.16 USD |
Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep –the tower, the last stand –is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.
The Enchanted April (New York Review Books Classics)
 | author: Elizabeth Von Arnim asin: 1590172256 binding: Paperback list price: $14.95 USD amazon price: $10.17 USD |
A recipe for happiness: four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed.
The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other—and the castle of their dreams—through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don’t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy. Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.
The Enchanted April was a best-seller in both England and the United States, where it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and set off a craze for tourism to Portofino. More recently, the novel has been the inspiration for a major film and a Broadway play.
Cousin Bette (Modern Library Classics)
 | author: Honoré de Balzac asin: 0375759077 binding: Paperback list price: $11.95 USD amazon price: $9.56 USD |
“Bette is a wronged soul; and when her passion does break, it is, as Balzac says, sublime and terrifying,” wrote V. S. Pritchett. A late masterpiece in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine, Cousin Bette is the story of a Vosges peasant who rebels against her scornful upper-class relatives, skillfully turning their selfish obsessions against them. The novel exemplifies what Henry James described as Balzac’s “huge, all-compassing, all-desiring, all-devouring love of reality.”
When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature
 | author: Thomas Merton asin: 1893732606 binding: Hardcover list price: $15.95 USD amazon price: $10.85 USD |
Millions know Thomas Merton as the author of The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography that became an international bestseller and a modern spiritual classic. Merton, a prolific spiritual writer and social activist, inspired a generation from the silence and solitude of a Trappist monastery. Decades after his death, he remains a modern spiritual master, a source of wisdom on peace, racial harmony, poverty, alienation, and the engagement of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.
Now Merton is also revealed as a man whose spirituality is rooted in nature, an environmentalist ahead of his time. His writings on nature serve as a primer on eco-spirituality. He approaches ecology as a spiritual issue, one that exposes the degree of human alienation from the sacredness of the planet.
When The Trees Say Nothing gathers for the first time over 300 of Merton's nature writings, grouping them thematically into sections on the seasons, elements, creatures and other topics. Edited by Merton scholar Kathleen Deignan, the collection is cohesive and accessible, drawing from both Merton's public writings and his recently published private journals. The lyrical writings are enhanced with Deignan's own informative Introduction, along with a Foreword by Thomas Berry, renowned spiritual mentor for the environmental movement.
Unique and powerful on its own, When the Trees Say Nothing is enhanced with the art of John B. Giuliani, known for his stunning iconography. Giuliani's drawings harmonize exquisitely with Merton's meditations on nature, making When the Trees Say Nothing a spiritual and aesthetic prize.
They Knew Mr. Knight
 | author: Dorothy Whipple asin: 1903155088 binding: Paperback list price: $24.50 USD amazon price: $24.50 USD |
The Abstinence Teacher
 | author: Tom Perrotta asin: 0312358334 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $14.97 USD |
Ruth Ramsey is the human sexuality teacher at the local high school. She believes that “pleasure is good, shame is bad, and knowledge is power.” Ruth’s younger daughter’s soccer coach is Tim Mason, a former stoner and rocker whose response to hitting rock bottom was to reach out and be saved. Tim belongs to The Tabernacle, an evangelical Christian church that doesn’t approve of Ruth’s style of teaching. And Ruth in turn doesn’t applaud The Tabernacle’s mission to take its message outside its doors. Adversaries in a small-town culture war, Ruth and Tim instinctively mistrust each other. But when a controversy on the soccer field pushes the two of them to actually talk to each other, they are forced to take each other at something other than face value.
The Abstinence Teacher exposes the powerful emotions that run beneath the surface of modern American family life and explores the complex spiritual and sexual lives of ordinary people. Elegantly written, it is characterized by the distinctive mix of satire and compassion that have animated Perrotta’s previous novels.
Not Yet Drown'd: A Novel
 | author: Peg Kingman asin: 0393065464 binding: Hardcover list price: $24.95 USD amazon price: $18.21 USD |
A mysterious parcel propels a young Scottish widow on a perilous quest to the far side of the world.
Catherine MacDonald is astonished to receive from her twin brother—who had reportedly drowned a year earlier, in the monsoon floods of 1821—a kashmiri shawl, a caddy of unusual tea, and a sheaf of traditional bagpipe music in his handwriting. When had he sent it? And why had he retitled a certain tune "Not Yet Drown'd"?
Irresistibly, Catherine is drawn to India to search for answers. With her stepdaughter and their two maids—one an enigmatic Hindu, the other a runaway American slave—she follows an obscure trail of tea, opium, and bagpipe music. In the course of their journey they meet botanists, smugglers, engineers, soldiers, and artists—as well as love and betrayal. And as they copy, translate, and finally understand certain Scottish and Indian paintings and music, they discover unsuspected truths about the man they are seeking.
This luminous and accomplished romance is the author's first novel.
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
 | author: Mildred Armstrong Kalish asin: 0553804952 binding: Hardcover list price: $22.00 USD amazon price: $13.20 USD |
I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a romp.
So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great Depression. With her father banished from the household for mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.
Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.
Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese (start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted; the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under the light of a full harvest moon.
Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a romp.”
Can You Forgive Her? (Penguin Classics)
 | author: Anthony Trollope asin: 0140430865 binding: Paperback list price: $13.00 USD amazon price: $10.40 USD |
In this, the first of the Palliser parliamentary novels, the plight of women in marriage, politics and private life is seen through the eyes of Alice and Kate Vavasor, Lady Glencora, and the coquettish Mrs. Greenow. Nineteen 90-minute cassettes and two 60's.
The Warden (Penguin Classics)
 | author: Anthony Trollope Robin Gilmour asin: 0140432140 binding: Paperback list price: $12.00 USD amazon price: $9.60 USD |
Introduction by Graham Handley
The House on the Strand (Virago Modern Classics)
 | author: Daphne Du Maurier asin: 1844080420 binding: Paperback list price: $16.50 USD amazon price: $16.50 |
In this haunting tale, Daphne du Maurier takes a fresh approach to time travel. A secret experimental concoction, once imbibed, allows you to return to the fourteenth century. There is only one catch: if you happen to touch anyone while traveling in the p
Miss Bunting: A Novel (Thirkell, Angela Mackail, Works.)
 | author: Angela Mackail Thirkell asin: 1559211741 binding: Paperback list price: $12.95 USD amazon price: $12.95 |
Miss Bunting, first published in 1945, returns us to Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire--a fictional stretch of countryside well-loved by legion of devoted readers--six years into wartime. While "the war had mingled al races and creeds, it had not as yet mingled Old Town and New."
The carefully observed separation of the old and new social strata is upset when representatives of each come together in the sphere of Miss Bunting--the governess who has molded most of the county's upper class. Under Miss Bunting's tutelage, Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Fielding, renews an old school acquaintance with the daughter of Hogglestock's successful, albeit not genteel, ironmaster. "We must move with the times," says the unflappable governess when Lady Fielding questions the suitability of this association. With characteristic aplomb, Miss Buntion takes girls and situation both firmly in hand and sets all things to right.