NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement brilliantly illuminates the collision of sexual longing, deep-seated fears, and romantic fantasy on a young couple’s wedding night.
“No one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment." —The Washington Post Book World
It is 1962, and Florence and Edward are celebrating their wedding in a...

For all his wealth and success, Asher Malacouti--the head of a prosperous Jewish family living in the Iranian town of Kermanshah in the early twentieth century--cannot have the one thing he desires above all: a son. His young wife Rakhel, trapped in an oppressive marriage at a time when a woman's worth is measured by her fertility, is made desperate by her failure to conceive, and grows jealous and vindictive.

London, 1946. The Right Sort Marriage Bureau is getting on its feet and expanding. Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge are making a go of it. That is until Lord Bainbridge, the widowed Gwen's father-in-law and legal guardian, returns from a business trip to Africa and threatens to undo everything important to her, even sending her six-year-old son away to a boarding school. Then a new client shows up at the agency, one whom Sparks and Bainbridge...

"Annie Zook--the preacher's eldest daughter--is expected to join the Amish church, but at 20 she is 'still deciding.' Because of the strict rules that guide the Plain community, she must continually squelch her artistic passion, although it has become her solace"--Provided by publisher.

"Allison Montclair returns with The Unkept Woman, the fourth Sparks & Bainbridge mystery: London, 1946, Miss Iris Sparks--currently co-proprietor of the Right Sort Marriage Bureau--has to deal with aspects of her past exploits during the recent war that have come back around to haunt her. The Right Sort Marriage Bureau was founded in 1946 by two disparate individuals--Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge (whose husband was killed in the recent World War) and...

"To escape a forced marriage, Cora Taylor travels from England to the Blue Ridge Mountains in search of her brother, who is working as a teacher in a mission school. She hopes to find a place where her nursing skills and independent ideas will be accepted and appreciated, but nothing prepares her for the wild mixture of isolation, community, brokenness, and hope within these mountains...or in the person of Jeb McAdams. Returning from the devastation...

"Murder once again stalks the proprietors of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau in the surprisingly dangerous landscape of post-World War II London."-- In the immediate post-war days of London, two unlikely partners have undertaken an even more unlikely, if necessary, business venture - The Right Sort Marriage Bureau. The two partners are Miss Iris Sparks, a woman with a dangerous - and never discussed - past in British intelligence and Mrs. Gwendolyn...

"Caroline Grant is struggling to accept the end of her marriage when she receives an unexpected bequest. Her beloved great-aunt Lettie leaves her a sketchbook, three keys, and a final whisper ... Venice. Caroline's quest: to scatter Juliet "Lettie" Browning's ashes in the city she loved and to unlock the mysteries stored away for more than sixty years. It's 1938 when art teacher Juliet Browning arrives in romantic Venice. For her students, it's a...

Sweethearts since childhood, Ellie Hogan and her husband, John, are content on their farm in Ireland -- until John, a soldier for the Irish Republican Army, receives an injury that leaves him unable to work. Forced to take drastic measures in order to survive, Ellie does what so many Irish women in the 1920s have done and sails across a vast ocean to New York City to work as a maid for a wealthy socialite. Once there, Ellie is introduced to a world...

"In 1969, sisters Trang and Quynh, desperate to help their parents pay off debts, leave their rural village to work at a bar in Sai Gon. Once in the big city, the young girls are thrown headfirst into a world they were not expecting. They learn how to speak English, how to dress seductively, and how to drink and flirt (and more) with American GIs in return for money. As the war moves closer to the city, the once-innocent Trang gets swept up in an...