Wanda McCaddon
103) The Matisse Stories
Unlike quite a number of people, Agatha has not given up on Christmas. To have the perfect Christmas had been a childhood dream while surviving a rough upbringing in a Birmingham slum. Holly berries glistened, snow fell gently outside, and inside, all was Dickensian jollity. And in her dreams, James Lacey kissed her under the mistletoe, and like a middle-aged sleeping beauty, she would awake to passion once more.
Agatha Raisin is bored. Her
...106) Wives and Daughters
Can't get enough of nineteenth-century British romance? Lovers of books like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights should give Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters a try. This tale follows the romantic ups and downs of Molly Gibson, a doctor's daughter who lives in a small English village and is trying desperately to find the right husband.
112) Anna Karenina
114) The Seamstress
A "marvelous history"* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years' War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal
The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and the exquisitely decorated Books of Hours;
...Doctor Dolittle, a little, lovable old doctor, had so many animal pets spread throughout his house and garden that patients would not come to him anymore. As a result, he became poorer and poorer.
But Doctor Dolittle occupied nearly all of his time tending to his pets, and his fame as an animal doctor spread all over the world. When the monkeys in Africa were stricken with an epidemic, they gave the good doctor a call. He set sail at once.
The
...117) The Guns of August
In this Pulitzer Prize–winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I.
This was the last gasp of the Gilded Age, of kings and kaisers and czars, of pointed or plumed hats, colored uniforms, and all the pomp and romance that went along with war. How quickly it all changed—and how horrible it became.
Tuchman masterfully portrays this transition from the nineteenth
...College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into his creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, has already excited the interest of publishers.
...In the classic work that launched a play, a movie, and a song, Muriel Spark tells the darkly intriguing story of an eccentric Edinburgh teacher and the intense relationship she develops with six of her students.
At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate in the application of her unorthodox teaching methods,
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