Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. In the story, a gentleman named Mr. Alonso Quixano reads too many chivalric romances and consequently loses his sanity. Deciding to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, he recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs...

"The saga [of The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End] now continues with Follett's... A Column of Fire. In 1558, the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look down on a city torn apart by religious conflict. As power in England shifts precariously between Catholics and Protestants, royalty and commoners clash, testing friendship, loyalty, and love. Ned Willard wants nothing more than to marry Margery Fitzgerald. But when the lovers find...

A gripping tale of one of history's most bizarre events, and what it reveals about the strange possibilities of human nature In the searing July heat of 1518, Frau Troffea stepped into the streets of Strasbourg and began to dance. Bathed in sweat, she continued to dance. Overcome with exhaustion, she stopped, and then resumed her solitary jig a few hours later. Over the next two months, roughly four hundred people succumbed to the same agonizing compulsion....

In the harsh Scottish highlands of 1565, superstition and treachery threaten a truce between rival clans. It's a weak truce at first, bound only by an arranged engagement between Anne MacGregor and Niall Campbell-the heirs of the feuding families. While Niall wrestles with his suspicions about a traitor in his clan, Anne's actions do not go unnoticed. And as accusations of witchcraft abound, the strong and sometimes callous Campbell heir must fight...

"When a woman's body is discovered, strangled and bound with rope to the stone torso of Fár Breige, the ancient stone god which stands sentinel above the haunted caves and ancient fortifications of the Atlantic cliffs, the locals believe it was the god who killed her. In life, Clodagh O'Lochlainn had been a disgrace to her clan, tormenting her former priestly lover, jeering at her husband, robbing her relatives: but could she really have been slaughtered...

In 1587, a group of 116 men, women, and children sailed from England to North America. They landed in Roanoke, an island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. Life was hard for the settlers, who struggled to build a new life. Within a few months, the governor of the colony, John White, sailed back to England to get more supplies. Three years passed before he could return to the colony. When White finally arrived back in Roanoke, he was shocked...

A young woman born with a strange birthmark on her face leaves her sheltered childhood and becomes hairdresser and personal maid to a former courtesan who draws her into a world of desire and jealousy lurking behind the wealth and privilege of Perugia. Born with a strange birthmark on her face, Flavia is alienated even from her family. She leaves her sheltered childhood and becomes an ornatrix, a hairdresser and personal maid to a former courtesan....

"Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar and alchemist, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, drunk and lost, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in Golden Lane, an alley hard by Rudolf's great castle. Dressed in a velvet gown, wearing a large gold medallion around her neck, the woman is clearly well-born...

Francis Crawford is once again in France leading an army against England, and his haunted past becomes a subject of intense interest to forces on both sides, as whoever knows the secret of his parentage is in a position to control -- or destroy-- him.