"What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware's suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller. Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her "nest" of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora (Lee?) to a weekend away in an...

"Growing up the middle child of transatlantic parents -- her English Rose mother and cowboy boot-loving father -- Bella Pollen never quite figured out how to belong. Restlessly crossing back and forth between the boundaries of family and freedom, England and America, home and away, she has sought but generally failed to contain an adventurous spirit within the confines of conventional living. When she awakes one morning in an existential panic, Pollen...

A biography of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea examines her early years in the Caribbean as well as how her experiences with extreme poverty, alcohol, and drug dependency informed her writing. Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. Memories of her Caribbean girlhood haunt the four short and piercingly brilliant novels that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England,...

Nancy Mitford was, in the words of her sister Lady Diana Mosley, "very complex." Her highly autobiographical early work, the biographies and novels of her more mature French period, her journalism, and the vast body of letters to her family, to friends such as Evelyn Waugh, and to the great love of her life, Gaston Palewski, all tell an intriguing story. Drawing from these, as well as conversations with Mitford's two surviving sisters, acquaintances,...

Sophie Collingwood is drawn into a mystery when two people request a copy of the same very rare book from the antiquarian bookshop where she works.

The year is 1795 and the feisty 20-year-old Jane Austen is an emerging writer who already sees a world beyond class and commerce, beyond pride and prejudice, and dreams of doing what was nearly unthinkable - marrying for love. Naturally, her parents are searching for a wealthy, well-appointed husband to assure their daughter's future social standing. As a prospective match for Jane, her parents are eyeing Mr. Wisley. He is the nephew to the very formidable,...

"It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie's books still sell over four million copies each year -- more than thirty years after her death -- and it shows no signs of slowing. But who was the woman behind these mystifying,...