All of a Kind Family by Taylor, Sydney
Publisher Comments Meet the All-of-a-Kind Family -- Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie -- who live with their parents in New York City at the turn of the century. Together they share adventures that find them searching for hidden buttons while dusting Mama's front parlor and visiting with the peddlers in Papa's shop on rainy days. The girls enjoy doing everything together, especially when it involves holidays and surprises. But no one could have prepared them for the biggest surprise of all! Your price $4.95 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
Strings Attached One Tough Teacher & the Gift of Great Expectations by Joanne Lipman, Melanie Kupchynsky
Publisher Comments Strings Attached is a powerful memoir about resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy, an inspiring and poignant tale of how one man transformed his own heartache into a legacy of joy for his students. His students knew Jerry Kupchynsky as "Mr. K"-the fierce Ukrainian-born music teacher who rehearsed them until their fingers almost bled and who made them better than they ever expected to be. Away from the classroom, though, life seemed to conspire against him at every turn. Strings Attached takes you on his remarkable journey, from his childhood on the run in Nazi Germany, to his life in America caring for his disabled wife while raising their two small daughters, to his search for his beloved younger daughter after she mysteriously disappeared-a search that would last for seven years. His unforgettable story is lyrically told in alternating chapters by two childhood friends who reconnected decades later: Melanie Kupchynsky, his daughter, and Joanne Lipman, a former student. Heartbreaking yet ultimately triumphant, Strings Attached is a testament to the astonishing power of hope-and a celebration of the profound impact one person can have on the lives of others. Your price $10.95 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather
Synopsis Willa Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt toa new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of onethey left behind. In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cecile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas creche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors andthen as legends and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder." Your price $16.00 New Trade Paperback
|
|
The Brandons: A Virago Modern Classic by Angela Thirkell
Publisher Comments The Brandons cheerfully confront matters of love, money, and an ill-tempered dowager aunt Lavinia Brandon is quite the loveliest widow in Barsetshire, blessed with beauty and grace, as well as two handsome grown-up children, Delia and Francis. So thinks their cousin Hilary Grant when he comes to stay and—like many before him—promptly falls for his fragrant hostess. Meanwhile, the Brandons' ill-tempered dowager aunt is stirring up controversy over her legacy, and Lavinia's attention is further occupied by the challenges of making a match between the vicar and gifted village helpmeet Miss Morris, and elegantly deterring her love-struck suitors. Angela Thirkell's 1930s comedy is bright, witty, and winning. Trade Paperback
|
|
My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
Publisher Comments A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth — Middlemarch — and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece — the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure — and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us. Hardcover
|
|
Age of Wonder The Romantic Generation & the Discovery of the Beauty & Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Publisher Comments The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution. Through the lives of William Herschel and his sister Caroline, who forever changed the public conception of the solar system; of Humphry Davy, whose near-suicidal gas experiments revolutionized chemistry; and of the great Romantic writers, from Mary Shelley to Coleridge and Keats, who were inspired by the scientific breakthroughs of their day, Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science—an era whose consequences are with us still. Your price $9.95 Used Trade Paperback
|
|
My Brother Michael by Stewart, Mary
Publisher Comments Mary Stewart, author of many bestselling novels, has been often compared with the Brontë sisters. Her 1960 classic My Brother Michael, with its superb mingling of romance and suspense, its vivid descriptions and overtone of impending disaster, is further evidence that the comparison is richly deserved. Perhaps Camilla Haven unintentionally invoked the gods that afternoon in the crowded Athens café when she wrote to a friend, Nothing ever happens to me.” But a few hours later, an extraordinary train of events had dispatched Camilla to Delphi, to be in the company of a charming but quietly determined Englishman named Simon Lester. Simon told Camilla he had come to the ancient Greek ruins to appease the shade” of his brother Michael, killed some fourteen years earlier on Parnassus. From a curious letter Michael had written, Simon believed his brother had stumbled upon something of great importance hidden in the craggy reaches of the mountainside. And then Simon and Camilla learned that they were not alone in their search... Trade Paperback
|
|
Tillerman 03 Solitary Blue by Cynthia Voigt
Publisher Comments andlt;b andgt;A Newbery Honorand#8211;winning installment of the Cynthia Voigtand#8217;s classic Tillerman series is repackaged with a fresh new look.andlt;/bandgt;andlt;BRandgt;andlt;BRandgt;Jeff Greene was only seven when he came home from school to find a note from his mother. She felt that the world needed her more than her and#8220;grown upand#8221; son did. For someone who believed she could see the worldand#8217;s problems so clearly, she was blind to the heartache and difficulties she pushed upon her son, leaving him with his reserved, undemonstrative father.andlt;BRandgt;andlt;BRandgt;So when, years later, she invites Jeff to spend summers with her in Charleston, Jeff is captivated by her free spirit and warmth, and a happiness heand#8217;s been missing fills him. But Jeff's second visit ends with a devastating betrayal and an aching feeling of loneliness. In life, there can be emotional pits so deep that seemingly nothing will growand#8212;but if he digs a little deeper, Jeff might just come out on the other side.andnbsp; Trade Paperback
|
|
Home Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Publisher Comments "A remarkable and brave novel. I was astonished at the acute angle of vision and the fullness of sympathy toward both men and women—and children."—Carol Shields An ahead-of-its-time novel about an unhappy and obsessively house-proud mother of three whose husband is disabled, leaving her free to work in a department store and him to be a Montessori father. One of the ten best-selling novels of 1924 and made into a (silent) film, it was singled out by Elaine Showalter in her recent book on American women writers and was included in the collection Five Hundred Great Books by Women. Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) was one of America's best-known novelists. The Home-Maker has been a bestseller for Persephone Books in the United Kingdom, and with this edition it will be widely available in the United States. Trade Paperback
|
|
Hild by Griffith, Nicola
Publisher Comments A brilliant, lush, sweeping historical novel about the rise of the most powerful woman of the Middle Ages: Hild. In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king's youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby. But now she has only the powerful curiosity of a bright child, a will of adamant, and a way of seeing the world — of studying nature, of matching cause with effect, of observing her surroundings closely and predicting what will happen next — that can seem uncanny, even supernatural, to those around her. Her uncle, Edwin of Northumbria, plots to become overking of the Angles, ruthlessly using every tool at his disposal: blood, bribery, belief. Hild establishes a place for herself at his side as the kings seer. And she is indispensable — unless she should ever lead the king astray. The stakes are life and death: for Hild, for her family, for her loved ones, and for the increasing numbers who seek the protection of the strange girl who can read the world and see the future. Hild is a young woman at the heart of the violence, subtlety, and mysticism of the early Middle Ages — all of it brilliantly and accurately evoked by Nicola Griffith's luminous prose. Working from what little historical record is extant, Griffith has brought a beautiful, brutal world to vivid, absorbing life. Hardcover
|
|