"In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful...

Growing up in the 1990s, Loretta knows little of life beyond the Home for Wayward Girls, the secluded ranch where her parents run a program designed to "correct" teen girls' "bad behavior." Loretta witnesses firsthand how the adults use abusive discipline to crush these young women's spirits and break their wills. Since childhood she's been afraid of her father, and avoids him by spending time with the residents, secretly teaching them the survival...

Blood to Rubies is the scorching saga of injustice, love, and redemption in the western wilderness. A young frontier photographer goes West to escape the Civil War draft and settles in the Bitterroot Mountains, ancestral home of the Nez Perce Indians. There he becomes obsessed with a young Irish pioneer woman he spies swimming nude in a mountain lake. He comes to admire the Nez Perce and photographs the young leader, Chief Joseph, and a Nez Perce...

"On a sunny day in July 1815, thirty-eight-year-old Philippa, Lady McKinsey, takes her sixteen-year-old daughter, Emma, and her young niece and nephew, fifteen-year-old Arabella and thirteen-year-old Percy, on an outing to Richmond Park. But when Arabella and Percy go off to pick flowers, tragedy strikes. Shots echo across the park. Two young gentlemen investigate and find Lady McKinsey and her daughter dead. As the men gaze in horror at the strangely...

"It is a long and treacherous journey to the mountains, some braved the dangers to escape the sure death from a rich and powerful man, while others were looking for the freedom they have never known. For some it was a job, a job that paid much better than working in Saint Louis, as others hoped to find their riches in the fur trade. For Gabe and his new wife Jenny, they had to escape the reaches of a father seeking vengeance. For Toby and Letty they...

"Nestled in the hills of West Virginia lies White Sulphur Springs, home to the Greenbrier Resort. Long a playground for presidents and film stars, the Greenbrier has its own gravitational pull. Over ten decades, four generations of the Zelner family must grapple with their place in its shadow . . . and within their own family. In 1942, young mother Sylvia is desperate to escape her stifling marriage, especially when it means co-running Zelner's general...

"A hauntingly poetic family drama and coming-of-age story that reveals a dark corner of South Korean history through the eyes of a small community living in a reformatory center--a stunning work of great emotional power from the critically acclaimed author of If You Leave Me"-- In 2011, Eunju Oh opens her door to greet a stranger: a young Korean American woman holding a familiar-looking knife--a knife Eunju hasn't seen in more than thirty years,...

"A powerful feminist retelling of the early life of the famed villainess of Arthurian legend, Morgan le Fay, this dazzling debut is the story of a woman both mortal and magical, formidable and misunderstood, told in her own words. Young Morgan of Cornwall lives a happy life in Tintagel Castle until King Uther Pendragon, with the help of the sorcerer Merlin, murders her father and tricks her mother into marriage. Furious, brilliant and vengeful, Morgan...

A centuries-old book is found in Florence in this novel with "a sympathetic heroine, a suspenseful plot . . . and illuminating meditations on life, art, and love" (Chicago Tribune). Margot Harrington, an American volunteer in Florence, is an expert at book conservancy. While struggling to save a waterlogged convent library after the devastating Arno flood of 1966, she comes across a fabulous volume of sixteen erotic drawings by Giulio Romano, accompanying...