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Summary
"In Iceland, the Age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures - as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare.
Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled Iceland and of their descendants,...
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"Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it's the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she's twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne....
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"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and...
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Series
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Flagan and Galloway Sackett are heading west from Tennessee to seek their fortunes. That's when they came across an old Irish trader who offered them two fine horses if they would agree to escort his granddaughter, Judith, to her father in Colorado. Flagan saw nothing but trouble in the fiery young woman, but they needed the horses. Unfortunately, Flagan was right, for Judith had fallen for James Black Fetchen, a charismatic gunman whose courtship...
Author
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"[This novel] tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a man who was "born without skin," so that no one is able to tell what race he belongs to; and Arrienne Christie, his quixotic soul mate who makes it her duty in life to protect Moshe from the social and emotional consequences of his strange appearance. The narrative begins with Moshe's birth in the late 1950s, four years before Jamaica's independence from colonial rule, and ends in the era of what Forbes...
7) The bastard
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Series
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The first volume in the addictive saga of the American Revolution by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the North and South trilogy.
Meet Phillipe Charboneau: the illegitimate son and unrecognized heir of the Duke of Kentland. Upon the Duke’s death, Phillipe is denied his birthright and left to build a life of his own. Seeking all that the New World promises, he leaves London for America,...
Meet Phillipe Charboneau: the illegitimate son and unrecognized heir of the Duke of Kentland. Upon the Duke’s death, Phillipe is denied his birthright and left to build a life of his own. Seeking all that the New World promises, he leaves London for America,...
8) Giant
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The basis for the classic film starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson, Giant is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber's sweeping generational tale of power, love, cattle barons, and oil tycoons, set in Texas during the first half of the twentieth century.
When larger-than-life cattle rancher Jordan "Bick" Benedict arrives at the family home of sharp-witted but genteel Virginia socialite Leslie Lynnton to purchase a racehorse,...
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Regarded by Charles Dickens as his best novel upon publication, "Martin Chuzzlewit" relates a tale of familial selfishness and eventual moral redemption. First published serially from 1842 to 1844, it is the story of young Martin Chuzzlewit, who has been raised by his grandfather. He has fallen in love with his grandfather's ward and caretaker, the young orphan Mary Graham. Martin's grandfather does not approve and young Martin alienates himself from...
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First published in 1917, "Growth of the Soil" is the epic and seminal work by Knut Hamsun, the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer. Originally published in Norwegian and subsequently translated into numerous languages and read around the world, "Growth of the Soil" has been lauded as one of the twentieth-century's most important and ground-breaking novels. Hamsun was a pioneer in a new more realistic style of literature and was one of the first to...
13) Fancy Dancer
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Summary
"On his thirty-fifth birthday, Jake St. Cloud inherits a fortune--and learns the whereabouts of his mysterious half-brother. On her deathbed, Selma St. Cloud revealed that Jake had a sibling, a product of his father's affair. At last, Jake is in a position to track down Alex Rosario and make amends for their father's past neglect. At least, that's the plan. When their initial meeting goes badly, a distraught Jake crashes his car and is sentenced to...
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Series
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The son of a wealthy plantation owner and a doting mother, Augustus Mungo St John is accustomed to the wealth and luxuries his privilege has afforded him. That is until he returns from university to discover his family ruined, his inheritance stolen and his childhood sweetheart, Camilla, taken by the conniving Chester Marion. Fuelled by anger, and love, Mungo swears vengeance and devotes his life to saving Camilla - and destroying Chester. Camilla,...
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The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.
16) Betrayal
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Kate and Alex Rocket are blessed with a wonderful marriage and a lovely home. Although Kate cangast have children, she and Alex look upon Sara and Emily, daughters of their good friends Don and Debbie Winter, as part of their family. With one phone call, everything changes. Sara accuses Alex of a terrible act, opening up a vicious rift between the couples. Kate watches helplessly as her innocent husband is convicted and sent to prison. But when...
17) Justine
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This “very remarkable novel”—first in the acclaimed Alexandria Quartet—tells a haunting story of love, desire, and deception in the Egyptian city pre-WWII (New York Herald Tribune Book Review).
Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and...
Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and...
Author
Summary
he drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters. By the author of Pigs in Heaven.
Author
Formats
Summary
Little Nell Trent lives in the quiet gloom of the old curiosity shop with her ailing grandfather, for whom she cares with selfless devotion. But when they are unable to pay their debts to the stunted, lecherous and demonic money-lender Daniel Quilp, the shop is seized and they are forced to flee, thrown into a shadowy world in which there seems to be no safe haven. Dickens's portrayal of the innocent, tragic Nell made The Old Curiosity Shop an instant...
20) The warden
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The first novel of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, this work introduces the fictional cathedral town of Barchester and many of its clerical inhabitants. Originally published in 1855, the story centers on Mr. Septimus Harding who has been granted the comfortable wardenship of Hiram's Hospital, an almshouse from a medieval charity of the diocese. Mr. Harding, a fundamentally good man and an excellent musician, conscientiously fulfills his...