WHEN MARGARET CAVENDISH, one of Elizabeth I's Gentlewomen of the Bedchamber, lost her life in a bungled attempt to kill the Queen, her daughter, Lady Grace, became a protégée to the monarch, who takes Grace under her wing. Now Grace, a spunky girl who romps through the gardens with the laundry maids and court tumblers and rolls her eyes at her fellow ladies, chronicles the court intrigues that swirl around her. . . .It's the spring of 1569 and 13-year-old Lady Grace, the youngest lady-in-waiting to the Queen, finds herself at a glittering ball choosing amongst three suitors. But the Queen's generosity turns deadly as threats, dark secrets, and even murder descend on the Tudor court. And it is up to Grace to use her intelligence, stealth, and curious nature to solve the mystery that threatens the very lifeblood of England.From the Hardcover edition. Views: 57
Grace's star is on the rise with a new TV series, but then the director asks her to lose fifteen pounds. When she goes public with her struggles with weight, she suddenly develops a huge fan club of people who are happy to see a curvy actress speak up, and she becomes a flashpoint in society's ongoing conversation about what's beautiful and what Hollywood's responsibility is to portray women of all shapes and sizes.Meanwhile, Jack is voted the Sexiest Man Alive and becomes a little too enamored with the star lifestyle. But while he can have anything he wants, he can't have the one thing he really needs: a public relationship with Grace, which his manager says will hurt his career. When Jack begins to spiral downward into parties, booze, and Hollywood brat behavior, it's time for Grace to set him straight—and maybe dare to walk the red carpet together, hand in hand. Views: 57
The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus.The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancingthe text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift.For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.About the AuthorAlistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He has published two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two new stories, were published in a single-volume edition entitled Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod. In 1999, MacLeod’s first novel, No Great Mischief, was published to great critical acclaim, and was on national bestseller lists for more than a year. The novel won many awards, including the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Alistair MacLeod and his wife, Anita, have six children. They live in Windsor, Ontario.Peter Rankin was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He specializes in illustrating the traditional way of life there. A fisherman as well as an artist, in 2004 he illustrated Making Room, a children’s book by Joanne Taylor that was published by Tundra Books, for which he won the 2004 Lillian Shepherd Memorial Award for Excellence in Illustration. He lives in Mabou Coal Mines with his wife and their five children. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.I am speaking here of a time when I was eleven and lived with my family on our small farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. My family had been there for a long, long time and so it seemed had I. And much of that time seems like the proverbial yesterday. Yet when I speak on this Christmas 1977, I am not sure how much I speak with the voice of that time or how much in the voice of what I have since become. And I am not sure how many liberties I may be taking with the boy I think I was. For Christmas is a time of both past and present and often the two are imperfectly blended. As we step into its nowness we often look behind.We have been waiting now, it seems, forever. Actually, it has been most intense since Hallowe’en when the first snow fell upon us as we moved like muffled mummers upon darkened country roads. The large flakes were soft and new then and almost generous, and the earth to which they fell was still warm and as yet unfrozen. They fell in silence into the puddles and into the sea where they disappeared at the moment of contact. They disappeared, too, upon touching the heated redness of our necks and hands or the faces of those who did not wear masks. We carried our pillowcases from house to house, knocking on doors to become silhouettes in the light thrown out from kitchens (white pillowcases held out by whitened forms). The snow fell between us and the doors and was transformed in shimmering golden beams. When we turned to leave, it fell upon our footprints, and as the night wore on obliterated them and all the records of our movements. In the morning everything was soft and still and November had come upon us.My brother Kenneth, who is two and a half, is unsure of his last Christmas. It is Hallowe’en that looms largest in his memory as an exceptional time of being up late in magic darkness and falling snow. “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas?” he asks. “I think I’ll be a snowman.” All of us laugh at that and tell him Santa Claus will find him if he is good and that he need not dress up at all. We go about our appointed tasks waiting for it to happen.I am troubled myself about the nature of Santa Claus and I am trying to hang on to him in any way that I can. It is true that at my age I no longer really believe in him, yet I have hoped in all his possibilities as fiercely as I can; much in the same way, I think, that the drowning man waves desperately to the lights of the passing ship on the high sea’s darkness. For without him, as without the man’s ship, it seems our fragile lives would be so much more desperate. Views: 57
THE WILDEST OF THE MCCALL BOYS WAS BACK The wildest of the McCall boys was back...and he had a score to settle with Cassidy Miller! Like two outlaws facing off at high noon, they reunited at the Longhorn Cafe for the whole town to witness the long-awaited showdown. Rourke McCall had been fantasizing about this moment for more than a decade -- except he hadn't counted on Cassidy growing up and growing into a woman. That one high-school kiss suddenly hit him like a shotgun recoiling. But he couldn't let his emerging desire for Cassidy deter his search for a killer, who by all accounts was still at large in Antelope Flats and equally determined to destroy Rourke...and anyone close to him. Views: 57
Stark terror ruled the Inner-Flight ship on that last Mars-Terra run. For the black-clad Leiters were on the prowl ... and the grim red planet was not far behind. Views: 57
Terrorist Abu Alhaul is bringing mass destruction to America's East Coast and the man he blames for the death of his family-U.S. Navy SEAL Commander Tucker Raleigh. As international intelligence forces mobilize, Tucker gears up for the brewing storm that is putting them all at its mercy. Views: 57
The death of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) marked the end of Spain's Golden Age of literary and artistic excellence, and his immense popularity and mastery of Spanish drama has earned him notoriety as the national dramatist of Spain. Although he came from a family of lower nobility, his theater is often associated with the royal court, as he presented many plays in the palace of Philip IV. His best known work, "Life Is a Dream", borrows material from several other sources and transforms it into a masterful philosophical drama. The story of King Basil of Poland and his son, Segismund, is a complex and improbable plot featuring themes of the awakened sleeper, Christian grace, pagan superstition, and the popular Spanish theme of God's grace revealing nobility. This play has been translated and performed in many different languages, and it remains an unquestioned masterpiece of world theater. Views: 57
It is 1943, and the war has come home to Loring, Mississippi. As German POWs labor in the cotton fields, the local draft board sends boys into uniform, and families receive flags and condolences. But for Dan Timms, just shy of 18, the war is his ticket out of town and away from the ghosts that haunt him. As he peddles goods from a rolling store for his profiteer uncle, Dan tries to understand his friend L.C., a young man who, on account of his skin, feels like a prisoner himself. But one day, Dan spots Marty Stark who has just returned from Italy, mysteriously reassigned to guard the POWs he was once trained to kill. As Dan soon learns, Marty’s war is far from over and threatens to erupt again. From the Trade Paperback edition.From Publishers WeeklySet in the same small Mississippi town as Yarbrough's critically acclaimed Visible Spirits, this complex WWII-era novel explores questions of morality and social inequity in the rural South when a group of German POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers on nearby farms. The novel opens with the uncomfortable friendship between young Dan Timms, who drives one of his enterprising Uncle Alvin's "rolling stores" (old school buses boasting all the necessities of country life: sodas, coal-oil lamps, radios), and L.C. Stevens, the black employee who drives the other. While L.C. vainly struggles to make his work partner see the "parallel universe" in which black Americans are trapped, Dan yearns to join the army and escape the fresh memory of his father's recent suicide and his suspicions about his mother's past. But Dan's friend Marty Stark shows him another side of war when he returns damaged and changed from the German theater and is reassigned to help guard the town's German POWs. The story shifts subtly when a Polish prisoner informs Dan of an escape planned by several other prisoners, setting in motion a chain of events that eventually brings Marty's troubled war memories to the surface. Meanwhile, L.C. suffers a beating by an older, powerful white man who, after losing his own son in the war, uses his influence to ensure that the young black man is drafted. The multiple subplots slow the novel's pace, but Yarbrough's warm, measured voice, clean prose and rich character studies make this an unusually tender and accomplished study of the reverberations of war on the home front.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistOnce again, Yarbrough (Visible Spirits, 2001) turns in a gripping, character-driven novel that tackles important issues of race relations, patriotism, and the effects of war. The story takes place in a rural Mississippi community in 1943. Dan Timms is a few weeks shy of enlisting in the military, and he can hardly wait to shake the small-town dust off his shoes. For him the war is a reason to escape the knowledge of his mother's infidelity and the discovery of his father's suicide. Not even the experiences of his best friend, who has returned from the war with a damaged psyche, can dissuade him. Nor can his war-profiteering uncle, for whom Dan works part-time. Also working for Alvin Timms is L. C., a young African American who has no intention of serving in the military and for whom the racial gap is wider than the Grand Canyon. The novel is far from weak on plot, but Yarbrough's characters are so powerfully three-dimensional that the story's tension flows from many directions. And it never lets up. Frank CasoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Views: 57
Tamara Goodwin has always got everything she’s ever wanted. Born into a family of wealth, she grew up in a mansion with its own private beach, a wardrobe full of designer clothes, and a large four poster bed complete with a luxurious bathroom en suite. She’s always lived in the here and now, never giving a second thought to tomorrow. But then suddenly her dad is gone and life for Tamara and her mother changes forever. Left with a mountain of debt, they have no choice but to sell everything they own and move to the country to live with Tamara’s Uncle and Aunt. Nestled next to Kilsaney Castle, their gate house is a world away from Tamara’s childhood. With her Mother shut away with grief, and her Aunt busy tending to her, Tamara is lonely and bored and longs to return to Dublin. When a travelling library passes through Kilsaney Demesne, Tamara is intrigued. She needs a distraction. Her eyes rest on a mysterious large leather bound tome locked with a gold clasp and padlock. With some help, Tamara finally manages to open the book. What she discovers within the pages takes her breath away and shakes her world to its core… Views: 57
What do you do when you lose your possum ranch, all your money, and the Dalton Gang is on your trail? If you’re Taco Bob, you head for Florida and end up in tropical Key West hanging out with a collection of colorful and crazy locals, fishing for grunts, and avoiding Daltons. But there is never a shortage of trouble in paradise. A sexy cult leader hits town looking for a golden idol she is convinced holds psychic powers. She teams up with the aging owner of the local topless bar, who is looking for a fortune in Spanish treasure stolen from him years earlier. Taco Bob’s idyllic tropical lifestyle comes to an abrupt end and he finds himself lost in the Everglades swamps. But he is not as alone as he thinks, not with a hot cult leader, a cranky treasure hunter, and a mysterious old hermit in the neighborhood. Views: 57
