Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is 12, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women. Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world - and it is now the newest Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.

The ghost that haunts Canterville Chase has built a marvelous career of midnight haunting. But when an American family moves in, they simply have no respect for permanent bloodstains, nightmarish chains, or ancient legends. They even throw pillows at him.

Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather". It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.

Bridie Devine - flame-haired, pipe-smoking detective extraordinaire - is confronted with the most baffling puzzle yet: the kidnapping of Christabel Berwick, secret daughter of Sir Edmund Athelstan Berwick, and a peculiar child whose reputed supernatural powers have captured the unwanted attention of collectors in this age of discovery. Winding her way through the sooty streets of Victorian London, Bridie won’t rest until she finds the young girl, even if it means unearthing secrets about her past that she’d rather keep buried.

When Cora Seaborne's brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at 19, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive 11-year old son, Francis, and the boy's nanny, Martha.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.

Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.

Vlad, a stranger from Eastern Europe masquerading as a healer, settles in a small Irish village where the locals fall under his spell. One woman, Fidelma McBride, becomes so enamored that she begs him for a child. All that world is shattered when Vlad is arrested, and his identity as a war criminal is revealed.

With the country in the grip of the Black Death, brothers John and William fear that they will shortly die and suffer in the afterlife. But as the end draws near, they are given an unexpected choice: either to go home and spend their last six days in their familiar world, or to search for salvation across the forthcoming centuries - living each one of their remaining days 99 years after the last. John and William choose the future and find themselves in 1447, ignorant of almost everything going on. The year 1546 brings no more comfort, and 1645 challenges them further....

In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life's adversities.

From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in 12 years. Aimless Love combines new poems with selections from four previous books— Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings together plain speech with imaginative surprise, is clearly heard with every word, reminding us how he has managed to enrich the tapestry of contemporary poetry and greatly expand its audience.

In this luminous novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life of one of photography's founding fathers. In 1839, Louis Daguerre's invention took the world by storm. A decade later, he is sinking deep into delusions brought on by exposure to mercury, the very agent that allowed his daguerreotype process. Believing the world will end within one year, he creates his "Doomsday List", 10 items he must photograph before the final day. It includes a woman he has always loved but has not seen in half a century.

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel, and achieve a miraculous resolution.

A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs.

The ghost that haunts Canterville Chase has built a marvelous career of midnight haunting. But when an American family moves in, they simply have no respect for permanent bloodstains, nightmarish chains, or ancient legends. They even throw pillows at him.

When Cora Seaborne's brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at 19, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive 11-year old son, Francis, and the boy's nanny, Martha.

With scars on his back and silver in his pocket, the huge figure of Jack Maggs strides across the rich landscape of 19th century London. As this enigmatic man moves through its streets and houses, his single-minded quest to find his son will engender love, deceit, and vengeance in the lives around him.

It is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives at Montefiore, the farm of her father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up to the farm. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia, no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a quest, he leaves Bianca under the care of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but salvation can be found in the dark forest as well.

Margaret of Ashbury wants to write her life story. However, like most women in 14th-century England, she is illiterate. Three clerics contemptuously decline to be Margaret’s scribe, and only the threat of starvation persuades Brother Gregory, a Carthusian friar with a mysterious past, to take on the task. As she narrates her life, we discover a woman of startling resourcefulness.

London, September 1666. The Great Fire rages through the city, consuming everything in its path. Even the impregnable cathedral of St. Paul's is engulfed in flames and reduced to ruins. Among the crowds watching its destruction is James Marwood, son of a disgraced printer and reluctant government informer. In the aftermath of the fire, a semi-mummified body is discovered in the ashes of St. Paul's, in a tomb that should have been empty. The man's body has been mutilated, and his thumbs have been tied behind his back.

In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat, and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors - a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee.

Krampus: The History and Legacy of the Mythological Figure Who Punishes Children During the Christmas Season examines the pagan and Christian influences of the yuletide villain and dives into the riveting and frightening history behind the creature. You will learn about Krampus like never before.

Meet the Otis family: Mister and Missus, and their four children - Washington; the twins called Stars and Stripes; and their daughter, Virginia. They've just moved from America and into the English country manor of Canterville Chase. Though rumors persist that the house is haunted, the Otis' have none of it, and set about making the house their own. Then come the mysterious clanking chains and the bloodstains on the floor, and soon even the Otis family must come face to face with that most feared of creatures - The Canterville Ghost. But will the Ghost be able to survive his encounters with the erstwhile Americans?

For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.

Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice - and still lives.