Crescent Place was once a peaceful country green surrounded by five tasteful suburban houses and populated by polite, responsible citizens. But as the city enveloped it, the residents built a gate to keep the world out. With each passing year, the subdivision grew stranger and stranger - until it began to look like a time capsule of the 1890s.

Sir John Waveney has inherited Waveney Hall. A veteran of the Great War himself, his inheritance has come because of the deaths in action of his two distant cousins, leaving him as the next male heir. He hopes to make the acquaintance of his two remaining cousins, Lady Jenifer Marr and Anne Belinda. But Lady Marr proves very vague about her twin sister's whereabouts. Is she traveling with a friend or (as has been intimated) has she been incarcerated in a mental institution? No one seems to actually know, and several people seem bent on frustrating John's attempts to find her.

Corrupt politician Allan Fleming has disappeared, and his daughter Margery asks attorney Jack Knox to find him. When Fleming turns up murdered at a sleazy social club called the White Cat, Margery commissions Knox to clear her fiancé, the less-than-scrupulous Harry Wardrop, of all suspicion. Trouble follows Margery when she moves in with her aunts, kind and docile Jane and irascible Lavinia. Aunt Jane disappears, leaving only a bloody handprint on the banister. Is she a victim of the murderer at the White Cat?

The engagement of effervescent Mally Lee to handsome, well-connected Roger Mooring is not going well. They quarrel constantly and Mally's idea is to spend time apart and delay the wedding. She has no money of her own and hopes to find a job, which materializes when Sir George Peterson hires her to be a governess to his daughter. She happily heads to London and all is well until Sir George and his odious secretary, Paul Craddock, accuse her of the theft of a diamond brooch and an important paper.

As a mute, burly German peasant is helping British soldiers move a fallen tree, he's struck on the head. When he regains consciousness he calls out to the astonished Major Manning, using his nickname "Monkey"—in perfect English.

It is 1905. Asta and her husband, Rasmus, have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over 70 years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter, Ann, to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.

These are the valiant and lyrically descriptive letters, written in 1873, by Isabella Bird, a courageous and spirited Englishwoman, telling her sister of her adventures on horseback over 800 miles of American wilderness.

It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence. In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna's parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own.

Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" ( Entertainment Weekly). Now, in Half Broke Horses, she brings us the story of her grandmother, told in a first-person voice that is authentic, irresistible, and triumphant.

Burning Daylight begins as many of London's finest works begin: with the depiction of a man blessed with physical prowess and keen perception who takes on the natural forces of the 19th century Yukon. Supreme gold miner, risk-all gambler, and unbeatable fighter, Burning Daylight is his name. Daylight moves from the Yukon to San Francisco, and plays "the bigger game of finance and wealth," until he is reminded of something he lost, something pure and good....

Wealthy Sir Hubert Handesley's original and lively weekend house parties are deservedly famous. To amuse his guests, he has devised a new form of the fashionable Murder Game, in which a guest is secretly selected to commit a 'murder' in the dark, and everyone assembles to solve the crime. But when the lights go up this time, there is a real corpse....

This magnificent novel by one of America's finest writers is the epic of one man's remarkable journey, set in 19th-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of 12, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home.

West with the Night is the story of a remarkable woman molded and shaped by many things: the African jungle, a certain dog, horses, airplanes, friendships with white men and black. There is no life, no story quite like it.

Following on from the events in A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land sees Gerald Durrell and his wife Jacquie travel to Argentina to collect animals for their newly established zoo. With rare insight and unique charm, Durrell pulls the listener into the tropical landscape of Patagonia, where he witnesses magical moments with penguins, seals and ocelots, and encounters a hilarious cast of characters, including a swearing parrot and a belching guanaco.

In short vignettes, Galvin gives us a deeply personal portrait of the people who lived in a mountain meadow along the Colorado-Wyoming border over its hundred-year history. His portraits illuminate the Western character and evolve a sense of place like no other.