The Prairie Trilogy is a series of three novels centered around life in the Midwest during the late 19th/early 20th centuries by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather. First, in "O Pioneers!," we meet Alexandra Bergson, who inherits the family farm after her father dies and leaves her to care for her three siblings. While many immigrant families are giving up their farms and moving back to the city (or to their home countries), Alexandra decides to try to tough it out on the prairie.

Since her mother's death, Jennifer has devoted years of her life to her father, managing the family home. After the sudden announcement that he has taken a new wife, Jennifer, at 33, seizes the opportunity to lead an independent life. Quickly she secures the lease of Rose Cottage and turns her attention to her own interests. While Jennifer is desperate to experience life on her own terms within her reduced financial means, her neighbour, Alice, is pre-occupied with ensuring her position as head of her brother's household is never challenged.

Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther is a novella written by Elizabeth von Arnim, a British-German author known for her witty and insightful novels. Published in 1907, the story revolves around the correspondence between two main characters, Fräulein Rose-Marie Schmidt, a spinster in her late 30s, and Mr. Henry Anstruther, a kind and sympathetic stranger, as they navigate their lives and explore their feelings for each other.

Elizabeth von Arnim, who is best known for her later novel The Enchanted April, married a Prussian aristocrat and, with their five children, lived in Nassenheide, Pomerania. Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a semi-autobiographical novel about the joy that the protagonist finds in the delights of her Pomeranian garden, which provides relief from the stifling environment of her household. The novel was originally published anonymously because von Arnim feared that her husband, whom she satirised in the book, would disapprove.

Opportunistic, shrewd and beautiful, Ethelberta resolves to disguise her humble beginnings and elevate her position in society. Crafting her career as a society poet and staging her family as her servants, she proves admirably adept at sustaining her own web of deceit as she reinvents herself and navigates the attentions of four different suitors. The wealthiest is not the one she loves... what will she do? This is a light-hearted urban tale, offering a different side of Thomas Hardy.

Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince. They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by. I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.

Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.

Lucy Entwhistle's beloved father has just died; aged twenty-two she finds herself alone in the world. Leaning against her garden gate, dazed and unhappy, she is disturbed by the sudden appearance of the perspiring Mr Wemyss. This middle-aged man is also in mourning - for his wife Vera, who has died in mysterious circumstances. Before Lucy can collect herself, Mr Wemyss has taken charge: of the funeral arrangements, of her kind aunt Dot, but most of all of Lucy herself - body and soul.

An inspiring and relatable heroine, Esther is a pious young servant girl who endures the terrible fate of becoming pregnant and leaving her workplace to face a desperate future... but she is tenacious and fiery, and dedicated to keeping her son and building her life against unfathomably poor odds. Society’s ills are laid bare, especially the addictive buzz, desperate drive and inevitable destruction of gambling on horses.

The four dauntless comrades in arms from The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask are reunited in this extraordinary tale. Dumas brilliantly weaves the story into the tapestry of both French and English history. In Paris the four protect Queen Anne and the young Louis XIV from swelling revolution. In England they take on the ambitious Oliver Cromwell. Once again we are treated to the ring of swords, hearts are won or lost, and revenge is sweet.

Published in 1801, Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda is an absorbing novel that mirrors social and domestic life among the English gentry. In her pursuit of a suitable marriage, Belinda encounters an array of characters including the dazzling socialite Lady Delacourt, the feminist Harriet Freke, the wealthy and handsome West Indian Mr Vincent and the impulsive Clarence Hervey.

Lucy Entwhistle and Everard Wemyss, both recovering from recent unhappiness, meet and quickly fall in love. However, over their new-found bliss looms the spectre of Vera, Wemyss’s first wife who died in mysterious circumstances. After their wedding the couple return home and Lucy really does begin to be troubled by what happened to Vera. Considered a high-water mark by the author, the story is an extraordinarily black vision of a young wife who gradually begins to understand that her husband will accept nothing less than total intellectual and emotional servitude.