A tragic tale of love and the bonds of marriage. Teenager Judah Jacobs is employed regularly as a babysitter by Peter and Joyce Kane. When Joyce is taken to hospital, Judah allows herself to be seduced by Peter. They embark on an affair, and eventually, once Judah is pregnant, Peter leaves Joyce and they embark on a new life together. Tragedy strikes when their son dies from leukaemia and Peter finds comfort in the arms of Judah's sister, Syria. Judah...

Hailed by Henry James as "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country", Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed,...

On the day of her father's funeral, twenty-eight-year-old Clarissa Iverton discovers that he wasn't her biological father after all. Her mother disappeared fourteen years earlier, and her fiancé has just revealed a life-changing secret to her. Alone and adrift, Clarissa travels to mystical Lapland, where she believes she'll meet her real father. There, at a hotel made of ice, Clarissa is confronted with the truth about her mother's history, and must...

Michael and Sarah's marriage is already in trouble. But the revelation that Michael has a daughter he's never mentioned-and only just met-pushes their relationship to the breaking point. His secrecy about the past, his compulsion to visit his ex-lover, and the sudden presence of his beautiful, grown daughter in their lives drives Sarah to search for the truth-a search that takes her from Washington, D.C., to Latin America. Chatter is a snapshot...

Shunned as an outsider and mistreated due to an undiagnosed learning disability, the young and imaginative Mari-Jen Delene retreats into silence. Around her, the fictional community of Ste. Noire, Cape Breton, hosts a vividly drawn cast of characters: the uncompromising and bitter Mother Superior; the dangerous Uncle Jule; the kind-hearted holocaust survivor Daniel Peter; and Mari-Jen's rebellious and powerfully intelligent brothers, who sleep next...

"Meet Vera Johnson, the uncommonly resourceful fifteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of Rose, notorious proprietor of San Francisco's most legendary bordello and ally to the city's corrupt politicians. Vera has grown up straddling two worlds--the madam's alluring sphere, replete with tickets to the opera, surly henchmen, and scant morality, and the violent, debt ridden domestic life of the family paid to raise her. On the morning of the great quake,...

Beneath the quiet surface of life in Old Kane, Illinois, love, cruelty, murder, and friendship drive the destinies of Worthy and Willa Giberson and their boy Cappy in this novel spanning 1925 to 1950.

Set during a period of revolution and turmoil, Mistress of My Fate is the first audiobook in a trilogy about Henrietta Lightfoot, a young woman who was abandoned as a baby and raised alongside her cousins, noble children of a lord and lady. At just sixteen years old, circumstance and a passionate love affair tear Henrietta away from everything she knows, leading to a new life fending for herself on the streets of 18th century London as a courtesan,...

Miriam Vener feels trapped in the comfortable white, middle-class life she leads with her family in Houston in the 1980's. That life suddenly shatters with the appearance, after almost eighteen years, of Veronica (Ronnee), her biracial daughter born in Mississippi in the sixties when Miriam was a civil rights activist. Rosellen Brown charts the emotionally fraught terrain of the mother and daughter's reunion and Ronnee's divided sense of self and...