Juliet Stevenson
Author
Description
Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker--a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable...
2) Sweet tooth
Author
Description
Cambridge student Serena Frome's beauty and intelligence make her the ideal recruit for MI5. In 1972, the Cold War is far from over. England's intelligence agency is determined to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government. The operation is code named "Sweet Tooth." Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is the perfect candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 5 - AR Pts: 4
Description
When ten-year-old orphan Peter Augustus Duchene encounters a fortune teller in the marketplace one day and she tells him that his sister, who is presumed dead, is in fact alive, he embarks on a remarkable series of adventures as he desperately tries to find her.
Author
Formats
Description
"Disgraced when her village's mysterious healer, an Eastern European immigrant whom she loved and begged to help her have a child, is arrested as a war criminal, Fidelma flees to England to take migrant work, only to confront her nemesis at a tribunal in The Hague."--Publisher.
Author
Description
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
Author
Series
Description
"From bestselling author Diane Setterfield, a new mystery as gorgeous, spellbinding and addictively readable as her blockbuster debut The Thirteenth Tale. Solstice is a time of dreaming, a time of stories and a time of magic. On a dark, misty night in the small English village of Radcot, locals gather at the Swan Inn to cap their day with drinks and lore. The 600-year-old pub is a famed hub for storytellers, but the patrons cannot know that their...
Author
Description
"Natalie Jenner, the internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society, returns with a compelling and heartwarming story of post-war London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world in Bloomsbury Girls. Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one...
8) Middlemarch
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10.4 - AR Pts: 64
Formats
Description
Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces reisistance from the society she inhabits.
9) Jane Eyre
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.9 - AR Pts: 33
Description
"Jane Eyre recounts the story of a governess who, having suffered during childhood both at her aunt's house and then at school, finds herself falling for her new employer, Mr Rochester. But Mr Rochester and his home are not all they seem and when secrets come to light, Jane is forced to abandon all her hopes and dreams."--Amazon.
10) Miss Austen
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Formats
Description
""A deeply imagined and deeply moving novel. Reading it made me happy and weepy in equally copious amounts." -Karen Joy Fowler For fans of Jo Baker's Longbourn, a witty, poignant novel about Cassandra Austen and her famous sister, Jane. Whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was? England, 1840. For the two decades following the death of her beloved sister, Jane, Cassandra Austen has lived alone, spending her days visiting...
Description
Eighteen year-old Jesminder's parents want her to be a nice, conventional Indian girl. But she just wants to play soccer like her hero, David Beckham. For Jess, that means kicking a ball around the local park with the lads until she's spotted by Jules, who invites her to join the local women's team.
12) House of Names
Author
Series
Formats
Description
Taoibain brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that readers not only believe Clytemnestra's thirst for revenge, but applaud it. He inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth's most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels. Told in four parts, this is a portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes' story, too:...
13) Mona Lisa Smile
Pub. Date
c2003
Description
Set in 1953, Katherine Watson is a free-spirited graduate of UCLA who accepts a teaching post at Wellesley College, a women-only school where the students are torn between the repressive mores of the time and their longing for intellectual freedom.
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.2 - AR Pts: 7
Formats
Description
A feminist manifesto by the great modernist writer contends that women's literature would be on a par with that of men, if women had the same levels of income, privacy, and experience as their counterparts. Her main illustration of this principle is a hypothetical sister to Shakespeare, who, even with the same talents as her brother, would have never been given the chance to display her talents to the world.
15) Infamous
Pub. Date
[2007]
Description
While researching his book "In cold blood", writer Truman Capote develops a relationship with convicted murderers Dick Hickock and, in particular Perry Smith, while both men waited for their date of execution on death row.
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Description
*The basis for the wonderfully funny and moving TV series developed by Amy Poehler and Scout Productions*
A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life.
In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning "death" and städning meaning "cleaning." This surprising and invigorating...
A charming, practical, and unsentimental approach to putting a home in order while reflecting on the tiny joys that make up a long life.
In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning "death" and städning meaning "cleaning." This surprising and invigorating...
Author
Description
"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent command across France: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's "ministry of...
19) Trespass
Author
Pub. Date
[2010], p2010
Description
An electrifying novel about disputed territory, sibling love, and devastating revenge. In a silent valley in southern France stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Aramon, the owner, is so haunted by his violent past that he's become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin. Meanwhile, his sister Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution...
Author
Description
"She's going too far to go it alone. It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson, a schoolteacher and spinster, is trying to get through life, surviving on scraps. One day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and small existence to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of her childhood obsession: an insect that may or may not exist - the golden beetle of New Caledonia. When she...