He made himself an island until something unexpected washed ashore. When Holton lost his wife, Adele, in a freak accident, he shut himself off from the world, living a life of seclusion, making drifwood sculptures and drowning his pain in gin. Until twenty-three-year-old Libby knocks on his door, asking for a job and claiming to be a friend of his late wife. When he discovers Libby is actually his late wife's illegitimate daughter, given up for adoption...

In 1952, a young Philomena was sent the convent of Roscrea in Ireland, after giving birth to her first child. When her son became a toddler, the nuns sent him to America for adoption. Philomena then spent the next fifty years searching for him in vain.

Bleak House defies a single description. It is a mystery story, in which Esther Summerson discovers the truth about her birth and her unknown mother's tragic life. It is a murder story, which comes to a climax in a thrilling chase, led by one of the earliest detectives in English fiction, Inspector Bucket.

""Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me." With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester wears a scarlet "A" upon her breast, the sign of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name, her husband begins his vindictive search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to protect. Defiant and proud, Hester witnesses the degradation of...

"A new addition to the New York Times-bestselling Stone Barrington series. After an eventful trip to Bel-Air and a reunion with his sophisticated (and very wealthy) former love, Arrington Calder, Stone Barrington is back in New York, and he's looking to stay closer to home and cash in on his partnership at Woodman & Weld. But Arrington has other plans for Stone...including introducing him to the child he fathered many years ago"--Provided by publisher....

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the brothers. Includes the...

"Two women, bound by a child, and a secret that will change everything. London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate newborn at the Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the daughter she has never known. Dreading the worst, that she has died in care, she is astonished to discover someone pretending to be Bess has already claimed her. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl--and why....

"After growing up poor in Texas, Vera Lomax used every gold-digging trick in the book to land a rich husband. Now living in the lap of luxury in San Francisco, her only job is to fawn over her much-older husband, so it's been easy for her to balance a life of shopping and affairs with younger men with a major secret: the sixteen-year bribery of one of her husband's mistresses to keep her pregnancy under wraps. Vera figures that a little hush money...

On the eve of the Civil War, Sara Collier marries Dru Talbot just before he joins the Confederate Army. When Dru dies heroically on the battlefield, Sara rises above her grief. Then, a year after the end of the war, battle-scarred Dru surprises everyone when he returns home, still clinging to the dream of starting over with his bride.