Dr Robyn Ballantyne, daughter of a famous missionary and explorer, returns on a joint expedition with her brother Zouga, to southern Africa the land of her birth, fired with the desire to bring the Africans medicine, Christianity and an end to the slave trade, still flourishing in 1860.
‘The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now…’
Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent’s Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, ‘H.G.’ to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, ‘the man who invented tomorrow’; now he feels like yesterday’s man, deserted by readers and depressed by the collapse of his utopian dreams.
He recalls his unpromising start, and early struggles to acquire an education and make a living as a teacher; his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination and a comic common touch which brought him into contact with most of the important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time; his plunge into socialist politics; his belief in free love, and energetic practice of it. Arguing with himself about his conduct, he relives his relationships with two wives and many mistresses, especially the brilliant student Amber Reeves and the gifted writer Rebecca West, both of whom bore him children, with dramatic and long-lasting consequences.
Unfolding this astonishing story, David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel; a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns, but always vitally human.
From a New York Times bestselling author known as the creator of the modern historical romance novel: Although her love has long belonged to another, beautiful Erienne Fleming weds the aloof yet gentle Lord Saxton to help her father pay off his debts. But can she resist the passionate pull of her heart? A compelling tale read by an Audie Award–winning narrator.
The fairest flower in Mawbry is Erienne Fleming, the enchanting, raven-haired daughter of the village mayor. Charming, spirited and exquisitely lovely, she is beset on all sides by suitors, any one of whom would pay a king’s fortune for a place in her heart. But Erienne has eyes for only one: the dashing and witty young Yankee, Christopher Seton.
But marriage for love is not to be, for her irresponsible and unscrupulous father, crippled by gambling debts, is intent on auctioning off his beautiful daughter to the highest bidder. And in the end, Erienne is devastated to find it is the strange and secretive Lord Saxton who has purchased her–a mysterious, tragic figure who wears a mask and a cloak at all times to hide disfiguring scars gained in a terrible fire some years back.
But in the passing days, Saxton’s true nature is revealed to her. A gentle and adoring soul, he treats his new bride with warmth and abiding tenderness, yet appears to her only by daylight. She, in turn, vows to be a good and loyal wife to him. And then Christopher Seton reenters Erienne’s world.
Conflicted by emotions she cannot suppress, Erienne valiantly attempts to remain honorable to her elusive, enigmatic husband but feels herself irresistibly drawn to Seton’s passion, his fire, and his secrets. Entangled in intrigues she doesn’t yet understand, Erienne Fleming will soon have to make a devastating choice: between love and honor…between her duty and her heart.
After a disastrous first Season, Lady Daisy Patterdale is relieved to be back home with her books. Looking for peace, she rows out to the island on the lake, where she encounters Captain Benjamin Flinders, the Earl of Bramhall—who’s been tricked and left there with no clothes! It’s a scandalous encounter that rushes them straight to the altar… But despite her unwillingness to wed, Daisy’s drawn to charismatic Ben. If only he felt more for her than a sense of duty…
He’s back…
Eight years ago, ‘The Inside Man’ murdered four women and left three more in critical condition—all of them with their stomachs slit open and a plastic doll stitched inside.
And then the killer just… disappeared.
Ash Henderson was a Detective Inspector on the initial investigation, but a lot can change in eight years. His family has been destroyed, his career is in tatters, and one of Oldcastle’s most vicious criminals is making sure he spends the rest of his life in prison.
Now a nurse has turned up dead on a patch of waste ground, a plastic doll buried beneath her skin, and it looks as if Ash might finally get a shot at redemption. At earning his freedom.
At revenge.
A Sparrow Falls, another gripping installment in Wilbur Smith’s Courtney Family Adventure series
Mark Anders grew up on eight thousand acres of African land that bore his family name. Then he fought in Europe’s Great War and, upon returning to his ancestral home, he saw savagery unlike any other….
In Africa, Mark’s family estate has been despoiled. His grandfather has died under mysterious circumstances. And he has inherited a murderous enemy–the rogue scion of the powerful Courtney clan–in an altogether new kind of war.
Now, Mark will make a fateful choice between two women. Journey into the wilderness to uncover his grandfather’s fate. Find his way through battles raging between fathers and sons, generals and politicians, and nature and man. In an age of violent conflict, Mark Anders will live or die for justice–and his fight will echo across a country he always loved…
A Sparrow Falls, another gripping installment in Wilbur Smith’s Courtney Family Adventure series
Mark Anders grew up on eight thousand acres of African land that bore his family name. Then he fought in Europe’s Great War and, upon returning to his ancestral home, he saw savagery unlike any other….
In Africa, Mark’s family estate has been despoiled. His grandfather has died under mysterious circumstances. And he has inherited a murderous enemy–the rogue scion of the powerful Courtney clan–in an altogether new kind of war.
Now, Mark will make a fateful choice between two women. Journey into the wilderness to uncover his grandfather’s fate. Find his way through battles raging between fathers and sons, generals and politicians, and nature and man. In an age of violent conflict, Mark Anders will live or die for justice–and his fight will echo across a country he always loved…
To assure his position as Queen Victoria’s Master of the Horse, the Marquis of Falcon arranges to dispel his playboy image with a quick marriage to a country neighbor’s daughter, but a misunderstanding has him marry the wrong daughter
Corban Addison leads readers on a chilling, eye-opening journey into Mumbai’s seedy underworld–and the nightmare of two orphaned girls swept into the international sex trade.
When a tsunami rages through their coastal town in India, 17-year-old Ahalya Ghai and her 15-year-old sister Sita are left orphaned and homeless. With almost everyone they know suddenly erased from the face of the earth, the girls set out for the convent where they attend school. They are abducted almost immediately and sold to a Mumbai brothel owner, beginning a hellish descent into the bowels of the sex trade.
Halfway across the world, Washington, D.C., attorney Thomas Clarke faces his own personal and professional crisis-and makes the fateful decision to pursue a pro bono sabbatical working in India for an NGO that prosecutes the subcontinent’s human traffickers. There, his conscience awakens as he sees firsthand the horrors of the trade in human flesh, and the corrupt judicial system that fosters it. Learning of the fate of Ahalya and Sita, Clarke makes it his personal mission to rescue them, setting the stage for a riveting showdown with an international network of ruthless criminals.
In the tumultuous years before the First World War, sisters Iris, Marianne, Eva and Clemency, born and raised in industrial Sheffield, seek to follow their dreams. When twenty-year-old Marianne meets handsome, sophisticated Arthur Leighton at a local provincial ball, she knows that she has found the love of her life. Years pass, and Iris, her ambition of a grand marriage dashed, becomes a nurse in a London hospital, surprising herself, and her family, at her ability to deal with the injuries and needs of her patients. When Eva falls in love with the Bohemian, Gabriel Bellamy, her hopes of becoming an artist falter, for though he admires her work, he expects attention in return for his tutelage. Caring for her invalid mother, Clemency remains tied to the family home, stifling her dreams of a life elsewhere. And Marianne’s desire for happiness turns to nightmare when she finds herself trapped in an isolated outpost of the Empire with a cruel and dangerous man. Only her love for her son and her memory of her sisters, thousands of miles away in England, give her the strength to survive. As the clouds darken and war changes the lives all the sisters have known, Iris, Marianne, Eva and Clemency fight to free themselves of the bonds that confine them and discover love at last.
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