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  The Nun

  Simonetta Agnello Hornby

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  Winner of the Italian PEN Prize: A tale of illicit love and a girl forced into a convent in the early nineteenth century.   1839, Messina, Italy: Agata is the daughter of an aristocrat, albeit an impoverished one, and she has fallen in love with wealthy Giacomo Lepre. Their families, however, view their romance as unacceptable and tawdry—and when Agata’s father dies, her mother decides to ferry her daughter far away, to Naples, where she hopes to garner a stipend from the king.   The only boat leaving Messina that day is captained by young Englishman James Garson. Following a tempestuous passage to Naples, during which Agata confesses her troubles to James, Agata and her mother find themselves rebuffed by the king, and Agata is forced to join a convent. The Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Stilita is rife with rancor and jealousy, illicit passions and ancient feuds. But Agata remains aloof, devoting herself to the cultivation of medicinal herbs, calmed by the steady rhythms of monastic life. She reads all the books James sends her and follows the news of the various factions struggling to bring unity to Italy.   She has accepted her life as a nun, but she is divided between her yearnings for purity and religiosity and her desire to be part of the world. And she is increasingly torn when she realizes that her feelings for James, though he is only a distant presence in her life, have eclipsed those for Lepre . . .   “Hornby enriches her story with sensuous details of food, fashion, furnishings, and the rules of an extravagant society, savoring local color and personality quirks.” —Publishers Weekly   “An historical novel, a coming-of-age novel, a perfect portrait of family dynamics, The Nun also gives us, in Agata, an unforgettable heroine.” —Gazzetta di Mantova

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  The Further Exploits of The...

  James Grant Goldin

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  Pirate Queen ANNE BONNY has a secret--a baby daughter named KATE! Anne, afraid that motherhood will undermine her fearsome reputation as the scarlet-haired scourge of the 18th century Caribbean, is having the baby raised by friends in the Spanish colony of Cuba, unknown to the crew of the Tigress--and that Kate's father, CAPTAIN CALICO JACK RACKAM. But when Anne wants to go to her daughter's first birthday--now behind enemy lines in the middle of Great Britain's latest war with Spain--she turns for help to the only person she can trust: fellow female freebooter MARY READ. 
  Together, the pirate queens will defy storms sharks, slave-catchers, a shipwreck, and the Spanish Inquisition...to fulfill a promise. 
  And, along the way, they might just plunder Spain's world-famed "treasure fleet."

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  Ilsa - A Novel

  Madeleine L'Engle

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  A novel about the darker side of love by the bestselling author of A Wrinkle in Time and the Crosswicks Journals. 
  From the moment Henry Porcher first sees Ilsa Brandes, he worships her. Despite controversy surrounding the young girl, Henry is drawn to her, a fascination that turns into a lifelong infatuation. 
  As the years pass, Ilsa's memory never leaves him, not until the day he returns to their sleepy Southern hometown and renews their childhood friendship. Henry watches as she becomes a wife, then a mother, then a widow, irrevocably changed by tragedy. 
  This rare and sought-after novel is a portrait of a remarkable woman bound by both the stifling conventions of her time and place, and her own sense of honor and purpose. 
  A departure from L'Engle's later works, Ilsa is a dark, intriguing novel about passion, fixation, and the real price of unrequited love by an author renowned for her children's classics as well as her candid personal memoirs.

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  The Most Important Thing

  David Gross

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  In this novel based on true events, a young man from rural Kentucky discovers what matters most in life as a soldier in the Korean War. 
   
  In January of 1950, Bradley leaves his family’s Kentucky farm to join the US Army. He’s eighteen years old and eager for adventure, new horizons, and a bigger paycheck. His service takes him halfway across the world to serve in the Korean War. It is there, amidst the perils of battle, that he discovers the most important thing. 
   
  In The Most Important Thing author David Gross parlays his own father’s life history into a moving novel about a young man’s coming of age. It is a powerful story of resilience that explores the meaning of service, sacrifice, and heroism.

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  The Weight of Smoke - So begins...

  George Robert Minkoff

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  Four hundred years after the founding of Jamestown, the lives of Captain John Smith, Powhatan, and Pocahontas assume their true dimensions in this far-ranging saga of the beginnings of the British Empire. The English came to the New World to found a utopia. Instead they founded a slave state. The only English voice of reason and the first true American hero became an outcast - and then forgotten. 
  George Robert Minkoff presents a rich, authentic tale about the disastrous first 18 months of the Jamestown Colony, 1607-1609. Entwined with the colony’s fractious beginnings are the adventures of Sir Francis Drake, retold around the campfires by an old alchemist, Jonas Profit, who sailed the Spanish Main with Queen Elizabeth’s favorite pirate. 
  Appropriately, these tales are told in a language rich with metaphorical power, flavored with Elizabethan authenticity, and read with power and authenticity by Nigel Gore. 
  “George Minkoff is one of the bravest men alive. He has gambled that a three-part epic novel about 17th century Colonial America — written in a language that mimics the speech of the time — can hold the interest of 21st century readers and bring satisfactions and delights as a work of contemporary fiction. Remarkably enough, he has won his bet." 
  ~ Paul Aster

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  The Original Manuscript The...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.A youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922 inspired the novel. Following a move to the French Riviera, he completed a rough draft in 1924. He submitted the draft to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After his revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives.After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, although some literary critics believed it did not hold up to Fitzgerald's previous efforts and signaled the end of the author's literary achievements. Despite the warm critical reception, Gatsby was a commercial failure. The book sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. After his death, the novel faced a critical and scholarly re-examination amid World War II, and it soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a focus of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. The novel was most recently adapted to film in 2013 by director Baz Luhrmann, while contemporary scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited wealth compared to those who are self-made, race, environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American dream.

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