Publisher: ShandonPress
A Lady of Quality is a novel published in 1896 by Frances Hodgson Burnett that was the second highest best-selling book in the United States in 1896. It was the first of series of successful historical novels by Burnett.
"The subject is an American citizen holding high elected office, married, and father to a young family..."From its opening line, American Adulterer examines the psychology of a habitual womanizer in hypnotically clinical prose. Like any successful philanderer, the subject must be circumspect in his choice of mistresses and employ careful calculation in their seduction; he must exercise every effort to conceal his affairs from his wife and jealous rivals. But this is no ordinary adulterer. He is the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.JFK famously confided that if he went three days without a woman, he suffered severe headaches. Acclaimed author Jed Mercurio takes inspiration from the tantalizing details surrounding the president's sex life to conceive this provocatively intimate perspective on Kennedy's affairs. Yet this is not an indictment. Startlingly empathetic, darkly witty, and deft, American Adulterer is a moving account of a man not only crippled by back pain but enduring numerous medical crises, a man overcoming constant suffering to serve as a highly effective commander-in-chief, committed to a heroically idealistic vision of America. But each affair propels him into increasingly murky waters. President Kennedy fears losing the wife and children to whom he's devoted and the office to which he's dedicated. This is a stunning portrait of a virtuous man enslaved by an uncontrollable vice and a novel that poses controversial questions about society's evolving fixation on the private lives of public officials and, ultimately, ignites a polemic on monogamy, marriage, and family values.Show book
From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South: The first in a saga about a German immigrant and his family’s rise in 20th-century America. The tide of the twentieth century is rising upon the world, and on its crest rides the Crown family. Young Pauli Kroner, freshly arrived in America from the streets of Berlin, makes his way to the mansion of his millionaire uncle in Chicago, looking to fulfill his dreams. His uncle, Joe Crown, is a self-made brewery tycoon who rules his domain with an iron hand—especially when it comes to his own family of defiantly rebellious children and a wife yearning for her own liberation. In this new world, Pauli will rise as his own man and find his destiny in the early days of motion pictures. Surrounded by relations close and distant, proud and vengeful, each struggling to find themselves at the dawn of a new era, he will witness and experience the violence of the Pullman Strike, and find love in the arms of a woman who can never be his as he follows the march of history, intertwined with such figures as the audacious Theodore Roosevelt, the ruthless Thomas Edison, the fading western icon Buffalo Bill, and many more. Named a New York Times Notable Book, Homeland is a “first-rate historical . . . chock-full of fascinating period detail, [Jakes’s] captivating story brings to life the sounds, smells and tastes of turn-of-the-century America in a manner comparable to Michener’s Hawaii and Doctorow’s Ragtime” (Publishers Weekly). This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.Show book
War and Peace (Russian: ????? ? ???, Voyna i mir; in original orthography: ????? ? ????, Voyna i mir") is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels. War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. (Summary by Wikipedia)Show book
When Yuri Varienski, a Ukranian emigré, dies in Jersey, he leaves his daughter Lucy an object—and a great responsibility. Lucy must take the gold filigree cross she is bequeathed to Geneva, and deliver it into the hands of exiled former dissident leader, Volkov. Lucy innocently accepts her father’s charge. But Volkov, broken by imprisonment, is not the man he used to be. And there are other people who wish to possess the cross too. For the object Lucy carries is the legendary relic, St. Vladimir’s Cross, and it has the power to unite or divide the volatile Soviet Union. Lucy soon realizes that she will have to make sacrifices—of her home, her heart, and maybe even her life—if she is going to fulfill her father’s last wish.Show book
1939. Declared unfit for active service after the Great War, Richard Hansen feels rudderless and out of place. But when the unthinkable happens and the shadow of a new conflict looms, he is thrust into enemy territory once again for a final, covert mission. Devastated and mourning her own catastrophic losses, his wife Emily is alone and adrift in a once-idyllic marriage grown cold and distant. When one day a surprise visitor comes calling she is faced with a choice that may grant her the very thing she has always longed for… or lead her into terrible danger. As Europe goes to war a second time and Richard and Emily’s paths are wrenched apart, each must confront the ghosts of their own past, battling forces both seen and unseen as their lifelong love is tested to its limits - by duty, grief, time, and betrayal.Show book
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his bestknown works are MobyDick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival, and MobyDick grew to be considered one of the great American novels. Melville's growing literary ambition showed in MobyDick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The ConfidenceMan (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as United States customs inspector. From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. BattlePieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a selfinflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.Show book
