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In the cellar there was no sound at all except her own breathing and the soft rustle of her skirts. After her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she noticed a niche in the wall a yard from where she stood. She saw something there about the size of her fist. Agnes quietly picked it up. It was wrapped in a cloth and surprisingly heavy. . . a pistol, the hilt filthy with mud and dirt. Suddenly she heard the... (more)

An Inconvenient Wife

by Megan Chance

Young Mrs. Lucy Carleton is the daughter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in 1880s New York City. William Carleton is Lucys un-pedigreed, nouveau riche husband. Problems arise when Lucy becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the prudish manners and paternalistic dependencies that define the wives of New York society. Lucy longs to break away and give free reign to her more bohemian soul, but her... (more)

Emma Brown

by Clare Boylan, Charlotte Bronte

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, she left behind twenty pages of a novel that signaled her most compelling work since Jane Eyre . One hundred fifty years later, Clare Boylan has finished Brontë’s novel, sparking a sensational literary event. With pitch-perfect tone that is utterly true to Brontë’s voice, Boylan delivers a brilliant tale about a mysterious young girl, Matilda, who is delivered to a... (more)

The Observations

by Jane Harris

An extraordinary historical novel about a peculiar friendship between the mistress of a Scottish estate and her irresistibly appealing housemaid Winner of the Book of the Month Club First Fiction Prize Scotland, 1863. In an attempt to escape her not-so-innocent past in Glasgow, Bessy Buckley-a wide-eyed and feisty young Irish girl-takes a job as a maid in a big house outside Edinburgh working for the... (more)

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Tags: 19thc