Family Life Classics

Lady Charlotte French-McGrath has successfully ruled over her family with a rod of iron until the arrival of Cynthia: beautiful, young, talented, selfish - and engaged to her son, Desmond. When Cynthia enters the Jazz Age, on the surface her life passes in a whirl of hunting, drinking and romance. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next.

This delightful true story, written in the first person by the spouse of the title character, will have readers reliving their own pasts. Baby boomers will surely savor references to the pop culture, history, and politics of their collective youth as they get caught up in the personal lives of the author and his spouse. In an afternoon you will learn how a speeding ticket and an interest in four-part a cappella harmony intersected with the Cold War to start the protagonists on the road to holy matrimony.

Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.

After their home is destroyed by a fire, Rosa, her mother, and grandmother save their coins to buy a really comfortable chair for all to enjoy. A Chair for My Mother has sold more than a million copies and is an ideal choice for reading and sharing at home and in the classroom.

Life on the streets of turn-of-the-century London hurls the orphan Oliver Twist into a danger-filled adventure! With him we meet the Artful Dodger and Fagin, and learn the ways of the hard world...

Literary critic, E. A. Koltonovskaya, described the literary style of novelist Maria Krestovskaya as follows, “Her pen, for all its feminine agility, is often remarkable for its nearly masculine reticence. She has none of the chaotic flood of thoughtless emotions, which so frequently plagues the works by female writers. She does not like lyrical diversions and allows her characters to speak and act for themselves. Even during the most dramatic scenes, her tone remains restrained. Her formulation of women’s issues gives one the sense of a broad, universal foundation...."

Everybody's met a Judy. Somehow, as crass and rusty on the outside as they always are, you always like them. Deep down inside they have a soft heart, which you can see in their eyes if you look long enough. Why? Because often they have a story - of pain, and they just like to hide it under the gruff face. Meet Judy, raised by her grandparents because of her dysfunctional home; has a baby out of wedlock in her teens and is dying of cancer.