Letters Literature

In 1762, 22-year old James Boswell left Edinburg for London. This portion of his personal journals documents the nine months that followed. Filled with detail, description, and zest for life, Boswell's London Journal provides a frank and accurate picture of both the young man and London in the early 1760s. While many of Boswell's journals have been published, this one gained popularity for its racier entries as well as its descriptions of Boswell's first encounter with Samuel Johnson.

Millie Ashton thinks London society is full of empty headed, arrogant fools, but when she meets Alex Radley she falls desperately in love with him. Fearing humiliation and rejection, she decides the only sensible thing to do is take her pride and go home to India. Men like Alex do not fall for girls like her, whereas every girl loses her heart to Alexander the Great. Alex Radley, Marquess of Brooke rules the ton like a god, but even gods are known to fall for mere mortals.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a masterpiece of historical fiction set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1642 to 1649. Exploring themes of legalism, sin, and guilt, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a child out of wedlock and then struggles to create a new life of dignity. The Scarlet Letter was one of the earliest mass-produced books in America and a best seller. It is still highly regarded in literary circles.

Jeremy Wheale's well-ordered life is blasted apart when his brother is murdered. The killer was after a family heirloom - an antique gold tray - which sets Wheale on a trail from Devon to the tropical rainforest of Yucatan. There he joins the hunt for a lost Mayan city. But in the dense cover of the jungle, a band of vicious convict mercenaries are waiting to strike....

In April 1915 Dorothea Crewdson, a newly trained Red Cross nurse, and her best friend, Christie, received instructions to leave for Le Treport in Northern France. Filled with excitement at the prospect of her first paid job, Dorothea began writing a diary. 'Who knows how long we shall really be out here? Seems a good chance from all reports of the campaigns being ended before winter, but all is uncertain.'

A classic fable from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, read by Johnny Morris. Have you ever wondered how and why the animals came to be as they are? In these magical tales, drawn from stories he heard as a child in India as well as on folk traditions he later collected all over the world, Rudyard Kipling gives some wonderfully imaginative explanations.

Greetings from Monchac, Louisiana. Home to fifty-seven souls and the world's only floating stationery store! When Mila Breaux's LA dreams go up in smoke, she'll move her cozy lettering shop down to bayou country, and pile her pens and paper onto her late uncle's houseboat. But the discovery of human bones just feet from her new store will rock the foundations of the sleepy swamp town. It will be up to Mila and a quirky band of characters to get to the bottom of things before it is too late!

Chief Superintendent Strange's opinion was that too little progress had been made since the discovery of a corpse in a North Oxford flat. The victim had been killed by a single stab wound to the stomach. Yet the police had no weapon, no suspect, no motive.

Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who’s traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for—a boyfriend. But not any boy. She wants the “Real Thing,” to be in love with someone who loves her equally. Then Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything.

A trip to Washington, DC, turns into a perilous scramble through dark alleys and secret passages as Jake, Lucy, and TJ race to find the lost letters of Mary Lincoln before they fall into the hands of the Order of the Dark Lantern. What makes these letters so valuable to the Lantern? And how did the White House fall under control of this dark and powerful group? Another fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping thriller with all of the action, humor, and historical trivia that make the Jake and the League Series such a riveting adventure.

Penelope Scottsdale is faced with a dilemma when her spoiled sister refuses to respond to letters sent to her by a deployed soldier. Her sister wants nothing to do with the admirer, but Penelope doesn't have it in her heart to break his. Rather than tell him the truth, she decides to take her sister's place and respond to the letters. In time, Penelope discovers the truth behind her sister's foul behavior, and her life spirals out of control. With new and frightening truths around every corner, Penelope finds herself turning to the soldier for advice and comfort.

Chace, a teenage orphan with the power to see the future, saves people anonymously by leaving them a letter to find in their moment of crisis. When his friends are in danger, he is there. He saves them but cannot predict the consequences. He can see their future, but he cannot see his own. Chase is interrupted while writing to save his best friend, Sarah. With an incomplete letter, her rescue feels equally incomplete inside. Sarah cannot rest until she speaks to the one person who helped her want to go on living.

When famous writer Victor Esposito falls into a coma, the memories of a 10-year-old love affair come roaring back to Eva Abram's mind, uprooting her quiet Long Island life. Victor Esposito mysteriously dedicates every novel he's ever written to one woman. His trademark protagonist fits the description of Eva Abrams, the bright-eyed and blonde Long Island housewife. Tragedy suddenly strikes Victor's life when a courageous act leaves him in a coma. Hearing the news from a television broadcast, Eva finds herself suddenly overcome with the memories of a love affair she'd left behind.

Is there any mystery greater than those we love the most? In this remarkable collaboration, New York Times best-selling author Luanne Rice and Joseph Monninger combine their unique talents to create a powerfully moving novel of an estranged husband and wife through a series of searching, intimate letters. By way of a correspondence so achingly real you’ll forget it’s fiction, they trace the history of a love affair and of a family before, and after, the moment that changed the course of two people’s journey forever.

Immediately following the death of her young son, distraught and heartbroken, a woman sends a heart-wrenching letter to the only man she has ever loved, chronicling their love affair, opening with, "To you, who have never known me."

Mia Anderson is an invisible woman. An unremarkable thirty-two-year-old Tennessee librarian, she’s accustomed to disappearing in a crowd, unseen and unheard. Then she receives an anonymous note: You look beautiful today. It doesn’t stop there. The attentive stranger—a secret admirer named Adam—has plans for Mia. With each new text comes a suggestion for her hair, clothes, or attitude, and for the first time in memory, Mia feels noticed. Slowly, she develops a confidence in herself she’s never had. But Adam has a surprise coming....

Kate thinks all her wishes have come true when she opens her little craft shop down on the harbour in the pretty Cornish seaside town of St Felix. It's been her life-long dream to open her own shop, and now she's finally got the chance, she's loving selling her own quirky handmade textile designs to the many holidaymakers that flock into St Felix every year. But there's a mystery about Kate's shop - one that Jack, the owner of a new art store in town, wants to help Kate solve. A series of mysterious paintings and beautiful embroidered pictures hint at a love story over 60 years old.

Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John, who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John's reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John's life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public's reception of their work.

Jonathan Landry está cada vez más agobiado por su trabajo y por su matrimonio fracasado. Un día su madre le pide que se reúna urgentemente con su tío, Julian Mantle, a quien casi no conoce. Hace años Julian, un abogado de gran éxito, decidió vender todas sus posesiones, incluido su flamante Ferrari, y se refugió en un monasterio del Himalaya. Ahora Julian necesita la ayuda de Jonathan.

Tacky is about the power of pop culture - like any art - to imprint itself on our lives and shape our experiences, no matter one's commitment to "good" taste. These 14 essays are a nostalgia-soaked antidote to the millennial generation's obsession with irony, putting the aesthetics we hate to love - snakeskin pants, Sex and the City, Cheesecake Factory's gargantuan menu - into kinder and sharper perspective.