Letters Literature

After centuries of sleep, the gods are warring again. But eighteen-year-old Iris Winnow just wants to hold her family together. Her mother is suffering from addiction and her brother is missing from the front lines. Her best bet is to win the columnist promotion at the Oath Gazette. To combat her worries, Iris writes letters to her brother and slips them beneath her wardrobe door, where they vanish—into the hands of Roman Kitt, her cold and handsome rival at the paper.

In the book that he was born to write, provocateur and best-selling author Christopher Hitchens inspires future generations of radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, angry young (wo)men, and dissidents. Who better to speak to that person who finds him or herself in a contrarian position than Hitchens, who has made a career of disagreeing in profound and entertaining ways.

Trust is a delicate thing, and no one knows that better than Rosalind Thorne. Lady Melbourne has entrusted her with recovering a packet of highly sensitive private letters stolen from her desk. The contents of these letters hold great interest for the famous poet Lord Byron, who had carried on a notorious public affair with Lady Melbourne's daughter-in-law, the inconveniently unstable Lady Caroline Lamb. Rosalind is to take up residence in Melbourne House, posing as Lady Melbourne's confidential secretary. There, she must discover the thief and regain possession of the letters.

When husband and wife Eve and Patrick Gantly discover a shocking secret from Patrick's past, they make the difficult decision to use the old lantern once again to return to 1885. They hope to save his child from a tragic future. Although they try to plan for every possible contingency, something goes wrong. They lose each other and end up in a different time! Nothing goes as planned. They struggle to save Patrick's daughter from certain death, even as they search for the lost lantern that will return them to their own time.

Arto has a problem. For one, he's a robot. He’s awoken with no memory of who he is, with nothing but a mysterious letter, in a world bereft of those fleshy, talky things that made him. So why is he alone, and where have all the people gone? He stumbles upon a lost, cheeky kitten and selects it as his best friend for the adventure of a lifetime, trying to make sense of all this existence stuff. Just as Arto begins to fear he's the only sentient thing left on the whole planet, a cantankerous robot falls from the sky. She says she's his sister.

I was eight when Nathan moved away. He was my best friend. My only friend. My safe space. And then he was gone. And my life turned into Hell. But I survived. I broke free and made a life for myself. And I tried to forget about the boy who grew up to be Nate Waller, the famous retired football player. I really did try to forget. But then I opened the door, while working at a client’s house, and he was there. Standing before me. My old friend. My unwitting confidant. My Nathan. Except… he doesn’t recognize me.

Scott's discourses on the psychological, religious, physical, and preternatural explanations for contemporary beliefs in ghosts, witches, warlocks, fairies, elves, diabolism, the occult, and even werewolvesare are essential for acolytes of the dark and macabre. The letters dealing with witch hunts, trials, and torture are morbidly compelling. Scott was neither fully pro-rational modernity nor totally anti-superstitious past.

In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee - whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by secrets and transcendent delusions.

I caught her staring at me from across the quad, eyes fixed on the football jersey stretched across my wide chest. And if I flexed my muscles, showing off the strength of a defensive tackle, it was just to see her blush. And then she did, and I couldn’t get her out of my mind. Her wide eyes. The freckles on her cheeks. I needed to know her. The girl who scampered away every time we bumped into each other—by accident and by design.

Maddox Lovelace. The captivating football player I met in college. The one I only knew for a week. A week that was...life-changing. Until my phone rang, and I had no choice but to go home. I left Maddox a letter, putting my feelings on paper, giving him my number, hoping he'd call. But he didn't call. He never called. He got drafted into the professional league and lived like a king while I stayed home and struggled to stay afloat.

Stalin exchanged more than 600 messages with Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. In this riveting volume - the fruit of a unique British-Russian scholarly collaboration - the messages are published and also analyzed within their historical context. Ranging from intimate personal greetings to weighty salvos about diplomacy and strategy, this book offers fascinating new revelations of the political machinations and human stories behind the Allied triumvirate.

Rainey’s grandmother makes a startling request: Take me home. To Ireland, the country she fled post-World War II. Though they’re inseparably close, Rainey knows few of her grandmother’s secrets. Until they arrive at Aisling—the majestic estate on the southern coast of Ireland where her grandmother was raised—and Rainey discovers a collection of seventy-year-old letters in a trunk.

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography.

Murphy Shepherd has made a career of finding those no one else could - survivors of human trafficking. His life’s mission is helping others find freedom...but then the nightmare strikes too close to home. When his new wife, her daughter, and two other teenage girls are stolen, Murphy is left questioning all he has thought to be true. With more dead ends than leads, he has no idea how to find his loved ones. After everything is stripped away, love is what remains. Hope feels lost, but Murphy is willing to expend his last breath trying to bring them home.

Barbara Taylor Bradford delivers an evocative new novel of family secrets and betrayals that stretch from the streets of World War II Berlin to the winding alleys of Istanbul to the present day. Justine Nolan is a documentary film maker who lost her beloved grandmother a decade ago. Her own mother, Deborah, had always been distant and uninvolved. But when Justine inadvertently opens a letter addressed to her mother, she discovers that not only is her grandmother alive, but that Deborah has deliberately estranged the family from her for all these years.

One of the most important novels in classic literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter tackles the subject of adultery, with the notorious Hester Prynne at the forefront of the scandal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the beginning of the novel, Hester is serving time in prison for having a child out of wedlock and is forced to wear a scarlet A on her clothing at all times, so she cannot run from her sin no matter where she goes.

Elin Peer presents Book 0.5 in the Men of the North series. Contains mature themes.

It’s the summer of 1891, New York City, in the early days of Fiona Finnegan’s marriage to Nicholas Soames. When Fiona senses a quiet love blossoming between her widowed uncle, Michael Finnegan, and his neighbor, Mary Munro, she’s thrilled and hopes that Michael will soon propose to Mary. But one night, at a family supper, a surprise announcement tears these hopes asunder.

Captain Jack Aubrey, a brilliant and experienced officer, has been struck off the list of post-captains for a crime he did not commit. His old friend Stephen Maturin, usually cast as a ship's surgeon to mask his discreet activities on behalf of British intelligence, has bought for Aubrey his former ship the Surprise to command as a privateer, more politely termed a letter of marque. Together they sail on a desperate mission against the French, which, if successful, may redeem Aubrey from the private hell of his disgrace.

A road trip with Gabe and her friends leads Sylvia to discover more about her mother’s veiled past yet throws up several questions, too. The stack of unopened letters addressed to her family will hopefully provide answers. As she delves into the contents, a startling revelation emerges: the letters allude to a clandestine union between two magician families, hinting at the elusive identity of Sylvia’s father. Full of hope, she embarks on a quest to find the author of the letters.