Letters Literature

The Letter, the final book of the Christmas Box collection, is, most simply stated, the love story of David and MaryAnne Parkin. But it is also everyone's love story, for it is about the storms that all relationships must face when the blissful state of romance vanishes into one of real-life challenges and difficulties. We often forget that it is in the hard times that we truly see what is best in love as well as in life. Though love may be temporarily darkened, true love never gives in, or up, but holds tight to noble ideas, which transcend this earth and all time.

When Chloe is given a peek at the script for an epic love story, she decides to take her destiny into her own hands and request an audition for the lead female role, Esther Kingsley. The compelling tale, inspired by family lore and a one-page letter from the colonial ancestor of scriptwriter Jesse Gates, just might break her out of this career-crippling rut. Jesse would rather write about romance than live through it after his past relationship ended in disaster. But once on-set together, the chemistry between Jesse and his leading lady is hard to deny.

Centered on recently discovered, authenticated correspondence between two famous 19th-century Masonic leaders, Confederate General Albert Pike and British Colonel James Wilson Bury MacLeod Moore, this modern-day thriller follows Thomas, a direct descendant of Col. Moore, and Janet Rose, a direct descendant of the Merovingian Kings and House of David, as they risk their lives to protect the letters and the Templar and Rosicrucian secrets encoded within them.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.

Can a good girl find love in a thug? For Lei Fifer, that’s the hundred-thousand-dollar question. When Lei, an introverted homebody, invites her girls over for a spa day, she isn’t expecting their conversation to shift to men in prison. As an advocate for rehabilitated people receiving the love, companionship, and support those who haven’t committed crimes receive, Lei doesn’t hesitate to put her money where her mouth is and bet that she can find a good friend or great love with someone through the pen pal program her father created.

Burned-out software engineer Jake Martin and his golden retriever, Fred, live in a mountain cabin far enough from Denver to escape the rat race but not far enough to escape its crime. While remodeling an old house, he uncovers a stack of love letters that will turn his world inside out. When word of the letters gets out, people start dying, including the owner of the house Jake was remodeling. With his main source of income gone, he lets his friend and neighbor, Bonnie Jones, talk him into searching for the killer after they are offered a large retainer.

Veronica and Gabe met when they were children at ballet class, and by the time they’d reached their teens, they knew they’d be dancing together forever. Only Gabe’s mother had other ideas.... Twenty-something years later, Veronica no longer dances and life hasn’t turned out how she thought it would. She’s divorced with a needy ex-husband, monosyllabic teenage sons, a sister who fancies herself as a long in the tooth ‘it girl’ and a mother who’s recently moved into a care home.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, an 1850 novel, is a work of historical fiction written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book is considered to be his "masterwork." Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

The first volume in the best-selling Letters of Note series was a collection of hundreds of the world's most entertaining, inspiring, and unusual letters, based on the seismically popular website of the same name. In this volume, Shaun Usher turns to the theme of war. Letters of Note: War brings together some of the most remarkable letters that encapsulate human experience of war, from unimaginable feats of courage and compassion, to unthinkable episodes of violence and horror. Includes letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Alexander Hamilton, Martha Gellhorn, and many more.

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered.

In a forgotten nook of Cambridge a little shop stands where thousands of sheets of beautiful paper and hundreds of exquisite pens wait for the next person who, with Clara Cohen's help, will express the love, despair and desire they feel to correspondents alive, estranged or dead. Clara knows better than most the power a letter can have to turn a person's life around, so when she discovers a cache of wartime love letters, she follows them on a profound journey of her own.

"Momma set me on the jukebox." So begins the personal story of Denise (Sweetie) Wooten, set between a post-civil rights era New York City and a growing but stale rural Alabama. We are thrust in the midst of a family longing for normalcy, but instead struggling with illness and all that comes with it - denial, anger, misunderstanding, and love. As cultures clash, we see the family through a child's eyes and walk with her as she makes sense of war fought far away, but with effects close to home, and a tragedy that changes her life forever.

For many Christians reading the Old Testament, trying to understand Israel's prophets is like listening to just one side of a phone conversation—you only get half the idea of it. You hear the answer, but how do you know what question the prophet is answering? In The Lost Letters to the Twelve Prophets, John Goldingay uncovers the questions behind the prophets' answers that make their meaning and relevance intelligible to us.

On the eve of a world war, a forbidden love will blossom in the garden of a stately home, where one young woman will make a choice that will change her life forever. As the storm clouds of war gather, Cordelia seeks refuge in the grounds of her family estate. Handsome landscaper Isaac has recently arrived to tend to the gardens, and the connection between him and Cordelia is as immediate as it is forbidden. Isaac begins to secretly teach her how to cultivate the gardens, so when he and all the young men are called away to war, Cordelia takes over.

Sydney Paige was never so mortified to hear the words "wrong number" in her life. She meant to tell off the guy who broke her best friend's heart but unleashed her anger on a perfect stranger instead. And now her world is turned upside down by the captivating man who wants to keep her on the line. Brian Savage is living a life he's quickly come to hate - until Sydney's wild rant has him hooked and hungry for more. Soon the sexy woman on the phone becomes the lover in his bed. But Brian has secrets.

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

So when mum of two Beth moves out of her beloved marital home and into an unloved and unkempt cottage, she can’t help but feel demoralised. Faced with months of DIY and dust, her children Jacob and Olivia aren’t impressed either. But when Beth finds a box of letters while she’s clearing out the children’s room, things start to look up.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game". Part autobiography, part writer's workshop, these letters offer an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck's creative process, and a fascinating glimpse of Steinbeck, the private man.

This is a meditation on the power of creative connection. Drawing on 20 years' experience as a writer and performer, Kae Tempest explores how and why creativity - however we choose to practise it - can cultivate greater self-awareness and help us establish a deeper relationship to ourselves and the world. Honest, tender and written with piercing clarity, On Connection is a call to arms that speaks to a universal yet intimate truth.