"It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully...

Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth- century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimkés daughter Sarah has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarahs eleventh birthday in 1803, she is given ownership of ten-year-old Handful, who is to be her handmaid....

Relates the story of the life of Joan of Arc, as seen through the eyes of the fictional narrator Sieur Louis de Conte, Joan's childhood friend and secretary.

A fictional memoir of Mary Queen of Scots, documenting her reign over Scotland, her marriages, and her final days as a prisoner of her cousin Elizabeth I.

"Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who'd amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans. Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie...

Gregory answers the question about an unsolved crime that has fascinated detectives and historians for centuries. Useing documents and evidence from the Tudor era and, with almost magical insight into the desires of Robert Dudley and his lovers, she paints a picture of a country on the brink of greatness, a young woman grasping at her power, a young man whose ambition is greater than his means, and the wife who cannot forgive them.

"In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tèatowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism--but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion....

The year is 1876. Among the warring Indian tribes and lawless gold-rush towns of America's western territories, two paleontologists pillage the Wild West. They are hunting for dinosaur fossils, while surveilling, deceiving and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars. Into this treacherous territory plunges the arrogant and entitled Yale student William Johnson. Determined to survive a summer in the west to win...

Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given an awful choice at the age of twenty-two: die within months in Atlanta or leave everyone and everything he loves in the hope that the dry air and sunshine of the West will restore him to health. Young, scared, lonely, and sick, he arrives on the rawest edge of the Texas frontier just as an economic crash wrecks the dreams of a nation. Soon, with few alternatives...

"The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds -- Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s -- and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events"--Provided by publisher.