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English
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After the death of elder statesman Lord Slane--a former prime minister of Great Britain and viceroy of India--everyone assumes that his eighty-eight-year-old widow will slowly fade away in her grief, remaining as proper, decorative, and dutiful as she has been her entire married life. But the deceptively gentle Lady Slane has other ideas. First she defies the patronizing meddling of her children and escapes to a rented house in Hampstead. There, to...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
There is something epic-and almost mythic-about this sparsely beautiful novel by Willa Cather, although the story it tells is that of a single human life, lived simply in the silence of the desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This semi-autobiographical book is about the life of a young English woman who marries an ageing German aristocrat and in the marriage she focuses on her garden and children, at the same time running a country house. She also writes down her observations of the stuffy German aristocratic set using her razor sharp wit. Von Arnim was a successful author in her time and deserves to be re-discovered, this novel is a gem. In the first year of publication...
4) Frost in May
Author
Publisher
Dial Press
Pub. Date
[1980]
Language
English
Description
Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient, and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes.
Convent life is perfectly captured-the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty...
Author
Series
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English
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Description
"Gone to Earth" is the cry of fox hunters as the fox takes to its den and they lose the chase. Here, Mary Webb tells the story of Hazel Woodus whose understanding of her half tame fox cub contrasts with her misunderstanding of humanity. She is pursued by two very different men, a Gentleman Farmer and the local Minister. Mary Webb’s writing is sometimes compared to that of Thomas Hardy, her descriptions of nature are vivid and her view
...13) Maurice Guest
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Series
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English
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Description
Maurice Guest comes to Leipzig, the music capital of Europe, to realize his dream of becoming a great pianist. However, in its bohemian and heady atmosphere, he encounters not exaltation and inspiration but coarseness, greed, and ambition. For his muse, he turns to Louise Dufraryer, an exotic and languid pianist. Louise has recently been deserted by her own obsessive love, the resident composer and reigning genius, Schilsky.
Now her capricious demands...
Author
Language
English
Description
"I told Helen my story and she went home and cried" begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns's beguiling novel is far from maudlin, despite the ostensibly harrowing ordeals its heroine endures. Sophia is twenty-one when she marries fellow artist Charles, and she seems to have nearly as much affection for her pet newt as she does for her husband. Her housekeeping knowledge is lacking (everything she cooks tastes of soap) and she attributes...