When Persephone Lancaster receives a marriage proposal from the ill-tempered Duke of Kielder, she refuses — and then reconsiders. The obscene sum of money he’s offering Persephone would save her family from ruin. With her characteristic optimism, she travels to the far reaches of Northumberland to wed a greatly feared stranger. Lodged deep in a thick forest infested with wild dogs, the Duke’s castle is as cold and forbidding as the Duke...

Nottinghamshire, 1785. Julia Cummings has long been acquainted with loss--her mother, her brother, her sister, her friend, all gone too soon. But the loss that pushed her grief to the limit as a young girl was that of her best friend, Lucas Jonquil, who abandoned her without looking back. Now, eight years later, Lucas has returned to Lampton Park, and Julia has steeled herself--she will never forgive the man who broke her heart. After losing too many...

Fleeing from the unwanted advances of a cruel master, chambermaid Annie Morgan--without family and tainted by scandal--finds safety in a marriage of convenience with widowed Welsh miner Evan Powell who dreams of immigrating to America. In the midst of Mormon missionaries preaching a strange new religion, disaster strikes her adopted Welsh town and Annie's troubled history can no longer be hidden.

Can imaginative Emily make her biggest dream come true? Spunky Emily Bartlett lives in an old farmhouse in Pitchfork, Oregon, at a time when automobiles are brand-new inventions and libraries are a luxury few small towns can afford. Her runaway imagination leads her to bleach a horse, hold a very scary sleepover, and feed the hogs an unusual treat. But can she use her lively mind to help bring a library to Pitchfork? Adventure is pretty scarce in...

In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, Kim Heacox, writing in the tradition of Abbey, McPhee, and Thoreau, discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier, where flowers emerge from boulders, moose swim fjords, and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve. In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too, and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys, epiphanies, and successes. All in an America free of crass commercialism and...

When a native of Iowa returns from England to wander across America's heartland in search of the perfect small town, the result is a string of hilarious anecdotes and biting social commentary