The irresistible new novel set between 1960s Tuscany & present-day Devon from number one bestseller Santa Montefiore Ten-year-old Floriana is captivated by the beauty of the magnificent Tuscan villa just outside her small village & dreams of living there someday When Dante the son of the villa's owner invites her inside she knows that her destiny is there with him But as they grow up they cross an unseen line jeopardizing the very thing they hold most dear Decades later & hundreds of miles away a beautiful old country house hotel on England's Devon coast has fallen on hard times Its owner Marina hires an artist-in-residence to stay the summer & teach the guests how to paint The man she finds is charismatic & wise & begins to pacify the discord in her family & transform the fortunes of the hotel However it soon becomes clear that he is not who he seems From the Italian countryside to the English coast The House by the Sea is a moving & mysterious tale of love forgiveness & the past revealed This book has been published in the US under the title The Mermaid Garden ...

Just across the River Thames from St Paul's Cathedral stands an old & elegant house Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes From its windows people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to & from Shakespeare's Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London's marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves workshops & tenements
- & then seen these too become dust & empty air Rich with anecdote & colour this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house
- the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London's numberless poor In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others & for a whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London's history

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In this drama a writer & his wife rent a small country cottage where he plans on doing some work Unfortunately he soon discovers that the eccentric landlord an artist wants to kill his wife The painter is already suspected of killing his own wife The murderous landlord is just about to kill the writer's wife when he is stopped ...

John of Gaunt's illegitimate line whose role in the Wars of the Roses led to the capture of the crown 328 pages 16 Plates color Amin Nathen ...

Bernarda Alba is a widow & her five daughters are incarcerated in mourning along with her One by one they make a bid for freedom with tragic consequences Lorca's tale depicts the repression of women within Catholic Spain in the years before the war The House of Bernarda Alba is Lorca's last & possibly finest play completed shortly before he was murdered by Nationalist sympathisers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War Inspired by real characters & described by the author as 'a true record of village life' it is a tragic tale of frustration & explosive passions in a household of women rulled by a tyrannical mother Edited with invaluable student notes
- a must for students of Spanish drama
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Houses in literature have captured readers' imaginations for centuries from Gothic castles to Georgian stately homes Bloomsbury townhouses & high-rise penthouses Step on to a tour of real & imagined houses that great English writers have used to reflect the themes of their novels houses that became like characters themselves embodiments of the social & historical currents of their time Phyllis Richardson takes us on a journey through history to discover how authors' personal experiences in their homes helped to shape the imaginative dwellings that have become icons of English literature Virginia Woolf's love of Talland House in Cornwall is palpable in To the Lighthouse just as London's Bloomsbury is ever-present in Mrs Dalloway EM Forster's childhood home at Rook's Nest mirrors the idyllic charm of Howards End Evelyn Waugh plotted Charles Ryder's return to Brideshead while a guest at Madresfield Jane Austen was no stranger to a manor house or a good ballroom & Horace Walpole's little Gothic castle' in Twickenham inspired him to write the first English Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto But the English country house from the idyllic to the unloved is also viewed through a modern lens
- Kazuo Ishiguro's Darlington Hall Ian Mc Ewan's Tallis House Alan Hollinghurts's Two Acres Using historic sources authors' biographies letters news accounts & the novels themselves The House of Fiction presents some of the most influential houses in Britain through the stories they inspired while offering candid glimpses of the writers who brought them to life
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THE HOUSE OF FOUR is the brand new Istanbul crime thriller featuring Inspector Ikmen 'the Morse of Istanbul' (Daily Telegraph) from Barbara Nadel Perfect for fans of Donna Leon Everyone in the Istanbul neighbourhood of Moda knows the Devil's House A crumbling Ottoman mansion & once the home of a princess it is a place associated with ill fortune The princess's four children now in old age still live in separate apartments on different floors & are rumoured never to speak to each other Then one of them is found dead stabbed through the heart & it is discovered that the other three siblings have met an identical fate There is no sign of forced entry or burglary & all evidence must be gained from letters & diaries but as Inspector Ikmen digs into their past it becomes clear they have been harbouring a secret Meanwhile a young couple are arrested for a series of seemingly random killings on the streets of Istanbul They claim to have been squatting in the Devil's House But this fiendish mystery is far from over & it will take Inspector Ikmen to the darkest & most devilish depths of this ancient city ...

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution & the Soviet experiment Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War & Peace Grossman's Life & Fate & Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago Yuri Slezkine's gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials & their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin's purges A vivid account of the personal & public lives of Bolshevik true believers the book begins with their conversion to Communism & ends with their children's loss of faith & the fall of the Soviet Union Completed in 1931 the House of Government later known as the House on the Embankment was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin The largest residential building in Europe it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater & a library to a tennis court & a shooting range Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building's residents lived in their apartments & ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House & led one by one to prison or their deaths Drawing on letters diaries & interviews & featuring hundreds of rare photographs The House of Government weaves together biography literary criticism architectural history & fascinating new theories of revolutions millennial prophecies & reigns of terror The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that like the Soviet Union itself became a haunted house forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared ...

The stakes have never been higher If Percy Jackson & Annabeth fail in their quest there'll be hell on Earth Literally Wandering the deadly realm of Tartarus every step leads them further into danger & if by some miracle they do make it to the Doors of Death there's a legion of bloodthirsty monsters waiting for them Meanwhile Hazel & the crew of the Argo II have a choice to stop a war or save their friends Whichever road they take one thing is certain
- in the Underworld evil is inescapable
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A gritty & gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay & transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ballroom scene of the 1980s & '90s inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning It's 1980 in New York City & nowhere is the city's glamour & energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ballroom scene where seventeen-year-old Angel first comes into her own Burned by her traumatic past Angel is new to the drag world & has a yearning to help create a family for those without When she falls in love with Hector a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza the first-ever all-Latino house in the ballroom circuit Into the house come Venus a whip-smart trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito a quiet boy who loves fabrics & design; & Daniel a butch queen who accidentally saves Venus' life The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work addiction & persistent abuse leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them All are ambitious resilient & determined to control their own fates even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences Told in a voice that brims with wit rage tenderness & fierce yearning The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love family & the dynamism of the human spirit ...