Thrown out of her ancestral home by her brutal half-brothers after the death of their father, Ang�elique Latham makes her way to Paris, where she takes in abused streetwalkers and transforms them into upper-crust courtesans in an exclusive bordello.

Hired to care for a small Irish village girl said to have miraculously survived on nothing but "manna from heaven" for months, a journalist and nurse veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign quickly finds herself fighting to save the child's life.

Utah Territory, winter of 1888. Deborah Tyler waits for her husband, Samuel, who is weeks overdue from his travels as a wheelwright. Junction is a tiny town of seven Mormon families scattered along the floor of a canyon, and Deborah earns her living by tending orchards and making work gloves. Isolated by the red-rock cliffs that surround the town, the townspeople are regarded with suspicion by the Mormon faithful who question the depth of their belief....

Oliver Twist is a poor orphan boy cruelly treated in the public workhouse. Pennyless and hungry, he runs away to London, only to fall into the clutches of a gang of thieves and pickpockets led by the master criminal, Fagin. Befriended by a man robbed by the gang, Oliver ultimately learns his true identity and gains a home, a fortune, and a family. --Amazon.com

Relates the story of the American artists, writers, and doctors who traveled to Paris in the nineteenth century, fell in love with the city and its people, and changed America through what they learned there.

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naive young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long...

Shut out of the investigation of a massive bombing he witnessed, William Monk takes over when evidence surfaces that the person executed for the crime was innocent, a situation that places him in the center of a violent power struggle for control of the Suez Canal.

"A vivid reimagining of the woman who inspired Hester Prynne, the tragic heroine of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and a journey into the enduring legacy of New England's witchcraft trials. Who is the real Hester Prynne? Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts...

"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar...

An unabridged edition of nineteenth-century American author Louisa May Alcott's novel about four New England sisters who come of age during the Civil War, which also includes discussion questions and activity ideas for reading groups.