Based on Louise May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of 19th-century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers.

“Facts alone are wanted in life.” The children at Mr. Gradgrind’s school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. The effects of Gradgrind’s teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them, they have a friend in Sissy Jupe, the child of a circus

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In her twentieth William Monk mystery, she brings us to London's grand Mayfair mansions, where the arrogant masters of the Western world hold sway--and to the teeming Thames waterfront, where one summer afternoon, Monk witnesses the horrifying explosion of the pleasure boat Princess Mary, which takes nearly two hundred of the merrymakers on board to their deaths. The tragedy is no accident. As commander of the River Police, Monk should handle the...

"London, 1881. Lily Raynor, owner of the World's End Investigation Bureau, is growing increasingly worried. Work is drying up, finances are tight and she cannot find enough for her sole employee, Felix Wilbraham, to do. So when schoolteacher Georgiana Long arrives, with a worrying tale of runaway pupils, it seems like the answer to her prayers. The case is an interesting one, and what could be less perilous than a trip to a girls' boarding school,...

Threatened by powerful enemies, William Blackburn, Earl of Ketterham, lives in exile in the Scottish Highlands with his daughter Vanessa. When she comes of age William urges her to return to her mother in England to make her debut. Raised with all the advantages and freedom a boy would have, Vanessa doubts she can fit into the mold of a proper young lady. Still, she agrees to re-enter fashionable society, determined to end the vendetta against her...

London, 1810. In Vere Street is a house where men assemble to indulge passions for which the age will hang them. A raid on this notorious tavern sees the city gripped with hatred of Mollies, coupled with suspicion of their political sympathies. A few miles away in St. James's Palace, the Duke of Cumberland's valet suffers a violent death, which the authorities are anxious to see only as suicide. Caught between these two events, Wyre is reluctantly...

July, 1840. Did young Jack Picton, a known rebel and political agitator, kill governess Mary Marsh? Private investigator Liberty Lane has left London for Cheltenham to find out, sharing the magistrate's doubts. Picton is, however, hiding something, but what? As Liberty is about to discover, behind Cheltenham's genteel facçade lies a hotbed of vice. It is a place where the poor are driven to desperate lengths to escape the horror of the workhouse,...

"These two classic novels, together with Charlotte Bronte's well-known Jane Eyre and Villette, comprise a magnificent oeuvre, each one a singular achievement of characterization, human understanding, and narrative elegance and drama.". "Shirley is the story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both...