Family Life Classics

Orphaned cousins Jane and Lucilla, both 19, receive the exciting news that their guardian is at last allowing them to leave boarding school. But their rosy future is thwarted when they find he has made some bad investments and fled, leaving them with a cottage in the English countryside and a modest bank account.

Schooldays at St Clare's are never dull for twins Pat and Isabel O'Sullivan in Enid Blyton's much-loved boarding school series. In audiobook three, Pat and Isabel look forward to their first summer term at St Clare's. They soon make friends with new girl Carlotta, who has a secret past that she's desperate to hide. But sneaky Prudence finds out and tells everybody. How will the class react? There'll be mischief at St Clare's!

A witty retelling of a well-known fairy tale features the adventures of two children who are abandoned in the forest and lured into the clutches of a witch by her confection cottage. By the creator of the George and Martha series.

Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart.

A mysterious girl birthed him, but couldn’t raise him Armed with an adoption diary written by his father and a picture of a young girl, Gadi searches for his roots in Brazil. He hunts down clues about the identity of his biological mother and wants to know what had happened that made her give him up and what is her life like. Gadi learns about Brazil’s adoption process and retraces the steps of his own adoption journey; from the arms of a young girl who could not raise him, to the arms of his adoptive parents who looked forward to his arrival. While traveling with two friends in Brazil,...

When the Shepards' car breaks down in pre-World War II New York City, a chain of events occurs that transforms the lives of the Shepards and the Drakes, as Evan and Rachel meet, court, and marry. But betrayal, disappointment, and secret schemes are on the horizon....

In this charming classic story, Harry, the little white dog with black spots, runs away before bath time and plays outside until he changes into a black dog with white spots.

Adam Bates, the Land King of Hartley, Indiana, rules his 16 children with a firm hand and a tight purse. All work tirelessly on the family farm until the sons, at 21, are given 200 acres of land with a house and barn (they pay the taxes while their father holds the deeds). The daughters, at 18, get a term at Normal School to train as schoolteachers, a position they hold until they marry. Kate, the youngest, has always bristled at her father's preference for his sons but eagerly awaits her chance for further education. Her father has other plans.

Desperate to escape a harsh and narrow regime, two runaways unwittingly flee headlong into the centre of a terrible battle. This first sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe includes all the hallmarks of its famous predecessor, though this time the fate of Narnia is wound up in the lives of its own children, and a talking horse!

In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat, and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family's manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish 12-year-old son, Peter. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors - a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee.

When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady's father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society.

“Chilling...satisfying...offers up tasty tidbits of San Francisco lore . . . [Russell] has a gift for dialogue, slyly using it to reveal character.”—New York Times Book ReviewSan Francisco P.I. Stuart Winter looks into the death of a young, deaf heiress who volunteered as a sign language instructor—for a gorilla who may have witnessed her murder. “Polished and provocative...a California mystery of the hard-boiled school...very well written, with a corking good plot and fine characters.”—Booklist “Remarkable...[hops] from avant-garde theater to a deaf school, from winos’ ...

E.M. Forster's Howards End is a vivid portrait of London's golden age, before World War I forever changed its values and culture. Forster brings the great city's upper classes to life, detailing their grandiose spending habits, popular fads, Monet and Debussy, the rise of feminism, and the beginnings of urbanization. More than a mere idealization of pre-war London, Howards End provides insightful commentary on the rapid societal changes that occurred at the onset of the 20th century. Masterfully blending the stories of three vastly different groups of people - the independently wealthy, educated Schlegels; the nouveau riche Wilcoxes; and the ambitious but struggling Leonard Bast - Forster weaves a wonderfully rich, unforgettably poignant novel.

Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet deals with the issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Austen at her wittiest.

Generations of young readers continue to fall in love with Marguerite Henry’s “horse stories.” In one of her most famous, King of the Wind, the author traces the ancestry of the great Kentucky Derby winner, Man o’ War, whose mysterious pedigree is linked to the noble line leading from the Godolphin Arabian.

Caje Amis and his father are mountain folk, they live off the land and have few interactions with more sophisticated people. But at the onset of an especially harsh winter, the two take shelter with distant relatives. The adjustment to their new life is an easy one for Caje, but impossible for his father, and the elder Amis ends up abandoning his son and vanishing into the cold!

Eleven-year-old Sport Rocque is living a happy life, keeping his father's absentmindedness under control, and managing the family budget. When Kate, Sport's new - and nice - stepmother enters the picture, things couldn't be better. Then comes the news: Sport's wealthy grandfather has just died and Sport is a multimillionaire. But millions of dollars equals millions of problems, as Sport soon discovers when his mother returns and kidnaps him to double her share of the inheritance! Life at the Plaza Hotel is no fun when you're a prisoner. Will Sport manage to return his life to normal?

Cédric vit avec sa mère à New York dans l'harmonie et l'insouciance de l'enfance. Un jour, il apprend qu'il hérite, de son père, d'un titre de noblesse et d'un domaine en Angleterre. Il part donc immédiatement vivre sa nouvelle existence. Mais à son arrivée, il se heurte à la sévérité de son grand-père qui veut faire de lui un véritable aristocrate.

The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet: a hardworking father, a loving mother, three fine sons, and a bright, pretty daughter. But an incident occurs on Valentine's Day, 1976 - hushed up in the rural town of Mt. Ephraim, New York and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home - that rends the fabric of their family life.

When Simeon Simcox, a socialist clergyman, leaves his entire fortune not to his family but to the ruthless, social-climbing Tory MP Leslie Titmuss, the Rector's two sons react in very different ways. Henry, novelist and former 'angry young man' turned grumpy old reactionary, decides to fight the will and prove their father was insane. Younger brother Fred, a mild-mannered country doctor, takes a different approach, quietly digging in Simeon's past, only to uncover an entirely unexpected explanation for the legacy.