Historical Letters

It has happened again. Barefoot and lost, Daisy closes her eyes and prays for a sign. After mourning her late husband, moving to Nicollet Island was meant to be a new beginning. Instead, at sixty-two, Daisy’s life is cruelly being stolen from her by dementia and the pandemic. Forced into isolation, she must navigate her cognitive decline while fear of death and societal turmoil overtake the country. When Daisy was young, before bitterness corrupted her mother’s soul, she asked, “How can we know for sure that Jesus was God’s son and that everything in the Bible is true?” Her mother...

This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.

Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who’s traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for—a boyfriend. But not any boy. She wants the “Real Thing,” to be in love with someone who loves her equally. Then Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything.

From USA Today Bestselling Author May McGoldrick... Dearest Millie A Pennington Family Novella Lady Millie, youngest of the Pennington family, has always lived in the shadow of her talented and powerful siblings. She’s been the rock of stability and order for her sisters and brothers. Her future looks bright until fate deals her a tragic hand. Dermot McKendry is a former surgeon in the Royal Navy who has returned to his home in the Highlands to open a hospital. As disorganized as he is passionate, he is a man with wounds and a secret past he has worked a lifetime to hide. Providence ...

"England, 1940. Dearest Ruby, you must have heard the news by now. The very worst has happened. Our countries are at war. What can I do? How can I stop this nightmare from happening? One day soon we’ll be together again. I swear. I love you. E. x". Ruby Summers is a tapestry of memories, her ninety-six years laced with both love and loss. The echoes of a wartime Norfolk summer, where young Ruby's heart entwined with Edmondo's under orchard skies, are as vivid as ever. Yet a single, haunting secret - born from a love tested by war and a betrayal that shattered her - remains locked within her.

Kent, 2019. With her marriage in tatters, school teacher Lizzie Armstrong moves to sleepy Elm Heath for a fresh start and her pupils and the community soon steal her heart. So when the school is threatened with closure Lizzie knows she has to fight and she looks to the school’s founder for inspiration. What makes Esther, born and bred in London, a proud Suffragette, suddenly leave the city and escape to Elm Heath? And when Lizzie uncovers Esther’s heartbreaking secret, could it give her the strength she needs to save not just the school, but her new beginning too?

With Prejudice is a romantic yet harsh action story of runaway soldier Michael Carver and a young Cherokee woman called Little Deer who find each other when their worlds collide in 1838 America. Amid the destruction of the Native tribes and their forced migration out west to the new Indian Territory, Michael becomes disillusioned with the army and the treatment of the indigenous people and decides to leave it all behind and return to his farm in Virginia.

It's the run-up to Christmas, 1998. On the Isle of Mull, Sergeant Ivor Punch is losing himself in his vinyl collection, a tragic anniversary and too much single malt whisky. But news of a missing child soon brings him back to his senses. And as word spreads of more strange disappearances, an aircraft vanishing from the sky and a famous classical musician gone with it, it seems a sinister plot holds the island in its grip. Punch thought he knew the secrets of this place, its people and stories.

Set in the Puritanical society of 17th-century Boston, this novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, a married woman who has an affair and gives birth to a daughter. Hester refuses to name her lover, but when her estranged husband appears unexpectedly, he determines to discover the man's identity.

The Scarlet Letter is generally considered to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s masterpiece. Set in 17th-century Boston, it follows the plight of Hester Prynne, a young woman who bears a child out of wedlock, refuses to name the father, and is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" for the rest of her life. With The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne reaches back to America’s Puritan roots to probe themes of lust, sin, guilt, and redemption. This Essential Classics edition includes a new introduction by Professor Vivian Heller, PhD, in literature and modern studies from Yale University.

BLUE MOUNTAINS, 2024: Working on a documentary at the historic Carrington Hotel, videographer Emma Quinn discovers a box of handwritten letters belonging to Rose Carey, water dancer and golden girl of the silent film era. Intrigued, Emma begins to read through them, slowly uncovering a deadly secret. SYDNEY, 1923: Rose Carey has faced enough scandal to last a lifetime. After an accident and near-death experience, the threat of bankruptcy, and rumours of her romantic entanglements, Rose decides to take matters into her own hands and propose to her business manager, Walter.

Germany, 1930s. In the peaceful village of Dachau, Ariana lives with her family, ordinary German citizens, during the Third Reich. Ariana and her sister Renate come of age amidst the growing horrors. Munich, 2012. Hard-nosed ex-cop Jack Bailey is determined to locate Ariana Schröder, who wrote a WWII wartime love letter to his father, decades ago. Jack and his brother think that the letter may hold the key to his past drunken abusiveness.

1951. Esther Durrant, a young mother, is committed to an isolated mental asylum by her husband. Run by a pioneering psychiatrist, the hospital is at first Esther's prison but soon becomes her refuge. 2018. Free-spirited marine scientist Rachel Parker embarks on a research posting in the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast. When a violent storm forces her to take shelter on a far-flung island, she discovers a collection of hidden love letters. Captivated by their passion and tenderness, Rachel determines to track down the intended recipient.

Cultural and familial fireworks flare when the headstrong teenage daughter of a wealthy New Yorker falls passionately in love with a young man from New Orleans, and from a very different background indeed. What makes this story sizzle and soar are its time and place - the United States during the Civil War and Victorian England - and a couple of key facts about the protagonists.

Giulia Farnese, a woman who traverses time to find, in this novel, her redemption. Her real story is tachat of a woman who goes far beyond the figure of Sponsa Christi as she was known throughout the world.

February 1941. After months of bombing raids in London, 12-year-old Olive Bradshaw and her little brother, Cliff, are evacuated to the Devon coast. The only person with two spare beds is Mr Ephraim, the local lighthouse keeper. Desperate to be helpful, Olive becomes his post girl, carrying secret messages (as she likes to think of the letters) to the villagers. But Olive has a secret of her own. Her older sister, Sukie, went missing in an air raid, and she’s desperate to discover what happened to her.

Salento, Italy, June 1934. A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a tight-knit village where everyone knows each other. A couple gets off: The man, Carlo, a child of the South, is happy to be back home after a long time away; the woman, Anna his wife, is a stranger from the North. Carlo's brother is there to meet them, and he and everyone else can't help but notice that Anna is as beautiful as a Greek statue. But Anna is not like the other wives. She doesn't gossip or attend church. She reads books no one else has ever heard of.

Trudy and Jeremy grew up in the same neighborhood, and they have always loved each other. She is a part of a large blended family living near a south Mississippi village. Jeremy, having lost all his family, makes his way through the world alone. At the beginning of World War I, he becomes so enthralled with his goals to succeed that he neglects Trudy, who has reached the stage in life where she wants to be loved.

In 1642, a pregnant Hester Prynne is found guilty of adultery, shunned by her neighbors, and forced to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her dress. Meanwhile, Hester's husband - long thought to be lost at sea - has returned to Boston under the assumed name 'Roger Chillingworth' and plots to uncover her lover's identity. After her daughter Pearl is born, Hester is frequently visited by both Reverend Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, but always refuses to name her lover.

Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth; and the defiant Hester Prynne, who, unwilling to name her partner in adultery, is condemned to wear a scarlet "A" on the breast of her gown for the remainder of her life.