Download or read book The Concubine written by Norah Lofts and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-10 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed and beloved historical novelist Norah Lofts brings to life the danger, romance, and intrigue of the Tudor court that forever altered the course of English history. The king first noticed Anne Boleyn as a heartbroken sixteen-year-old, sullen and beautiful after a thwarted romance with the son of the Earl of Northumberland. "All eyes and hair," a courtier had said disparagingly of her, but when King Henry VIII fell for young Anne, nothing could keep him from what he desired. Against common sense and the urgings of his most trusted advisors, Henry defied all, blindly following his passion for Anne, using the power he held over the bodies and souls of all who reside in his realm and beyond. Anne's ascent to the throne elevates her from lady-in-waiting to the highest position a woman could attain, but her life spirals out of control when Henry is driven to desperate acts of betrayal and violence. The consequences of Anne's rise to power and eventual demise are felt well beyond the inner circle of the court. Loyalties, to church, to queen, to country, are tested, and -- in the wake of the king's volatile passions -- can be an unpredictable matter of life and death. First published in 1963 and adored by readers for generations, Lofts' lush and moving portrayal of the ambitious and doomed Anne Boleyn will continue to reign as a classic retelling of this epic chapter of history vividly brought to life.

Download or read book The Concubine written by Elechi Amadi and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1966 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in a remote village in Eastern Nigeria, an area yet to be affected by European values and where society is orderly and predictable, the story concerns a woman "of great beauty and dignity" who inadvertently brings suffering and death to all her lovers. The novel portrays a society still ruled by traditional gods, offering a glimpse into the human relationships that such a society creates.

Download or read book My Fair Concubine written by Jeannie Lin and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The USA Today–bestselling author of The Dragon and the Pearl “combines wit, seduction, skill, and intelligence in a tantalizing take on ‘My Fair Lady’” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Yan Ling tries hard to be servile—it’s what’s expected of a girl of her class. Being intelligent and strong-minded, she finds it a constant battle. Proud Fei Long is unimpressed by her spirit—until he realizes she’s the answer to his problems. He has to deliver the emperor a “princess.” In two months can he train a tea girl to pass as a noblewoman? Yet it’s hard to teach good etiquette when all Fei Long wants to do is break it, by taking this tea girl for his own . . . “Lin has a gift for bringing the wondrous and colorful world of ancient China to readers. The history and culture of the era are beautifully bound together with a classic romance theme. Those yearning for new worlds and age-old adventures will savor Lin’s novel.” —Romantic Times

Download or read book The Russian Concubine written by Kate Furnivall and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-06-27 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping novel set in war-torn 1928 China, with a star-crossed love story at its center. In a city full of thieves and Communists, danger and death, spirited young Lydia Ivanova has lived a hard life. Always looking over her shoulder, the sixteen-year-old must steal to feed herself and her mother, Valentina, who numbered among the Russian elite until Bolsheviks murdered most of them, including her husband. As exiles, Lydia and Valentina have learned to survive in a foreign land. Often, Lydia steals away to meet with the handsome young freedom fighter Chang An Lo. But they face danger: Chiang Kai Shek's troops are headed toward Junchow to kill Reds like Chang, who has in his possession the jewels of a tsarina, meant as a gift for the despot's wife. The young pair's all-consuming love can only bring shame and peril upon them, from both sides. Those in power will do anything to quell it. But Lydia and Chang are powerless to end it.

Download or read book Gods Concubine written by Sara Douglass and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004-02 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second title of The Troy Game series, love and revenge are set against the very fabric of time itself as a warrior waits for his opportunity to finish what was started centuries before.

Download or read book The King s Concubine written by Anne O'Brien and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A child born in the plague year of 1348, abandoned and raised within the oppressive walls of a convent, Alice Perrers refused to take the veil, convinced that a greater destiny awaited her. Ambitious and quick witted, she rose above her obscure beginnings to become the infamous mistress of Edward III. But always, essentially, she was alone... Early in Alice’s life, a chance meeting with royalty changes everything: Kindly Queen Philippa, deeply in love with her husband but gravely ill, chooses Alice as a lady-in-waiting. Under the queen’s watchful eye, Alice dares to speak her mind. She demands to be taken seriously. She even flirts with the dynamic, much older king. But she is torn when her vibrant spirit captures his interest...and leads her to a betrayal she never intended. In Edward’s private chambers, Alice discovers the pleasures and paradoxes of her position. She is the queen’s confidante and the king’s lover, yet she can rely only on herself. It is a divided role she was destined to play, and she vows to play it until the bitter end. Even as she is swept up in Edward’s lavish and magnificent court, amassing wealth and influence for herself, becoming an enemy of his power-hungry son John of Gaunt, and a sparring partner to resourceful diplomat William de Windsor, she anticipates the day when the political winds will turn against her. For when her detractors voice their hatred,and accusations of treason swirl around her,threatening to destroy everything she has achieved, who will stand by Alice then? Includes a readers guide

Download or read book The Restitution of the Bride and Other Stories from the Chinese written by and published by . This book was released on 1926 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Succubus and Other Stories written by Hugh Cook and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2006-06-02 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories of varying lengths. Over 600 pages. SF, fantasy, horror, aberration and weirdness. Time travel, virtual reality, cloning. Murder in various modes of brutality. Sex, rape, necrophilia. SANTA CLAUS SEX CRIMINAL: a look at the pedophile. Torture. Vomit. The transcosmic environment of the moid. Life after death. Complications involving a demon. A story including a serial killer. Murdered by a ghost. High quality literary fiction to mainline to your mind.

Download or read book On the Eve of the Uprising and Other Stories from Colonial Korea written by and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Paper Door and Other Stories written by Naoya Shiga and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The little girl and the rapeseed flower -- As far as Abashiri -- The razor -- The paper door -- Seibei and his gourds -- An incident -- Han's crime -- At Kinosaki -- Akanishi Kakita -- Incident on the afternoon of November third -- The shopboy's god -- Rain frogs -- The house by the moat -- A memory of Yamashina -- Infatuation -- Kuniko -- A gray moon

Download or read book The Concubine the Princess and the Teacher written by Douglas Scott Brookes and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Western imagination, the Middle Eastern harem was a place of sex, debauchery, slavery, miscegenation, power, riches, and sheer abandon. But for the women and children who actually inhabited this realm of the imperial palace, the reality was vastly different. In this collection of translated memoirs, three women who lived in the Ottoman imperial harem in Istanbul between 1876 and 1924 offer a fascinating glimpse "behind the veil" into the lives of Muslim palace women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The memoirists are Filizten, concubine to Sultan Murad V; Princess Ayse, daughter of Sultan Abdulhamid II; and Safiye, a schoolteacher who instructed the grandchildren and harem ladies of Sultan Mehmed V. Their recollections of the Ottoman harem reveal the rigid protocol and hierarchy that governed the lives of the imperial family and concubines, as well as the hundreds of slave women and black eunuchs in service to them. The memoirists show that, far from being a place of debauchery, the harem was a family home in which polite and refined behavior prevailed. Douglas Brookes explains the social structure of the nineteenth-century Ottoman palace harem in his introduction. These three memoirs, written across a half century and by women of differing social classes, offer a fuller and richer portrait of the Ottoman imperial harem than has ever before been available in English.

Download or read book Melayu written by Maznah Mohamad and published by Flipside Digital Content Company Inc.. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People within the Malay world hold strong but diverse opinions about the meaning of the word Melayu, which can be loosely translated as Malayness. Questions of whether the Filipinos are properly called "e;Malay"e;, or the Mon-Khmer speaking Orang Asli in Malaysia, can generate heated debates. So too can the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of a kebangsaan Melayu (Malay as nationality) as the basis of membership within an aspiring postcolonial nation-state, a political rather than a cultural community embracing all residents of the Malay states, including the immigrant Chinese and Indian population.In Melayu: The Politics, Poetics and Paradoxes of Malayness, the contributors examine the checkered, wavering and changeable understanding of the word Melayu by considering hitherto unexplored case studies dealing with use of the term in connection with origins, nations, minority-majority politics, Filipino Malays, Riau Malays, Orang Asli, Straits Chinese literature, women's veiling, vernacular television, social dissent, literary women, and modern Sufism. Taken as a whole, this volume offers a creative approach to the study of Malayness while providing new perspectives to the studies of identity formation and politics of ethnicity that have wider implications beyond the Southeast Asian region.

Download or read book Women in the Medieval Court written by Rebecca Holdorph and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising look at women who wielded power in medieval Europe, from queens to concubines to abbesses. Medieval society might expect the elite women who decorated its courts to play the role of Queen Guinevere, but many of these women had very different ideas. Great queens, who sometimes ruled in their own right, fought wars and forged empires. Noblewomen acted behind the scenes to change the course of politics. Far from cloistered off from the world, powerful abbesses played the role of kingmaker. And concubines had a role to play as well, both as political actors and as mothers of children who might change a country’s destiny. They experienced tremendous success and dramatic downfalls. This book tells the stories of women from across medieval Europe, from a Danish queen who waged political war to form a Scandinavian empire to a Tuscan countess who joined her troops on the battlefield. Whether they wielded power in battle, from a convent, or from a throne—or even in the bedchamber—these women were far from damsels in distress waiting for their knights in shining armor.

Download or read book The Concubine s Daughter written by Helen Kwok and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Concubine's Daughter is a snapshot of a bygone era, depicting life in the British colony of Hong Kong in the fifties and sixties. It is the story Elizabeth Lee, beautiful, intelligent, and liberated, from the time she is a wide-eyed eighteen year-old studying English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, sharing girlish secrets with her two best friends, to her becoming an academic at the University, to just after her thirtieth birthday, when she leaves Hong Kong with her husband and young son for the US, frightened in part by the riots inspired by the Cultural Revolution taking place across the border in mainland China. After twenty years in the US she returns to Hong Kong in 1986, just ten years before China is to regain sovereignty over the colony. Educated in English Elizabeth is keenly aware of the conflict within herself between her love of certain aspects of Western culture and her Chinese heritage. Living in that period of the colony's history, and largely divorced from the cultural life of the Chinese mainland, she is conscious of a sense of isolation. Discriminatory attitudes and actions, whether based on gender, race, or language, are very much a fact of life in Hong Kong during this period. The subject matter is original. The narrative style is witty, mildly sarcastic, and humorous in places. The vivid depiction of social customs and manners and memorable characters from different strata of society contribute to make The Concubine's Daughter a book well worth reading.

Download or read book The Concubine s Daughter written by Pai Kit Fai and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An epic, heart-wrenching story of a mother and daughter's journey to their destiny. Lotus Feet. He would give his daughter the dainty feet of a courtesan. This would enhance her beauty and her price, making her future shine like a new coin. He smiled to himself, pouring fresh tea. And it would stop her from running away... When the young concubine of an old farmer in rural China gives birth to a daughter called Li-Xia, or "Beautiful One," the child seems destined to become a concubine herself. Li refuses to submit to her fate, outwitting her father's orders to bind her feet and escaping the silk farm with an English sea captain. Li takes her first steps toward fulfilling her mother's dreams of becoming a scholar—but her final triumph must be left to her daughter, Su Sing, "Little Star," in a journey that will take her from remote mountain refuges to the perils of Hong Kong on the eve of World War II.

Download or read book The Beginnings of the Christian Church written by William Henry Simcox and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Hotel Book written by Christiane Reiter and published by Taschen. This book was released on 2004 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much more than a travel or holiday guide, the book is first and foremost a paradisiacal photo album. It features opulent photographs of places that seem too perfect to be real. Pricing and contact information is provided for each hotel.