Download or read book The Mistress s Daughter written by A. M. Homes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A woman who was adopted as a newborn recounts her experience of meeting her birth parents, describing how adoption affected her sense of identity, her efforts to learn about her late birth mother's personal life, and her discouragement with her birth father's unwillingness to invite her into his family.
Download or read book The Mistress s Daughter written by A.M. Homes and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the day that A. M. Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an older married man with whom she was having an affair. Thirty years later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf of her birth mother, and they began to correspond; her biological father contacted her soon after. These two individuals and their effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected, and the story spirals into something utterly raw and hilarious, heartbreaking and absurd. Along the way, Homes describes the clash between her childhood fantasies of her birth parents and the disappointing reality. She writes about the experience of experiencing biological resemblance for the first time (in 'My Father's Ass') and the addictiveness of the genealogical research she embarks on. She reflects on the significance of DNA testing and having two mothers and two fathers and unearths profound truths about her family and herself. Finally, she writes movingly about her own baby daughter and the way she has recently helped to mend Homes' fractured life.
Download or read book Daughters of the Stone written by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers It is the mid-1800s. Fela, taken from Africa, is working at her second sugar plantation in colonial Puerto Rico, where her mistress is only too happy to benefit from her impressive embroidery skills. But Fela has a secret. Before she and her husband were separated and sold into slavery, they performed a tribal ceremony in which they poured the essence of their unborn child into a very special stone. Fela keeps the stone with her, waiting for the chance to finish what she started. When the plantation owner approaches her, Fela sees a better opportunity for her child, and allows the man to act out his desire. Such is the beginning of a line of daughters connected by their intense love for one another, and the stories of a lost land. Mati, a powerful healer and noted craftswoman, is grounded in a life that is disappearing in a quickly changing world. Concha, unsure of her place, doesn't realize the price she will pay for rejecting her past. Elena, modern and educated, tries to navigate between two cultures, moving to the United States, where she will struggle to keep her family together. Carisa turns to the past for wisdom and strength when her life in New York falls apart. The stone becomes meaningful to each of the women, pulling them through times of crisis and ultimately connecting them to one another. Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa shows great skill and warmth in the telling of this heartbreaking, inspirational story about mothers and daughters, and the ways in which they hurt and save one another.
Download or read book Emily Post written by Laura Claridge and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the 1960s, award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritative biography of Emily Post, who changed the mindset of millions of Americans with Etiquette, a perennial bestseller and touchstone of proper behavior. A daughter of high society and one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily Price married financier Edwin Post. It was a hopeful union that ended in scandalous divorce. But the trauma forced Emily Post to become her own person. After writing novels for fifteen years, Emily took on a different sort of project. When it debuted in 1922, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest–and a country at its wildest. Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which it took its shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decade to keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing social landscape. Now, nearly fifty years after Emily Post’s death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave.
Download or read book Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter written by Diana Souhami and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. Formidable and manipulative, her attentions to the king brought her wealth, power, and status. Her daughter Violet Trefusis had a long tempestuous affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, during which Vita left her husband and two sons to travel abroad with Violet. It was a liaison that threatened the fabric of Violet's social world, and her passion and recalcitrance in pursuit of it pitted her against her mother and society. From memoirs, diaries, and letters, Diana Souhami portrays this fascinating and intense mother/daughter relationship in Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Her story of these women, their lovers, and their lovers' mothers, highlights Edwardian - and contemporary - duplicity and double standards and goes to the heart of questions about sexual freedoms.
Download or read book Daughters of Rome written by Kate Quinn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-04-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fast-paced historical novel about two women with the power to sway an empire, from the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Alice Network and The Briar Club. A.D. 69. The Roman Empire is up for the taking. Everything will change—especially the lives of two sisters with a very personal stake in the outcome. Elegant and ambitious, Cornelia embodies the essence of the perfect Roman wife. She lives to one day see her loyal husband as Emperor. Her sister Marcella is more aloof, content to witness history rather than make it. But when a bloody coup turns their world upside-down, both women must maneuver carefully just to stay alive. As Cornelia tries to pick up the pieces of her shattered dreams, Marcella discovers a hidden talent for influencing the most powerful men in Rome. In the end, though, there can only be one Emperor...and one Empress.
Download or read book This Book Will Save Your Life written by A.M. Homes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes, author of the forthcoming novel The Unfolding, has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. This Book Will Save Your Life is a vivid, uplifting, and revealing story about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.
Download or read book Hades Daughter written by Sara Douglass and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-09-15 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Greece: A place where the gods hold mortal life cheap, mere playthings to amuse, delight, and abuse at their will. But those puny mortals are not wholly devoid of power and at the core of their fabulous city-states lies the Labyrinth, where they can shape the powers of the heavens to their own design. When Theseus entered the Labyrinth and came away with the prize of freedom and his beloved Adrianne, Mistress of the Labyrinth, his future seemed assured... Until he abandoned her for the unforgivable sin of bearing him only a daughter, and the world seemed to change. From that day forward, all the Labyrinths in the ancient world started to decay. It slowly became clear that power was fading from the city-states. Was it the natural decline that comes to all cultures or was it because the power of the Labyrinth had been corrupted by a woman spurned? A hundred years pass--Troy has fallen and the Trojans are a scattered and humbled people. The warrior Brutus is of the line of kings and gods. He wears the golden kingship bands of Troy proudly--but they are his only mementos of a former glory, for he is a man without a country and is left little else but pride and a memory of the latent power that he could wield if but given a chance. When he receives a god-sent vision of a distant shore where he can rebuild the ancient kingdom, he will move heaven and earth to reach his destiny. Ever eastward he is drawn, to a lovely and mystical green land that offers him a haven--and a dream of power and conquest. Nothing will deter him... not even the entreaties of the young princess whom he took as his wife and bedded against her will. First her hatred--and now her love--torment and bind him. She is the only one who realizes the danger he is stepping into, and she will do anything to save him... and his son, whom she carries in her womb. For in the mists of Albion there lies a woman of power--a woman who has used her siren call to cloud Brutus's mind and has her own reasons for luring the warrior to these lush shores.... She is the long-descended granddaughter of Adrianne, and she has in her heart a hatred that has been passed down for generations. Her plans for Brutus will enact a revenge that could destroy the gods themselves. s20If Brutus makes the journey successfully, it will be the next step in the Game of the Labyrinth and might start a complicated contest of wills that could span centuries.... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book To the King a Daughter written by Andre Norton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-09-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the start of a new fantasy trilogy, the Clan of Ash is dying, and their totem tree is withering away. There is a prophecy that a daughter of Ash will rise again, but none have survived the mass killings--except one.
Download or read book May We Be Forgiven written by A.M. Homes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Women’s Prize and featured on Elin Hilderbrand’s New York Times ballot for Best Books of the Century Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother’s two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.
Download or read book The Housemaid s Daughter written by Barbara Mutch and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbara Mutch's stunning first novel tells a story of love and duty colliding on the arid plains of Apartheid-era South Africa When Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa, she knows that she does not love the man she is to marry there —her fiance Edward, whom she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada. When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own family. Under Cathleen's tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide. As they grow closer, Ada sees new possibilities in front of her—a new horizon. But in one night, everything changes, and Cathleen comes home from a trip to find that Ada has disappeared, scorned by her own community. Cathleen must make a choice: should she conform to society, or search for the girl who has become closer to her than her own daughter? Set against the backdrop of a beautiful, yet divided land, The Housemaid's Daughter is a startling and thought-provoking novel that intricately portrays the drama and heartbreak of two women who rise above cruelty to find love, hope, and redemption.
Download or read book The Mistress s Revenge written by Tamar Cohen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There’s a fine line between love and hate. For five years, Sally and Clive have been lost in a passionate affair. Now he has dumped her to devote himself to his wife and family, and Sally is left in freefall. It starts with a casual stroll past his house, and popping into the brasserie where his son works. Then Sally starts following Clive’s wife and daughter on Facebook. But that’s alright, isn’t it? These are perfectly normal things to do. Aren’t they? Not since Fatal Attraction has the fallout from an illicit affair been exposed in such a sharp, darkly funny, and disturbing way: The Mistress’s Revenge is a truly exciting fiction debut. After all, who doesn’t know an otherwise sane woman who has gone a little crazy when her heart was broken? “A cracking debut. . . .very Fatal Attraction with a clever twist at the end. Addictive stuff.” —The Bookseller
Download or read book Things I Should Have Told My Daughter written by Pearl Cleage and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An inspiring and revelatory memoir of juggling marriage, motherhood and politics as she worked to become a successful writer and self-fulfilled woman"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Galileo s Daughter written by Dava Sobel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by a long fascination with Galileo, and by the remarkable surviving letters of Galileo's daughter, a cloistered nun, Dava Sobel has written a biography unlike any other of the man Albert Einstein called "the father of modern physics- indeed of modern science altogether." Galileo's Daughter also presents a stunning portrait of a person hitherto lost to history, described by her father as "a woman of exquisite mind, singular goodness, and most tenderly attached to me." Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was about to be overturned. In that same time, while the bubonic plague wreaked its terrible devastation and the Thirty Years' War tipped fortunes across Europe, one man sought to reconcile the Heaven he revered as a good Catholic with the heavens he revealed through his telescope. With all the human drama and scientific adventure that distinguished Dava Sobel's previous book Longitude, Galileo's Daughter is an unforgettable story
Download or read book Mistress of Rome written by Kate Quinn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in an unforgettable historical saga from the New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network and The Diamond Eye. “So gripping, your hands are glued to the book, and so vivid it burns itself into your mind’s eye and stays with you long after you turn the final page.”—Diana Gabaldon, #1 New York Times bestselling author First-century Rome: One young woman will hold the fate of an empire in her hands. Thea, a captive from Judaea, is a clever and determined survivor hiding behind a slave’s docile mask. Purchased as a toy for the spoiled heiress Lepida Pollia, Thea evades her mistress’s spite and hones a secret passion for music. But when Thea wins the love of Rome’s newest and most savage gladiator and dares to dream of a better life, the jealous Lepida tears the lovers apart and casts Thea out. Rome offers many ways for the resourceful to survive, and Thea remakes herself as a singer for the Eternal ’City’s glittering aristocrats. As she struggles for success and independence, her nightingale voice attracts a dangerous new admirer: the Emperor himself. But the passions of an all-powerful man come with a heavy price, and Thea finds herself fighting for both her soul and her destiny. Many have tried to destroy the Emperor: a vengeful gladiator, an upright senator, a tormented soldier, a Vestal Virgin. But in the end, the life of Rome’s most powerful man lies in the hands of one woman: the Emperor’s mistress.
Download or read book The Madman s Daughter written by Megan Shepherd and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark, breathless, beautifully-written gothic thriller of murder, madness and a mysterious island...
Download or read book The Sin Eater s Daughter written by Melinda Salisbury and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen-year-old Twylla lives in the castle. But although she's engaged to the prince, Twylla isn't exactly a member of the court. She's the executioner. As the Goddess embodied, Twylla instantly kills anyone she touches. Each month, she's taken to the prison and forced to lay her hands on those accused of treason. No one will ever love a girl with murder in her veins. Even the prince, whose royal blood supposedly makes him immune to Twylla's fatal touch, avoids her company.But then a new guard arrives, a boy whose easy smile belies his deadly swordsmanship. And unlike the others, he's able to look past Twylla's executioner robes and see the girl, not the Goddess. Yet Twylla's been promised to the prince, and knows what happens to people who cross the queen. However, a treasonous secret is the least of Twylla's problems. The queen has a plan to destroy her enemies, a plan that requires a stomach-churning, unthinkable sacrifice. Will Twylla do what it takes to protect her kingdom? Or will she abandon her duty in favor of a doomed love?
