Download or read book The Summer Before the War written by Helen Simonson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A novel to cure your Downton Abbey withdrawal . . . a delightful story about nontraditional romantic relationships, class snobbery and the everybody-knows-everybody complications of living in a small community.”—The Washington Post The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand returns with a breathtaking novel of love on the eve of World War I that reaches far beyond the small English town in which it is set. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND NPR East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won’t come to anything. And Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master. When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her beloved father, who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching and writing. But just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the colorful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For despite Agatha’s reassurances, the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small Sussex town and its inhabitants go to war. Praise for The Summer Before the War “What begins as a study of a small-town society becomes a compelling account of war and its aftermath.”—Woman’s Day “This witty character study of how a small English town reacts to the 1914 arrival of its first female teacher offers gentle humor wrapped in a hauntingly detailed story.”—Good Housekeeping “Perfect for readers in a post–Downton Abbey slump . . . The gently teasing banter between two kindred spirits edging slowly into love is as delicately crafted as a bone-china teacup. . . . More than a high-toned romantic reverie for Anglophiles—though it serves the latter purpose, too.”—The Seattle Times

Download or read book The Summer Before Boys written by Nora Raleigh Baskin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve-year-old best friends and relatives, Julia and Eliza are happy to spend the summer together while Julia's mother is serving in the National Guard in Iraq but when they meet a neighborhood boy, their close relationship begins to change.

Download or read book The Summer Before The Baby Sitters Club written by Ann M. Martin and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of the generation-defining series The Baby-sitters Club comes a series for a new generation! Before there was The Baby-sitters Club, there were four girls named Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier, Claudia Kishi, and Stacey McGill. As they start the summer before seventh grade, Kristy is still hoping that her father will return to her family, Mary Anne has to prove that she's no longer a little girl, Claudia is navigating her first major crush, and Stacey is leaving her entire New York City life behind. Separately, it's a lot to deal with. But together, these friends will find a way to make it through--with plenty of laughter, tears, and suprises along the way.

Download or read book The Summer Before the Dark written by Doris Lessing and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the summer begins, Kate Brown -- attractive, intelligent, forty five, happily enough married, with a house in the London suburbs and three grown children -- has no reason to expect anything will change. But when the summer ends, the woman she was -- living behind a protective camouflage of feminine charm and caring -- no longer exists. This novel. Doris Lessing's brilliant excursion into the terrifying stretch of time between youth and old age, is her journey: from London to Turkey to Spain, from husband to lover to madness: on the road to a frightening new independence and a confrontation with self that lets her, finally, come truly of age.

Download or read book Ostend written by Volker Weidermann and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts “the summer before the dark,” when a coterie of artists, intellectuals, drunks, revolutionaries, and madmen found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war. Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. (Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway)

Download or read book Before Summer Ends written by Susan Mallery and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan Mallery, #1 New York Times bestselling author, delivers a charming, uplifting story about second chances and found families. A long, hot summer with her secret crush... What could possibly go wrong? Nissa Lang knows Desmond Stilling is out of her league. He’s a CEO, she’s a teacher. He’s gorgeous, she’s...not. So when her house-sitting gig falls through and Desmond offers her a place to stay for the summer, she vows not to reveal how she’s felt about him since their first—and only—kiss. Desmond should’ve known better than to bring temptation into his house. He decided long ago that his best friend’s sister was too sweet, too good, for him. She deserves a guy who can give his heart. For her sake, he’s stayed away. But as her laughter breathes life into his lonely mansion, he’s not sure how long he’ll be able to resist. From Harlequin Special Edition: Believe in love. Overcome obstacles. Find happiness.

Download or read book The Summer Before the Storm written by Gabriele Wills and published by . This book was released on 2011-01 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the Age of Elegance in the summer playground of the affluent and powerful. Amid the pristine, island-dotted lakes and pine-scented forests of the Canadian wilderness, the young and carefree amuse themselves with glittering balls and friendly competitions. The summer of 1914 promises to be different when the ambitious and destitute son of a disowned heir joins his wealthy family at their cottage on Wyndwood Island. Through Jack's introduction into the privileged life of the aristocratic Wyndhams and their social circle, he seeks opportunities and alliances to better himself, including in his schemes, his beautiful and audacious cousin, Victoria. But their charmed lives begin to unravel with the onset of the Great War, in which many are destined to become part of the "lost generation." This richly textured tale takes the reader on an unforgettable journey from romantic moonlight cruises to the horrific sinking of the Lusitania, from regattas on the water to combat in the skies over France, from extravagant mansions to deadly trenches - from innocence to nationhood. The Summer Before The Storm, the first of the epic "Muskoka Novels," evokes a gracious, bygone era that still resonates in this legendary land of lakes.

Download or read book We ll Always Have Summer written by Jenny Han and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The summer after her first year of college, Isobel "Belly" Conklin is faced with a choice between Jeremiah and Conrad Fisher, brothers she has always loved, when Jeremiah proposes marriage and Conrad confesses that he still loves her.

Download or read book Black Sand Beach 2 Do You Remember the Summer Before written by Richard Fairgray and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelation about how Dash may or may not have spent the summer before raises the stakes even higher in this second installment of the eerie and enthralling Black Sand Beach series, perfect for fans of Gravity Falls, Rickety Stich, and Fake Blood. Dash and his crew might have stumbled upon the source of the evil at Black Sand Beach when they stumbled into the abandoned and haunted lighthouse, but when Lily reveals that she found Dash's journal there, the news is anything but comforting. The book is full of Dash's reflections on his trip to Black Sand Beach the previous summer. Only Dash doesn't recognize the journal or have any memory of being there. As the friends read the entries aloud, through flashbacks Dash's unsettling encounter with two ghost girls, a truly terrifying monster, and a life changing event make one thing very clear: Black Sand Beach isn't done with them yet. Deliciously creepy and difficult to put down, Do You Remember the Summer Before? returns readers to a supernatural shore they'll never forget.

Download or read book The Lost Hours written by Karen White and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street novels delivers a gripping tale of family, fate, and forgiveness. When Piper Mills was twelve, she helped her grandfather bury a box that belonged to her grandmother in the backyard. For twelve years, it remained untouched. Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper’s dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather’s death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn’t exist—or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace—and a newspaper article from 1939 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace’s charms tell the story of three friends during the 1930s— each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.

Download or read book Goodness and the Literary Imagination written by Toni Morrison and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is goodness? Where is it found in the literary imagination? Toni Morrison, one of American letters’ greatest voices, pondered these perplexing questions in her celebrated Ingersoll Lecture, delivered at Harvard University in 2012 and published now for the first time in book form. Perhaps because it is overshadowed by the more easily defined evil, goodness often escapes our attention. Recalling many literary examples, from Ahab to Coetzee’s Michael K, Morrison seeks the essence of goodness and ponders its significant place in her writing. She considers the concept in relation to unforgettable characters from her own works of fiction and arrives at conclusions that are both eloquent and edifying. In a lively interview conducted for this book, Morrison further elaborates on her lecture’s ideas, discussing goodness not only in literature but in society and history—particularly black history, which has responded to centuries of brutality with profound creativity. Morrison’s essay is followed by a series of responses by scholars in the fields of religion, ethics, history, and literature to her thoughts on goodness and evil, mercy and love, racism and self-destruction, language and liberation, together with close examination of literary and theoretical expressions from her works. Each of these contributions, written by a scholar of religion, considers the legacy of slavery and how it continues to shape our memories, our complicities, our outcries, our lives, our communities, our literature, and our faith. In addition, the contributors engage the religious orientation in Morrison’s novels so that readers who encounter her many memorable characters such as Sula, Beloved, or Frank Money will learn and appreciate how Morrison’s notions of goodness and mercy also reflect her understanding of the sacred and the human spirit.

Download or read book Twas the Night Before Summer written by Anne Margaret Lewis and published by Mackinac Island Press, Incorporated. This book was released on 2008 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young girl learns that you are never too old to dream and imagine, as she is taken on the summer adventure of a lifetime by a spectacular little luna moth.

Download or read book The Perfect Summer written by Juliet Nicolson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2008-05-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “sparkling social history” that brings the twilight of the Edwardian era to life (Entertainment Weekly). The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer just over a century ago, when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. That summer of 1911, a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August, deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated from the viewpoints of a series of exceptional individuals—among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the queen—The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of a bygone time and place. “Brimming with delectable information and little-known facts . . . manages to describe every stratum of English society . . . Where Nicolson is especially good, however, is with the royals and the aristocracy, whose country estates, salons, entertainments, and affairs—discreet and indiscreet—she describes with accuracy and humor.” —The Providence Journal “A hugely interesting portrait of a society teetering on a precipice both nationally and internationally . . . As page turning as a novel.” —Joanna Trollope

Download or read book The Summer Before Forever written by Melissa Chambers and published by Entangled: digiTeen. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chloe Stone’s life is a hot mess. Determined to stop being so freaking skittish, she packs up her quasi-famous best friend and heads to Florida. The goal? Complete the summer bucket list to end all bucket lists. The problem? Her hot soon-to-be stepbrother, Landon Jacobs. Landon’s mom will throttle him if he even looks at his future stepsister the wrong way. Problem is, Chloe is everything he didn’t know he wanted, and that’s...inconvenient. Watching her tear it up on a karaoke stage, stand up to his asshole friend, and rock her first string bikini destroys his sanity. But there’s more than their future family on the line. Landon is hiding something—something he knows will change how she feels about him—and she’s hiding something from him, too. And when the secrets come out, there’s a good chance neither will look at the other the same way again... Each book in the A Before Forever series is a standalone story that can be enjoyed out of order. Series Order: Book #1 The Summer Before Forever Book #2 Falling for Forever

Download or read book Major Pettigrew s Last Stand written by Helen Simonson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Major Ernest Pettigrew is perfectly content to lead a quiet life in the sleepy village of Edgecombe St Mary, away from the meddling of the locals and his overbearing son. But when his brother dies, the Major finds himself seeking companionship with the village shopkeeper, Mrs Ali. Drawn together by a love of books and the loss of their partners, they are soon forced to contend with irate relatives and gossiping villagers. The perfect gentleman, but the most unlikely hero, the Major must ask himself what matters most: family obligation, tradition or love? Funny, comforting and heart-warming, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand proves that sometimes, against all odds, life does give you a second chance.

Download or read book Before the End of Summer written by Peyton McDonald and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-12-23 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Oliver Bellamy's father hands him a bucket list that has been in the family for generations, he has lots of work to do! With the help of old and new friends, Oliver has to complete ten things off of the list before the end of the summer. Such as, competing in a rodeo, flying to France to find a woman named Clemence, and sky diving! A fast paced novel with adventures in every chapter!

Download or read book Beyond a Darkened Shore written by Jessica Leake and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vikings meets Frostblood in this romantic historical fantasy stand-alone from author Jessica Leake. The ancient land of Éirinn is mired in war. Ciara, princess of Mide, has never known a time when Éirinn’s kingdoms were not battling for power, or Northmen were not plundering their shores. The people of Mide have always been safe because of Ciara’s unearthly ability to control her enemies’ minds and actions. But lately a mysterious crow has been appearing to Ciara, whispering warnings of an even darker threat. Although her clansmen dismiss her visions as pagan nonsense, Ciara fears this coming evil will destroy not just Éirinn but the entire world. Then the crow leads Ciara to Leif, a young Northman leader. Leif should be Ciara’s enemy, but when Ciara discovers that he, too, shares her prophetic visions, she knows he’s something more. Leif is mounting an impressive army, and with Ciara’s strength in battle, the two might have a chance to save their world. With evil rising around them, they’ll do what it takes to defend the land they love...even if it means making the greatest sacrifice of all.