The Man Who Was Victor Hugo: Memoirs, Essays, Letters & Speeches gathers the public and private voices of one of nineteenth-century Europe's commanding literary figures. Through autobiographical fragments, critical reflections, correspondence, and oratory, the volume reveals Hugo not only as the author of Romantic monuments but as a stylist of immense rhetorical range: intimate, prophetic, combative, and elegiac. Set against the intellectual climate of French Romanticism, revolution, exile...

In 'The Life and Work of Victor Hugo', readers are immersed in the literary genius of Victor Hugo, a prominent figure in French Romanticism. The book explores Hugo's famous works such as 'Les Misérables' and 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame', delving into his innovative storytelling techniques and profound themes of social justice, redemption, and the human spirit. This scholarly examination provides a comprehensive analysis of Hugo's impact on French literature and his enduring legacy in the ...

New England, 1890. Doctor John Shepherd arrives at a women’s mental hospital to begin work as assistant to the owner. As Shepherd struggles to conceal his secrets, he finds the asylum has plenty of its own. Intrigued by a girl who is fascinated by books but cannot read, Shepherd embarks upon an experiment to help her. In this chilling literary thriller everyone has something to hide and no one is what they seem.

"Why, when we take such care to disguise our true selves from others, would we expect them to be an open book to us?" Harry Steen, a businessman travelling in Mexico, ducks into an old bookstore to escape a frightening deluge. Inside, he makes a serendipitous discovery: a mid-nineteenth-century account of a sinister storm cloud that plagued an isolated Scottish village and caused many gruesome and unexplainable deaths. Harry knows the village well; he travelled there as a young man to take...

DS Glyn Capaldi, half Welsh, half Italian, all maverick, returns in the CWA shortlisted series blowing fresh life into crime fictionDS Glyn Capaldi, exiled to the big empty middle of Wales to atone for past sins in Cardiff, is called in to investigate a human skeleton that has been uncovered during the excavations for a wind farm in a remote valley. The body is missing its head and its hands. Identity erasure or a ritual killing? Glyn’s assertion that there must be a local connecti...

A global thriller presenting an apocalyptic vision of a world on the brink of despair and destruction.What would you do if the world was brought to a standstill? If you heard deafening static followed by the words, ‘My children. Do not be afraid’?Would you turn to God? Subscribe to the conspiracy theories? Or put your faith in science and a rational explanation?The lives of all twenty-six people in this account are affected by the message. Most because they heard it...

In the bestselling tradition of The Secret Life of Bees, Liar's Bench is an atmospheric, compulsively readable tale full of heart and history, set in 1970s Kentucky and exploring civil rights and family secrets.In 1972 on Mudas Summers' seventeenth birthday, her beloved mama, Ella, is found hanging from the rafters of their home. Most people in Peckinpaw, Kentucky, assume that Ella's no-good husband did the deed. Others think Ella grew tired of his abuse and did i...

Thirty years after her death, Alice's mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs surgery, her eldest daughter decides to track down her birth mother, and the year Alice gets a daunting diagnosis. As it turns out, it's entirely possible for the people we've lost to come back to us when we need them the most.Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing...

"A tense and compelling drama of the wars without and the wars within—and of the flame of violence that burns through the American psyche." —T.C. Boyle, New York Times bestselling author of The Women"Stunning . . . [Parker is] a brave and daring writer." —Lisa See, New York Times bestselling author of Shanghai Girls and Dreams of Joy"A great American fam...

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago. Written by his great-grandmother Viola, it hints at his mother's role in a sinister crime. As he discovers more of Viola's chilling tales, he realizes that they might hold the key to finding Alice and unveiling his family's mystery—or will they bring about his untim...

John Searles’s Help for the Haunted is an unforgettable story of a most unusual family, their deep secrets, their harrowing tragedy, and ultimately, a daughter’s discovery of a dark and unexpected mystery.Sylvie Mason’s parents have an unusual occupation—helping “haunted souls” find peace. After receiving a strange phone call one winter’s night, they leave the house and are later murdered in an old church in a horrifying act of violence.A year later, Sylvie is livi...

From the author of The Spanish Bow comes a lush, harrowing novel based on the real life story of Rosalie Rayner Watson, one of the most controversial scientists-and mothers-of the 20th century "The mother begins to destroy the child the moment it's born," wrote the founder of behaviorist psychology, John B. Watson, whose 1928 parenting guide was revered as the child-rearing bible. For their dangerous and "mawkish" impulses to kiss and hug their child, "most mothers should be indicted for p...