A man escaping from a hotel fire sees a woman standing beneath a tree. He approaches her and sets in motion a series of events that will change his life forever. Years later, traveling from New England to Florida by train, he reflects back on his obsession with this unknown and ultimately unknowable woman--his courtship of her, his marriage to her, and the unforgivable act that ripped their family apart. Spanning three decades from 1899 to 1933, "All...

Dear Avon Books,

Where are my heroes? Whenever I'm reading a book by one of my favorite authors I find I'm falling for the wrong guy — not the hero, but the other man — and what I really want is for him to have his own story.

Like Jake Linley, from Someone to Watch Over Me by Lisa Kleypas...that doctor could sit by my bedside if I ever got sick. And Ned Blydon in Splendid by Julia Quinn...he makes me want to learn to waltz!

...

Kidnapped by the crew of an Africa-bound ship, a thirteen-year-old boy discovers to his horror that he is on a slaver and his job is to play music for the exercise periods of the human cargo.

As the war in Europe winds down in the wake of the Normandy invasion, the United States has turned its vast military resources toward an all-out effort against the Japanese. In the spring of 1945, Japan's empire has been pressed slowly back toward its home islands, and the Americans mount a furious assault on the last great stepping-stone to Japan itself--the heavily fortified island of Okinawa. The three-month battle will feature some of the most...

One novella and seven stories dealing with science and set in the 19th Century. In The Behavior of the Hawkweeds, the spirit of Mendel, the discoverer of the laws of heredity, haunts a geneticist of whose work Mendel disapproves, in Birds with No Feet, Darwin's theory of evolution provides a zoologist with consolation for his personal misfortunes, while in The English Pupil, Linnaeus, who brought order to botany, must deal with the mental disorder...

"Caught in his first bank robbery, Sean Donovan is sentenced to hang. But Charlotte Cooper, who needs a blacksmith for her livery, has other ideas. By law, a woman of good standing in the community can save a man from the gallows by marrying him. Humbled by the dramatic rescue and renewed in his faith, Sean's heart goes out to his new bride, a woman whose past has prompted her to guard her heart. Yet could the talk around town be true? Is the fiercely...

God wills it! The year is 1095. Thousands of men, including many of the leaders of the Christian world, have assembled in a meadow in France near Clermont. Pope Urban appeals for the liberation of Jerusalem and the people shout, Deus lo volt! The cry is taken up, echoes forth, is carried on. The crusades have begun. Wave upon wave of Christian pilgrims assault the growing power of the Muslims in the Holy Land - and will do so for the next two hundred...

Here in one volume are all five of Nathaniel Hawthorne's world-famous novels. "The House of the Seven Gables" moves across 150 years from an ancestral crime condoned by the Puritan theocracy to a new beginning in the bustling and democratic Jacksonian era. Hawthorne's masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. "The Blithedale Romance"...

Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in fourteenth-century England flees his village and meets a larger-than-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret.