Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...

Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason-his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and...

After Rachel's mother dies, she learns that her father is still alive and is an earl with a legitimte family. With the help of a man who promises access to her father, she sets herself up in London under a new identity and is determined to enveil her father's betrayal and bring his and her half sister's world crashing down.

When the affluent Lintons of Lenox Hill summon Sarah Brandt to examine their teenage daughter, their worst fear is confirmed: she is with child. The pregnancy is a mystery, however, as the young woman—mentally still a child herself—is never left on her own and denies that any man has ever hurt her. It’s a delicate situation, casting suspicion on those close to the Lintons, including their beloved minister, the Reverend Oliver Upchurch.

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Known professionally as the "success guru," Morgan Spencer is the turn- around genius who revitalizes failing corporations, and his gifts for identifying problems and finding solutions extends to the personal lives of his friends and acquaintances, but the one life he can't seem to set straight is his own: behind his charming rebel facade is a need that drives him toward success- and emptiness.

"E.M. Forster's most admired novel--the one that gave us his famous injunction, 'Only connect'--revolves around the troubled legacy of an English country house named Howards End. The old house holds significance of differing kinds for the characters whose lives are connected by it: the sweetly frail Ruth Wilcox, who longs to leave Howards End to someone who will love it as she does; her snobbish and materialistic husband and sons, who ignore her dying...

"Maggie, Eliza, and Tricia Sweeney grew up as a happy threesome in the idyllic seaside town of Southport, Connecticut. But their mother's death from cancer fifteen years ago tarnished their golden-hued memories, and the sisters drifted apart. Their one touchstone is their father, Bill Sweeney, an internationally famous literary lion and college professor universally adored by critics, publishers, and book lovers. When Bill dies unexpectedly one June...

When some of her personal letters go missing, Maggie Windham, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Moreland, turns to private investigator Benjamin Hazlit to help her recover the letters and stave off potential blackmail.

Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in wartorn Kabul, and the losses incurred over the course of thirty years test the limits of their strength and courage.

A family struggles with its secrets and betrayals when David Treasure discovers that a long ago affair resulted in the birth of an unknown illegitimate daughter who is now deathly ill and needs a bone marrow transplant from his legitimate son.