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...

Jade longs to begin a family with her husband Max. When she discovers that Max has an illegitimate son, her life is turned upside down. She flees to her Iowa childhood home, and questions everything she thought she knew about family, love, and motherhood. Does the future rest on the power of her past-- or in the goodness of God's tender mercies?

Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

"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 a mysterious stranger finds his way into her bedchamber and offers his help in landing a husband, Lady Felicity Faircloth agrees to his suspicious terms--on one condition. She's seen enough of the world to believe in passion, and won't accept a marriage without it. The bastard son of a duke and king of London's dark streets, Devil has spent a lifetime wielding power and seizing opportunity, and the spinster wallflower is everything he needs to...

Shortly after the death of her husband, a wealthy Southern widow is visited by an impoverished young woman with a small boy. A mistress? A son? Julia Springer can't believe it, only to discover that the whole town has known for years. But she will rise to the occasion when the boy is kidnaped.

When his charge, heiress Clarissa, the daughter of a notorious rake, and her beautiful, yet penniless, half-sister Isobel launch themselves into society against his wishes, the new Earl of Salcott must protect Clarissa from fortune hunters while dealing with the sharp-witted, rebellious and utterly intoxicating Izzy.

Erika and Steven, committed Christians, feel hopeless when their marriage begins to fall apart after the daughter Erika secretly bore at the age of seventeen and gave up for adoption contacts her seeking a relationship.

As she travels with her new family from England to France, Cora faces the hardships as well as the privileges of the family name. But her journey of self-discovery is only just beginning.