When their hijacked jet blows apart, two men miraculously survive. They have been chosen (by whom?) as opponents in an eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. A hijacked jumbo jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Two figures, Gibreel and Saladin, are washed up on an English beach. Soon curious changes occur--Gibreel seems to have acquired a halo, while Saladin grows hooves and bumps at his temples. They are transformed into living...

A London woman's great-granddaughters find themselves at a crossroads involving family values, traditions, new romance, and business, in the final episode of the Emma Harte saga.

Her belief in the power of beauty shattered when her fiancé dumps her for a plain woman, a pregnant Darcy flees to London and struggles to rebuild her glamorous life before realizing that her past methods no longer work.

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally...

At the Savoy hotel, two women with very different pasts try to forget the devastation of the Great War and forge a new life in a city where those who dare to dream can have it all. Dolly is the Savoy's newest chambermaid, whose proximity to the dazzling hotel guests fuels her dreams to be a star like her idol, Loretta May. Loretta, the daughter of an earl, has rebelliously turned her back on the ordered life expected of a society woman and lives as...

The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human motivations.
In this piercing story of innocence betrayed set in the thirties, the orphaned Portia is stranded in the sophisticated and politely...

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby's household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives-Gentleman, a somewhat elegant con man, who carries with...

"Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book takes a trip to London. The city was a favorite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: Back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed. The narrator, a writer, recalls all that...

After the death of his mother, Paul abandons his family to live life on the edge with his daughter from a previous marriage who is pregnant and living in a run-down council flat, while Cora rebels against her marriage and society.

A young woman from Bangladesh lives her life as girls from her village are supposed to do--as an obedient wife and mother--until she realizes she has control of her own destiny.