Sam and Bud intended to move to France and create a simple life with their children. However they bought a 17th century chateau with over thirty rooms. With modest savings, they restored the building and started a bed and breakfast against resistance from the locals. This is a glimpse into what it takes to leave everything behind to pursue a dream.

It is 1948 and a young American couple arrive in France for a holiday, full of anticipation and enthusiasm. But the countryside and people are war-battered, and their reception at the Chateau Beaumesnil is not all the open-hearted Americans could wish for.

A New York Times bestseller with an "engaging narrative and array of detail” (The Wall Street Journal), the “intimate and sweeping” (Raleigh News & Observer) untold, true story behind the Biltmore Estate—the largest, grandest private residence in North America, which has seen more than 120 years of history pass by its front door. The story of Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Depression, and generations of the famous Vanderbilt family, and features a captivating cast of real-life characters including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Orphaned at a young age, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser claimed lineage from one of New York’s best known families. She grew up in Newport and Paris, and her engagement and marriage to George Vanderbilt was one of the most watched events of Gilded Age society. But none of this prepared her to be mistress of Biltmore House. Before their marriage, the wealthy and bookish Vanderbilt had dedicated his life to creating a spectacular European-style estate on 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness. He summoned the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to tame the grounds, collaborated with celebrated architect Richard Morris Hunt to build a 175,000-square-foot chateau, filled it with priceless art and antiques, and erected a charming village beyond the gates. Newlywed Edith was now mistress of an estate nearly three times the size of Washington, DC and benefactress of the village and surrounding rural area. When fortunes shifted and changing times threatened her family, her home, and her community, it was up to Edith to save Biltmore—and secure the future of the region and her husband’s legacy. This is the fascinating, “soaring and gorgeous” (Karen Abbott) story of how the largest house in America flourished, faltered, and ultimately endured to this day.

Winemakers Éric and Saskia de Rothschild lead readers through 150 vintages of Château Lafite, sharing scientific and climatic data and visual memories since the family's arrival in 1868. Over the past 150 years, six generations of the Rothschild family have attended to the winemaking tradition, developing Château Lafite's reputation and transforming this classified Premier Grand Cru into a benchmark for fine wine in Bordeaux. Discover how this occurred and what actually lies behind Lafite's label through stories from the tightly-knit team of men and women who tend to Lafite wines. A chronology introducing each of the 150 vintages includes informative tasting notes, meteorological aspects, and the grape blends that mark each vintage. An archival gem has been unearthed for each year: from the harvesters' menu in 1922 to portraits by master photographers like Robert Doisneau, Richard Avedon, and Paolo Roversi. A fold-out original illustration by M/M Paris tracing the winemaker's month-by-month activity from vine to wine. The Lafite story--illustrated here with historical documents, press clippings, and photographs--combines deep respect for tradition with a commitment to evolve with the times, protecting Lafite's singular, vibrant, and evolving legacy for the next 150 years.

When you've written a book you want to see it in print. You want people to read and enjoy it. The only thing standing in your way is the publishing industry which rejects 98 per cent of the manuscripts submitted to it. Why not skip months of collecting rejection slips and simply join them at their own game? Anyone can publish their own book, and the cost can be as little as zero. In this easy-to-use guide, Stewart Ferris explains everything you need to know to be able to convert your manuscript into a printed book and to get that book selling in the shops, or to sell it online as an eBook. Stewart created the UK's first self-publishing agency in 1993 with his business partner Alastair Williams, offering authors all the services and advice they needed to publish and sell their own books.

THE TOP TWENTY SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘A brilliant new story-teller has arrived’ ERIN KELLY ‘A read-in-one-sitting thriller’ LUCY CLARKE ‘Chilling, devious’ JANICE HALLETT ‘Glorious escapism with a murderous twist’ TAMMY COHEN They thought it was perfect. They were wrong...

"We have proverb in Florida...You know why it's good to be on beach?" Bill smiles, but says nothing. He wants the guy to keep talking. "Because on beach you are surrounded by idiots on only three sides." "And on the remaining side you have what?" asks Bill. "Sharks..." Paul Goldberg, the acclaimed author of The Yid, takes us behind the scenes of a Florida condo board election, delivering a wild spin on Miami Beach, petty crime, Jewish identity, and life in Trump's America. It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was William M. Katzenelenbogen, successful science reporter at The Washington Post. But things have taken a turn. Fired from his job, aimless, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the “Butt God of Miami Beach,” has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill boards a flight for Florida’s Gold Coast, ready to begin his own investigation—a last ditch attempt to revive his career. There’s just one catch: Bill’s father, Melsor. Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen—poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook—is angling for control of the condo board at the Château Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise in Hollywood, Florida, populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. The current board is filled with fraudsters levying “special assessments” on residents, and Melsor will use any means necessary to win the board election. And who better to help him than his estranged son? As he did in The Yid, Paul Goldberg has taken something we think we know and turned it on its ear. Featuring a colorful cast of characters, The Château guarantees that you will never look at condo boards, crime, kleptocracy, vodka, Fascism, or Florida the same way again.