Grace Nebeker was spoiled! No doubt about it, but she was also a winsome bundle of contradictions. Her letters written between 1884-1887, while she was a student at Glendale Female College paint a charming, but revealing portrait of a young woman struggling to carve out her own unique identity. These were written at a time when womens role in society was narrowly prescribed by the Victorian Era. She had definite opinions about everything from family and friends to religion and politics. She considered herself to be a lady, yet she was capable of being a bit of a hoyden. She had a love/hate relationship with her college. Her relationship with Annie Davidson, her roommate, was complex and competitive. Possibly, in terms of contemporary psychology, Grace could be described as passive-aggressive. She, herself, wrote that she knew how to get around people. Her syntax, grammar and spelling were not always correct and there were times when, according to our contemporary thinking, she was not politically correct. One thing is certain, once you have met her you will not forget her.

Grace is a thief on the run from some very bad people who want the money she has stolen. Her thieving adventures have left her with a vague but compelling impression of the beauty and serenity of the Rhône valley in southern France, so she goes there in 1930 to hide and to acquire farm land that she can work. Since she was a very young woman, toiling in the heat to make green things grow has been what brings her peace. She buys a farm where she lives safely until 1935. But, then she makes an innocent and well-meaning phone call that opens the way for the winds of war to collapse her peaceful world....

An Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Romance Author On her boss's orders… For her entire life, pastry-chef Grace Blake has been the pinnacle of politeness. Yet less than a day into the contract with her enigmatic Argentinean boss, Cesar Navarro, all of her good manners—and her good sense!—have flown out of the window. Cesar's got his sexy little spitfire of a chef right where he wants her—in his penthouse, at his command! He knows his staff should be off-limits, but Grace has tantalized his jaded palate, and Cesar finds himself ordering something new from the menu—a taste of the forbidden….

Have you ever found yourself overcome and shaken by fear or anxiety for whatever reason? Maybe it was induced by a trauma of some sort, or maybe itaEUR(tm)s just a natural disposition. In this novel that is based on a true story, twelve-year-old Grace finds herself in the middle of a wicked plot of a man. How did she get involved? Surely it wasnaEUR(tm)t her fault. How is Grace to escape the evil plot of this man? Deeper still, there is a demonic plot waging war against GraceaEUR(tm)s soul. A plan that uses Fear as its weapon to torment Grace day and night. Fear that is used to block her from finding Truth. Grace tries everything she can in her own strength to rid herself from Fear. She is exhausted and wearied. She tries coming up with her own plans. She tries hiding. She tries moving to another home, She tries moving out of state. She tries hushing out FearaEUR(tm)s taunts by various means. Nothing she tries in her own power has worked. Fear was over Grace. He controls her from within. How will Grace overcome Fear? Will she ever be freed?

When a postgraduate student of African languages, looking for a topic for her doctoral thesis, happens upon an obscure and incomplete lexicon of metaphorical names for indigenous Sanga-Nguni cattle by a long-dead academic, she knows, instinctively, that she has found her subject. She is given access to his papers, his catalogue of index cards and field notes recorded in a remote valley in South Africa in 1946. Among his many photographs is a small print of a delicately patterned cow. In finding it she has, unwittingly, discovered a cipher to his life. In exchanging objectivity for passion, and in defiance of her supervisor's instructions, the linguist becomes the biographer. She begins to reconstruct the life and the lost love of a man long forgotten, to recreate a world to which she can restore him - and, in doing so, restore herself. Fact and supposition, instinct and intuition become blurred, making a new truth ... Recessional for Grace is an exquisitely textured novel. In Poland's assured hands, it is a love story at once delicate and incandescent and an exploration of the process of creation where sequence does not matter and past and present have a genesis apart from time.