This second novel in the author's historical mystery series is set in the year is 1380. Lady Apollonia is living with her affinity and three younger sons in Exeter House at the end of summer while her husband is away in London. The images of English medieval people here shift to the emerging towns and the growing merchant class who struggle with a gang culture organized by the local nobility.

The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous and “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author (The New York Times) Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral. Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death. The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best.

When Ophelia's father heads off to Italy for the summer to finish work on his book on the poet Ezra Pound, O - as she prefers to be called - is sent by train to stay with her Aunt Emily, who runs a secondhand bookshop back east called The Green Man. Emily has recently suffered a heart attack. Part of the reason O is sent to stay with her is to see if she can help out with the shop. Part mystery, part fantasy, this compelling and beautifully written novel slips between the real world, and that of the creative imagination. Cloaked in the simple story of a young woman taking over a bookstore from her aged aunt, The Green Man is an eerie story about finding voice and courage, and about suspending disbelief!

The Trotula was the most influential compendium on women's medicine in medieval Europe. Scholarly debate has long focused on the traditional attribution of the work to the mysterious Trotula, said to have been the first female professor of medicine in eleventh- or twelfth-century Salerno, just south of Naples, then the leading center of medical learning in Europe. Yet as Monica H. Green reveals in her introduction to this first edition of the Latin text since the sixteenth century, and the first English translation of the book ever based upon a medieval form of the text, the Trotula is not a single treatise but an ensemble of three independent works, each by a different author. To varying degrees, these three works reflect the synthesis of indigenous practices of southern Italians with the new theories, practices, and medicinal substances coming out of the Arabic world. Arguing that these texts can be understood only within the intellectual and social context that produced them, Green analyzes them against the background of historical gynecological literature as well as current knowledge about women's lives in twelfth-century southern Italy. She examines the history and composition of the three works and introduces the reader to the medical culture of medieval Salerno from which they emerged. Among her findings is that the second of the three texts, "On the Treatments for Women," does derive from the work of a Salernitan woman healer named Trota. However, the other two texts—"On the Conditions of Women" and "On Women's Cosmetics"—are probably of male authorship, a fact indicating the complex gender relations surrounding the production and use of knowledge about the female body. Through an exhaustive study of the extant manuscripts of the Trotula, Green presents a critical edition of the so-called standardized Trotula ensemble, a composite form of the texts that was produced in the mid-thirteenth century and circulated widely in learned circles. The facing-page complete English translation makes the work accessible to a broad audience of readers interested in medieval history, women's studies, and premodern systems of medical thought and practice.

A gripping novel of global disaster—by the visionary creator of Dune.

BEFORE THE RIPPER, THERE WAS THE PLAGUE MAKER England, 1870 A woman is murdered, her child taken. For residents of a small railway town, such a crime in their midst is as shocking as it is terrifying. Yet for local Police Constable John Tanner, the nightmare is only just beginning when he follows the trail to Whitechapel, home of the London Metropolitan Police Force’s legendary H Division. There he will meet Detective Sergeant Henry Lofthouse, a disillusioned officer of Scotland Yard’s reorganised Detective Branch. Confronted with murders unlike any yet seen, these two very different men must grapple with deception, mistrust and their own demons if they are to stop a relentless killer from fulfilling a horrifying ambition... In this sweeping, character-driven epic, Michael Averon weaves a dark tale of murder, betrayal, love, lust and vengeance to craft a bloodsoaked tapestry knotted with vicious twists and turns that will stay with you long after the final page. From the quiet bustle of a provincial town, to the dark underbelly of Victorian London, A Plague of Murder opens the door on a richly detailed world, igniting a saga that will lead to the blade of Jack the Ripper himself.