An evocative depiction of family life in postwar London by one of the world's best-loved author-illustrators.

It is a place both mythic and all too real, a place thought to be the site of one of our oldest human settlements and known to be a center of ancient cultures and annihilating conflicts. It sits at the bottom of a malarial valley, the lowest place on the surfact of the earth--"the overheated, earthen basement of the world," as Robert Ruby describes it. And yet, long before the world's modern religions began scrapping over its bones, Jericho was home to waves of colonization and floods of destruction. Fought over by the succeeding epochs of ancestors, the place we call Jericho is as old as the first remnants dated at 9,000 B.C.--and as current as the daily headlines. In this unorthodox biography of the first eleven thousand years in the life of a legend, Robert Ruby takes us back through time to those early settlements, then forward to the often crude but ultimately successful latter-day attempts to locate Jericho, to unearth and map and catalog its history. Beginning with the geography of place, he weaves together his own intimate knowledge of modern-day Jericho with stories of the lives and work of those explorers and archaeologists of the past whose courage often bordered on madness and whose dedication sometimes seemed the purest kind of human folly. Soldiers, scholars, engineers, adventurers--dilettantes and professionals alike, they were all dreamers drawn to this parched and dusty spot where so much of human history took place. Matching biblical accounts to araeological evidence, sifting myth from science, phantoms from reality, Robert Ruby teases out the complex strata of the past, helping us to make sense of what exists today. With the flair of a novelist and the enthusiasm of an amateur archaeologist, he offers a tale that is part detection, part epic adventure. Above all, he gives us a work of great literary panache: witty, fact-filled, and uterly, subversively compelling.

A suspenseful, contemporary Gothic coming-of-age tale with shades of Patricia Highsmith and Atonement, pitched against the sun-soaked backdrop of the French Riviera.

“Why mince words? Beautiful Ruins is an absolute masterpiece.” — Richard Russo The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 . . . and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. The story begins in 1962. On a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline, a young innkeeper, deep in daydreams, looks out over the waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying. And the story begins again today, half a world away, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot—searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier. What unfolds is a dazzling roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. From the lavish set of Cleopatra to the shabby revelry of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Walter introduces us to the tangled lives of a dozen unforgettable characters: the starstruck Italian innkeeper and his long-lost love; the heroically preserved producer who once brought them together and his idealistic young assistant; the army veteran turned fledgling novelist and the rakish Richard Burton himself, whose appetites set the whole story in motion—along with the husbands and wives, lovers and dreamers, superstars and losers, who populate their world in the decades that follow. Gloriously inventive, constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed yet fascinating people, navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.

'You read her, laughing, and want to do your best to protect her characters from any reality but their own' New York Times It's the summer of 1947, and peacetime has brought new challenges to Barsetshire. Beliers Priory, once a military hospital during the War, has now become a flourishing preparatory school for boys run by Leslie and Philip Winter. When Charles Belton is hired as the new school master, six young people are thrown together in a web of flirtations and misunderstandings: Charles and his elder brother, Naval Captain Freddy Belton; Susan Dean, now Red Cross Depot Librarian, and her glamorous sister Jessica, an actress in thrall to the theatre; pragmatic Lucy Marling and her brother Oliver. And with the old social order in ruins, the scene is set for a delicious summer of comic - and romantic - possibilities. Love Among the Ruins is a delightful, clever and wryly poignant classic, and the 17th novel in Angela Thirkell's beloved Barsetshire series.

As a war begins, four princesses of enemy kingdoms who were raised as sisters must decide where their loyalties lie: to their kingdoms, or to each other.

In an intergenerational keepsake volume, witnesses to World War II share their memories with young interviewers so that their experiences will never be forgotten. The Second World War was the most devastating war in history. Up to eighty million people died, and the map of the world was redrawn. More than seventy years after peace was declared, children interviewed family and community members to learn about the war from people who were there, to record their memories before they were lost forever. Now, in a unique collection, RAF pilots, evacuees, resistance fighters, Land Girls, U.S. Navy sailors, and survivors of the Holocaust and the Hiroshima bombing all tell their stories, passing on the lessons learned to a new generation. Featuring many vintage photographs, this moving volume also offers an index of contributors and a glossary.