Frances Hodgson Burnett, one of the early and most famous of women writers for children and adults, tells of Anthony Dart, ready to end his beggar days with a gun to his head. On the way to his place of demise, he threw a coin to a girl street urchin. She demanded to take him for a cup of coffee, where a thief grabbed the coin from her. Anthony chased the thief and found a reason to live. But there was much more to do.

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"A journey of poignancy and hope . . . difficult to put down. I loved it!" --Jennie Goutet, author of the Clavering Chronicles series Sarah Drayton is eager to spend a holiday at her best friend's crumbling Northumberland castle estate. Alas, rather than easy companionship with her dear friend, she finds herself being inveigled into a marriage of convenience with her friend's rakish brother. When James Langley returns to his family's estate, war is raging and he wants only distraction, not serious tethers. But his roguish ways have backed him into a corner, and he has little choice but to obey his father's shocking decree: marry before returning to war...or else. Suddenly he finds himself wedded to a clever and capable woman he barely knows. Sarah craves love and a place to belong, neither of which James offered before returning to the battlefront. Now everyone around her thinks she married above her station, and they have no intention of rewarding her for such impertinence. Only when her husband returns from war does she begins to hope they may find real happiness. When tragedy strikes, this pair must learn to trust God and cling to the belief that even in the darkest depths of night, the morning still holds hope.

Pages of a weathered original sonata manuscript - the gift of a Czech immigrant living in Queens - come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. The gift comes with the request that Meta find the manuscript's true owner - a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart - and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvorák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn't the only one seeking the music's secrets.