Cousins and best friends, Sophie and Tilly are looking for love and adventure Sophie, orphaned at six, has been brought up by a radical aunt. Tilly meanwhile has lived a sheltered life in Newcastle. Tilly surprises everyone with a whirlwind marriage to a confirmed bachelor and tea planter, James Robson, following him to India. Thinking herself in love with the charming, enigmatic forester Tam, the independent Sophie decides to follow him when he also goes to India. Set against the vivid backdrop of post WW1 Britain and the changing world of India under the British Raj. THE PLANTER'S BRIDE is a passionate story of tragedy, loyalty and undying love

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • 1920s Ceylon: A young Englishwoman marries a charming tea plantation owner and widower, only to discover he's keeping terrible secrets about his past, including what happened to his first wife, that lead to devastating consequences In this lush, atmospheric page-turner, nineteen-year-old Gwendolyn Hooper has married Laurence, the seductively mysterious owner of a vast tea empire in colonial Ceylon, after a whirlwind romance in London. When she joins him at his faraway tea plantation, she’s filled with hope for their life together, eager to take on the role of mistress of the house, learn the tea business, and start a family. But life in Ceylon is not what Gwen expected. The plantation workers are resentful, the neighbors and her new sister-in-law treacherous. Gwen finds herself drawn to a local Sinhalese man of questionable intentions and worries about her new husband’s connection to a brash American businesswoman. But most troubling are the unanswered questions surrounding Laurence’s first marriage. Why won’t anyone discuss the fate of his first wife? Who’s buried in the unmarked grave in the forest? As the darkness of her husband’s past emerges, Gwen is forced to make a devastating choice, one that could destroy their future and Gwen’s chance at happiness.

An exotic flower from a faraway land, Celia came to London tobecome a proper English rose -- a wide-eyed innocent, newlyawakened by womanhood's kiss...yet burning with a sensuous heatinflamed by gypsy blood. To one she is promised -- a man ofwealth and power and property. Yet another will own her heart. He is Grant Hamilton, a daring and unpredictable Americanrogue who senses a kindred spirit in the stunning, copper-eyedbeauty whom he has agreed to escort through London'ssocial whirl. Yet Grant is determined to resist his own secretyearnings for the exuisite enchantress. For there isdanger in a love that can know no bounds -- and in a passionthat could only lead to shattering ruin...or ecstasy.

The war is over, but at Fairhaven Plantation, Charlotte's struggle has just begun. Following her father’s death, Charlotte Fraser returns to Fairhaven, her family’s rice plantation in the South Carolina Lowcountry. With no one else to rely upon, smart, independent Charlotte is determined to resume cultivating the superior strain of rice called Carolina Gold. But the war has left the plantation in ruins, her father’s former bondsmen are free, and workers and equipment are in short supply. To make ends meet, Charlotte reluctantly agrees to tutor the two young daughters of her widowed neighbor and heir to Willowood Plantation, Nicholas Betancourt. Just as her friendship with Nick deepens, he embarks upon a quest to prove his claim to Willowood and sends Charlotte on a dangerous journey that uncovers a long-held family secret, and threatens everything she holds dear. Inspired by the life of a 19th-century woman rice farmer, Carolina Gold pays tribute to the hauntingly beautiful Lowcountry and weaves together mystery, romance, and historical detail, bringing to life the story of one young woman’s struggle to restore her ruined world. A native of west Tennessee, Dorothy Love makes her home in the Texas hill country with her husband and their two golden retrievers. An accomplished author, Dorothy made her debut in Christian fiction with the Hickory Ridge novels.

An island of secrets. A runaway. And a promise...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes a classic fairy tale and turns it into a novel set along the eighteenth-century frontier of the Natchez Trace. In the clammy forests of Louisiana, somewhere between New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi River, the berry-stained bandit of the woods, Jamie Lockhart, saves the life of a gullible planter. In reward, Jamie is given shelter—only to kidnap the planter’s lovely young daughter, Rosamund. It’s an impulsive act that will have far-reaching consequences, and will set in motion a series of fantastic, murderous, and flamboyantly uncivilized romantic adventures. With legendary figures of Mississippi’s past—including notorious riverboatman Mike Fink and the thrill-killing Harp brothers—mingling side-by-side with characters from legendary fairy tales and the author’s own imagination, The Robber Bridegroom in an exuberant cocktail of fantasy, folklore and history along the treacherous Natchez Trace. The basis of the popular musical that has run both on and off Broadway, The Robber Bridegroom is “a modern fairy tale, where irony and humor, outright nonsense, deep wisdom and surrealistic extravaganzas becomes a poetic unity through the power of a pure exquisite style” (The New York Times). “As sly and irresistible as anything in Candide. For all her wild, rich fancy, Welty writes prose that is as disciplined as it is beautiful.” —The New Yorker

Layla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric grandfather. And, by clever manipulation, she has found love with Manik Deb, a man betrothed to another. These were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, when most young women's lives were predetermined. But powerful changes are sweeping India on the heels of the Second World War.