This “masterfully woven…literary home run” (New York Journal of Books) follows four women across generations, bound by a beautiful wedding veil and a connection to the famous Vanderbilt family from the New York Times bestselling author of the Peachtree Bluff series. Four women. One family heirloom. A secret connection that will change their lives—and history as they know it. Present Day: Julia Baxter’s wedding veil, bequeathed to her great-grandmother by a mysterious woman on a train in the 1930s, has passed through generations of her family as a symbol of a happy marriage. But on the morning of her wedding day, something tells her that even the veil’s good luck isn’t enough to make her marriage last forever. Overwhelmed, she escapes to the Virgin Islands to clear her head. Meanwhile, her grandmother, Babs, is also feeling shaken. Still grieving the death of her beloved husband, she decides to move into a retirement community. Though she hopes it’s a new beginning, she does not expect to run into an old flame, dredging up the same complicated emotions she felt a lifetime ago. 1914: Socialite Edith Vanderbilt is struggling to manage the luxurious Biltmore Estate after the death of her cherished husband. With 250 rooms to oversee and an entire village dependent on her family to stay afloat, Edith is determined to uphold the Vanderbilt legacy—and prepare her free-spirited daughter Cornelia to inherit it—despite her family’s deteriorating financial situation. But Cornelia has dreams of her own, and as she explores more of the rapidly changing world around her, she’s torn between upholding tradition and pursuing the exciting future that lies beyond Biltmore’s gilded gates. In the vein of Therese Anne Fowler’s A Well-Behaved Woman and Jennifer Robson’s The Gown, The Wedding Veil is “a sparkling, fast-paced joy of a book that celebrates love, family, and the right to shape one’s own destiny” (Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author).

Qatar is a country of spectacular contrasts: from pearl fishing, its main industry until the 1930s, to gas and oil, which generate immense wealth today; to famously being at the center of both triumph and controversy in recent years for hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Almost a lifetime since he grew up in Qatar, Michael Quentin Morton writes about the country’s colorful past and its astonishing present. The book is filled with stories about the people of this land: the tribes and the travelers, the seafarers and slaves—as much a part of Qatar’s history as its rulers and their wealth. The opaque Arabian world guards its secrets well, but Masters of the Pearl penetrates the veil to shed light on a country that until now has defied explanation.

Concerned with physical experience, pain, and disability, Veil and Burn illuminates an intense desire to feel through the Other, embrace it, become it, and in the transformation, to understand the suffering body. In poems about animals, artifacts, and monsters, Lambeth displays a fascination for all bodies while exploring their pain, common fate, alienation, and abilities. Hovering between poem and prose fragment, between the self and fellow creatures, Laurie Clements Lambeth celebrates physical sensation, imbuing it with lyric shape, however broken, however imprisoned the shape may be.

'I found the photograph album by chance when we were clearing out the old coach house. It must have been sitting on the garage shelf for years among all the other family rejects.' When a woman finds a lost photo album in a garage clearout, she is drawn to the images of her ancestors. But one image in particular stands out: a baby sitting in the lap of its mother, both draped from head to toe in a cotton lace curtain or something, completely enveloped and unrecognizable. Who are they and what has happened to them? In a story that moves between 2012 and 1850, the shocking secrets of one family are gradually revealed…

A meticulously researched bouquet of more than 300 fascinating, informative, and always entertaining lists on all things nuptial, this fully-illustrated guide offers a unique compendium for anyone who is getting married or planning a wedding.