Wealthy Alan Ashley, blinded in World War I, returns home to face a challenge to his ability to run the family business. As the case goes to court, he is drawn to the cheerful, ever-optimistic Lenore Seldon, his defense attorney's secretary. When he wins his case, he offers her employment, but she declines and disappears from his life. Ten years later, frail and in desperate need of work, Lenore answers his ad for a personal assistant. He hires her with the agreement that she will live in, chaperoned by his housekeeper, so that she can drive for him, and he can teach her to use the Braille writer. She is the perfect employee, but he senses that she is frightened of something'or someone. When he finds himself falling in love with her, he must uncover her secrets in order to save their relationship---and to save her from herself.

In the dark days of the Great Depression, when eleven-year-old Bobbie Rycroft became Annie Ashley, cherished daughter of Alan and Lenore, she left behind a life of fear and deprivation. Or so she believed as she grew to womanhood, sheltered in an affluent home with every material possession and opportunity. Graduating from Vassar just as America gears up for war, she enters into a hasty marriage with David Levinson only ten days before he goes overseas. When he returns, they are strangers. David loves Annie deeply, but he realizes that she cannot live in the present until she has made peace with her past. When he urges her to find Albert Rycroft's shining star, she insists that Bobbie is dead. But David knows that Bobbie is very much alive and that his own tangled connection to her past could put Annie in danger of losing her life.

Ruthann Cooper can barely remember the fiancé whose plane went down in flames over Nazi Germany. He faded as she did her bit for the war effort in the munitions factory. Now, the war over, she meets the faculty on her first day as a schoolteacher. From that moment on it’s impossible to forget the piercing blue eyes and gentle, artistic ways of the superintendent of schools, who welcomes her both to the school and to his life. WWI veteran Drew Mallory still battles a debilitating injury from that earlier conflict. With complications of the injury, plus a grown daughter, the widower feels his life is all but over…until he meets the new third grade teacher. His renewed spirit rejoices, yet he must consider the effect he may have on her life. Their deepening relationship spawns a series of increasingly vicious attacks on Ruthann, and she finds herself on the brink of another, more personal war simply because of Drew’s interest in her. Should she retreat, as he wants her to for her own safety? Or can she do battle for the man she finds herself loving more than life?

Ben Butterfield, ex-circus performer, is living out his days in a small backwater town. He spends much of his time dwelling on the past, pondering his glory days with the circus, and his first grand adventure—an odyssey across Missouri and Illinois to Bright Star, Indiana, during the Civil War. It was a journey that laid the groundwork for the man he would become, and on which he got to know the two people who meant the world to him, and still do. In 1862, Ben sets out to help Johnny Hawkes, a resourceful Texican, drive two camels to the farm home of a Yankee officer who has taken possession of the desert beasts as contraband of war. But when Johnny is imprisoned by the Yankees and charged with horse theft, it is up to Ben to complete the task without his friend and mentor. On the threshold of manhood, he has only the help of a young girl, nicknamed Princess, who spends most of the time masquerading as a boy to avoid drawing unwanted attention. Johnny and Princess must stand together and persevere against the odds if they are to overcome every obstacle placed before them on the winding way to Bright Star. A magnificent tour of 1860s heartland America, The Way to Bright Star is a grand coming-of-age novel, in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn, and destined to become an American classic. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A thirst for learning and a passion for astronomy draw an extraordinary young woman deep into the intellectual maelstrom, political complexities and religious extremism of Renaissance Florence. This beautifully crafted novel will appeal to readers of Karen Brooks' The Good Wife of Bath and Pip Williams' Dictionary of Lost Words. 1496 It is the height of the Renaissance and its flowering of intellectual and artistic endeavour, but the city state of Florence is in the grip of fundamentalist preacher Friar Girolamo Savonarola. Its good people believe the Lord speaks through him, just as certainly as the Sun circles the Earth. For Leonarda Lunetta, eldest daughter of the learned Signore Vincenzio Fusili, religion is not as interesting as the books she shares with her beloved father. Reading is an escape from the ridicule flung her way, for Luna is not like other girls. She was born with a misshapen leg and that, and her passion for intellectual pursuits alters how society sees her and how she sees the world. Luna wants to know, to learn, to become an astronomer who charts the night sky - certainly not the dutiful, marriageable daughter all of Florence society insists upon. So when Luna meets astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, she is not surprised that his heretical beliefs confirm her view that the world is not as it is presented - or how it could be. These dangerous ideas bring her into conflict with the preacher Savonarola, and her future is changed irrevocably as politics, extremism and belief systems ignite in a dangerous conflagration. Luna is a woman born out of time, the brightest star of her generation, but can she reconcile the girl of her father's making with this new version of herself? And if she does, will Renaissance Italy prove too perilous and dark a place for a free-thinking woman?