Read this classic romance by bestselling author Sandra Marton, now available for the first time in e-book! The heat is on…and so is their marriage! Ryan Kincaid doesn’t like being told what to do. When his grandfather pressures him to marry and introduces him to a suitable bride, Ryan is furious. Devon Franklin is the most argumentative, grasping female he’s ever met! So what if she’s gorgeous and he can’t stop thinking about her? Devon is perfectly capable of running her own life. She doesn’t need a husband and certainly not one like Ryan—disgustingly rich, dangerously handsome, infuriatingly smug…! Who cares if his kisses turn her knees to jelly? Perhaps the solution is a whirlwind wedding…and an equally quick divorce? Originally published in 1996

Despite facing years of abuse after arriving in Canada as a teenage bride in a hastily arranged marriage, nothing could stop Samra Zafar from pursuing her dreams At fifteen, Samra Zafar lives with her family in Pakistan and has big dreams: she will go to university and forge her own path in the world. Then, with almost no warning, her dreams evaporate when her parents arrange her marriage to a stranger in Canada. Her new husband and his family promise that the marriage and the move will be a fulfillment of her dreams. But as the walls of Zafar’s new home slowly become a prison, she realizes how deeply she has been betrayed. Desperate to get out and refusing to give up, she hatches an escape plan for herself and her two daughters. Somehow, she finds the strength to not only build a new future, but also to walk away from her past, ignoring the pleas of her family and risking cultural isolation by divorcing her husband. A Good Wife tells Zafar’s harrowing and inspiring story, following her from a young girl with big dreams to a woman who finds strength in the face of oppression and battles through to empowerment.

How To Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman is a haunting literary debut about a woman who begins having visions that make her question everything she knows Marta and Hector have been married for a long time. Through the good and bad; through raising a son and sending him off to life after university. So long, in fact, that Marta finds it difficult to remember her life before Hector. He has always taken care of her, and she has always done everything she can to be a good wife—as advised by a dog-eared manual given to her by Hector's aloof mother on their wedding day. But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can't recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember—or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta's visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it's unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself. The girl is growing more real every day, and she wants something.

Don't think that your wife has placed waste-paper baskets in the rooms as ornaments. Don't forget that very true remark that while face powder may catch a man, baking powder is the stuff to hold him. Marriage can be a series of humorous miscommunications, a power struggle, or a diplomatic nightmare. Men and women have long struggled to figure each other out--and the misunderstandings can continue well after they've been joined in matrimony. But long before Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, couples turned to self-help booklets such as How to Be a GoodHusband and How to Be a Good Wife, two historic advice books that are now delightfully reproduced by the Bodleian Library. The books, originally published in the 1930s for middle-class British couples, are filled with witty and charming aphorisms on how wives and husbands should treat each other. Some advice is unquestionably outdated--"It is a wife's duty to look her best. If you don't tidy yourself up, don't be surprised if your husband begins to compare you unfavorably with the typist at the office"--but many other pieces of advice are wholly applicable today. They include such insightful sayings as: "Don't tell your wife terminological inexactitudes, which are, in plain English, lies. A woman has wonderful intuition for spotting even minor departures from the truth"; "After all is said and done, husbands are not terribly difficult to manage"; or "Don't squeeze the tube of toothpaste from the top instead of from the bottom. This is one of the small things of life that always irritates a careful wife." Entertaining and charmingly illustrated, How to Be a Good Husband and How to Be a Good Wife offer enduringly useful advice for all couples, from the newly engaged to those celebrating their golden anniversary.

In this captivating dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman finds inspiration in hidden notes left by her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife. As she discovers remarkable parallels between this woman’s life and her own, it causes her to question the foundation of her own relationship with her husband--and what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society. When Alice Hale leaves a career in publicity to become a writer and follows her husband to the New York suburbs, she is unaccustomed to filling her days alone in a big, empty house. But when she finds a vintage cookbook buried in a box in the old home's basement, she becomes captivated by the cookbook’s previous owner--1950s housewife Nellie Murdoch. As Alice cooks her way through the past, she realizes that within the cookbook’s pages Nellie left clues about her life--including a mysterious series of unsent letters penned to her mother. Soon Alice learns that while baked Alaska and meatloaf five ways may seem harmless, Nellie's secrets may have been anything but. When Alice uncovers a more sinister--even dangerous--side to Nellie’s marriage, and has become increasingly dissatisfied with the mounting pressures in her own relationship, she begins to take control of her life and protect herself with a few secrets of her own.

Betrayal was just the beginning… Melanie Hale is a devoted mother to her two children, a diligent caregiver to her ailing mother-in-law and a trusted neighbor in their wealthy Louisiana community. Above all, she’s a loving partner to her wonderful husband, Collin. Then there are the parts of herself that Mel keeps hidden. She’s exhausted, worried and unfulfilled. So much so that one night, after a writers’ group meeting, Mel begins an affair with a successful local author named Luke. Suddenly she’s transformed into a role she doesn’t recognize—a woman who deceives with unseemly ease. A woman who might be capable of just about anything. When Mel finds Luke’s dead body in his lavish rented house, she realizes just how high the stakes have become. Not only does she have to keep her affair a secret in order to preserve her marriage, but she desperately needs to avoid being implicated in Luke’s death. But who would want to kill him? Who else in her life is keeping secrets? And most terrifying of all, how far will they—and she—go to keep those secrets hidden? Looking for another heart-pounding thriller? Find out how far the shady residents of the Sycamores will go to keep the stranger in their midst from uncovering their deadly secrets in bestselling author Seraphina Nova Glass’s upcoming thriller, THE VACANCY IN ROOM 10! Other thrillers from Seraphina to keep you up all night: The Vanishing Hour On a Quiet Street Someone’s Listening

A captivating tale of one man's mission to groom his ideal mate. Thomas Day, an 18th-century British writer and radical, knew exactly the sort of woman he wanted to marry. Pure and virginal, yet tough and hardy, and completely subervient to his whims. But after being rejected by a number of spirited young women, Day concluded that the perfect partner he envisioned simply did not exist in frivolous, fashion-obsessed Georgian society. Rather than conceding defeat and giving up on his search for the woman of his dreams, however, Day set out to create her. So begins the extraordinary true story at the heart of How to Create the Perfect Wife. A few days after he turned twenty-one and inherited a large fortune, Day adopted two young orphans from the Founding Hospital and, guided by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the principles of the Enlightenment, attempted to teach them to be model wives. Day's peculiar experiment inevitably backfired -- though not before he had taken his theories about marriage, education, and femininity to shocking extremes. Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism -- and deep contradictions -- at the heart of the enlightenment.