29 and unmarried, gasp! - can you think of anything worse? In 1920s rural Canada, Valancy Stirling is considered "past it" and with a controlling, nagging mother and petty gossips for relatives she feels trapped in the life she has ended up in and when she is diagnosed with a terminal heart condition and given a year to live, it seems she will die without ever experiencing happiness. And so, she rebels. She leaves her family home slamming the door as she does and moves in with her old friend Cissy and starts working as a housekeeper. The independence is intoxicating - as is a growing friendship with local man, Barney Snaith. It looks as though Valancy will have love to warm her heart in her final months. But secrets on both sides threaten to ruin things. The intoxicating story of love and loss is perfect for fans of Elizabeth Gaskell and Jodie Picoult. Lucy Maud (L.M.) Montgomery was a Canadian author best known for a series of children's books beginning with 'Anne of Green Gables'. The books were a huge hit in her lifetime and were recently made in the Netflix series 'Anne with an E'. Montgomery published 20 novels, 530 short stories, 500 poems and 30 essays in her lifetime. Most were set in Canada's smallest province, Prince Edward Island.

You'll be liable to shy off at that title and say: "No more 'glad' books for me! I'm growing up!" But you'll be making a big mistake if you do. "The Blue Castle" is grown-up, too. And aside from being poignantly human, it is almost poetically beautiful in parts. "Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jeweled, barbaric hills, and icy-grey twilights, broken by snowsqualls. Doesn't that have twice the color, twice the beauty and rhythm that five sixths of the "verse libre" printed today attains? And the story is fascinating. It's about Valancy Stirling, who for the twenty-nine years of her life has been tied down by fear. Fear of criticism, fear of her mother, fear of her whole "tribe." And when she finds that she has only a year to live she breaks away; defies them all. She goes to the home of Roaring Abel, an old reprobate, and takes care of his daughter, a poor little waif with an illegitimate child. And she proposes marriage to Barney Snaith, a man about whom nothing is known but much is said. Then life starts for Valancy, and for the reader too; mystery, love, humor and pathos. And when you finish it, it leaves you with all the most delightful sensations - the thrill of first love; the splendor of mountains and trees; the feeling that God is very close when the sky is so blue.

Jane of Lantern HillLucy Maud Montgomery Jane of Lantern Hill is a novel by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery. The book was adapted into a 1990 telefilm, Lantern Hill, by Sullivan Films, the producer of the highly popular Anne of Green Gables television miniseries and the television series Road to Avonlea.Montgomery began formulating an idea on May 11, 1936, began writing on August 21, and wrote the last chapter on February 3, 1937. She finished typing up the manuscript on February 25, as she could not hire a typist to do it for her. This novel was dedicated to "JL", her companion cat.The novel was written at Montgomery's house, "Journey's End"; the environment influenced Montgomery's writing to create a

Sometimes fairy toles can come true-even for plain,shy spinsters like Missy Wright. Neither as pretty as cousin Alicianor as domineering as mother Drusilla, she seems doomed to aquiet life of near poverty at Missalonghi, her family's pitifullysmall homestead in Australia's Blue Mountains. But It's a brandnew century-the twentieth-a time for new thoughts and boldnew actions. And Missy Wright is about to set every self-righteous tongue in the town of Byron wagging. Because she hasjust set her sights on a mysterious, mistrusted and unsuspectingstranger ... who just might be Prince-Charming in disguise.

A New York Times bestseller with an "engaging narrative and array of detail” (The Wall Street Journal), the “intimate and sweeping” (Raleigh News & Observer) untold, true story behind the Biltmore Estate—the largest, grandest private residence in North America, which has seen more than 120 years of history pass by its front door. The story of Biltmore spans World Wars, the Jazz Age, the Depression, and generations of the famous Vanderbilt family, and features a captivating cast of real-life characters including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Teddy Roosevelt, John Singer Sargent, James Whistler, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Orphaned at a young age, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser claimed lineage from one of New York’s best known families. She grew up in Newport and Paris, and her engagement and marriage to George Vanderbilt was one of the most watched events of Gilded Age society. But none of this prepared her to be mistress of Biltmore House. Before their marriage, the wealthy and bookish Vanderbilt had dedicated his life to creating a spectacular European-style estate on 125,000 acres of North Carolina wilderness. He summoned the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to tame the grounds, collaborated with celebrated architect Richard Morris Hunt to build a 175,000-square-foot chateau, filled it with priceless art and antiques, and erected a charming village beyond the gates. Newlywed Edith was now mistress of an estate nearly three times the size of Washington, DC and benefactress of the village and surrounding rural area. When fortunes shifted and changing times threatened her family, her home, and her community, it was up to Edith to save Biltmore—and secure the future of the region and her husband’s legacy. This is the fascinating, “soaring and gorgeous” (Karen Abbott) story of how the largest house in America flourished, faltered, and ultimately endured to this day.

THE STORY: The home of the Blackwoods near a Vermont village is a lonely, ominous abode, and Constance, the young mistress of the place, can't go out of the house without being insulted and stoned by the villagers. They have also composed a nasty s

In the early 1900s after the male members of the family take the family inheritance, Missy Wright, her mother, and her aunt live in poverty until her cousin arrives from Sydney.