"The definitive inside story of the New England Patriots dynasty"--

New York Times Bestseller: An epic of love and adultery, money and power, set amid the revolutionary turbulence of twentieth-century China, from the author of Manchu and Mandarin. Founder of the Sekloong dynasty of Hong Kong, Sir Jonathan, the illegitimate offspring of an Irish adventurer and his Chinese mistress, overcame colonial prejudice to build a vast and influential trading empire spanning half a century. The marriage of Sir Jonathan’s profligate son Charles to the ambitious and beautiful Mary Osgood comes to embody, on both personal and political levels, the tensions between Orient and Occident, and between Nationalists and Communists fighting for control of postimperial China. Dynasty follows the Sekloongs’ triumphs, tragedies, betrayals, and bloodshed through the decades as they expand and protect their own empire, even as their homeland is torn apart from within by war and ideological upheaval, from the fall of the last emperor to the triumph of Mao Tse-tung. As China turbulently enters the modern world, the Sekloongs also grow in stature and strength—as do their desires and wayward passions. Fluent in Mandarin, author Robert Elegant spent many years in Hong Kong as a journalist and commentator, and has authored many acclaimed books on China. His stirring drama combines vivid writing with a deep understanding of Chinese culture, creating “an action-packed novel . . . conjured up with perception and vigor” (TheNew York Times Book Review).

An epic story of love and betrayal set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen Square protests In Heiress Apparently, Gemma Huang’s big acting break led her to Beijing, where she uncovered an incredible family secret. This second novel in the Daughters of the Dynasty series delves further into Gemma’s complex and storied legacy, moving back one generation to tell the story of Gemma’s mother, Lei, as she finds love against the backdrop of 1980s China and the Tiananmen Square protests and makes a difficult decision that forever alters the course of her life.

“The narrative offers informed, exacting characterizations of the uncertain political alliances, strained interactions and ideological growing pains that elites of the post-revolutionary decades put the country through.”—Andrew Burstein, The Washington Post A vivid account of leadership focusing on the first four Virginia presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—from the bestselling historian and author of James Madison. From a small expanse of land on the North American continent came four of the nation's first five presidents—a geographic dynasty whose members led a revolution, created a nation, and ultimately changed the world. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were born, grew to manhood, and made their homes within a sixty-mile circle east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Friends and rivals, they led in securing independence, hammering out the United States Constitution, and building a working republic. Acting together, they doubled the territory of the United States. From their disputes came American political parties and the weaponizing of newspapers, the media of the day. In this elegantly conceived and insightful new book from bestselling author Lynne Cheney, the four Virginians are not marble icons but vital figures deeply intent on building a nation where citizens could be free. Focusing on the intersecting roles these men played as warriors, intellectuals, and statesmen, Cheney takes us back to an exhilarating time when the Enlightenment opened new vistas for humankind. But even as the Virginians advanced liberty, equality, and human possibility, they held people in slavery and were slaveholders when they died. Lives built on slavery were incompatible with a free and just society; their actions contradicted the very ideals they espoused. They managed nonetheless to pass down those ideals, and they became powerful weapons for ending slavery. They inspired Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass and today undergird the freest nation on earth. Taking full measure of strengths and failures in the personal as well as the political lives of the men at the center of this book, Cheney offers a concise and original exploration of how the United States came to be.

"Brilliant, a definite page turner. They combine real historical events with fascinating fictional characters. The twenty-three volumes of the Morland Dynasty series has been completely repackaged in the most elegant style, using contemporaneous artwork for each period. This wonderful series opens with the back drop of the Wars of the Roses with the marriage between Eleanor Morland and a scion of the influential house of Beaufort. It is a union which establishes the powerful Morland dynasty and in the succeeding volumes of this rich tapestry of English life, we follow their fortunes through war and peace, political upheaval and social revolution, times of pestilence and periods of plenty, and through the vicissitudes which afflict every family - love and passion, envy and betrayal, birth and death, great fortune and miserable penury... The Morland Dynasty is entertainment of the most addictive kind.

The Dynasty Years documents and analyses in detail 'the Dynasty phenomenon', the hotly debated success of the Hollywood-made 'Rolls Royce of a primetime soap' which heralded a profound transformation of European television. From the operatic camp of Krystle and Alexis' fight in the lilypond or the Moldavian wedding massacre to the unprecedented gay sub-plot, Dynasty represented, in the words of co-producer Esther Shapiro, "the ultimate dollhouse fantasy for middle-aged women". Using evidence from audience survey results, newspaper and magazine clippings and letters to broadcasters and drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism and critical social theories, Jostein Gripsrud examines every aspect of Dynasty's production, reception and context. The result is a groundbreaking critical study. Jostein Gripsrud offers a theoretical but empirically grounded critique of many central positions in media studies, including notions of 'audience resistance' and the 'sovereign' audience and its freedom in meaning-making, arguing against what he perceives as the uncritical celebrations of the soap-opera genre in much contemporary media criticism.