Young, wild, and subversive artist Francesca deSilva lived hard and died young in a tragic fire that also destroyed most of her art. Growing up in the shadow of her brilliant sister Isabella, Francesca was always second best. Overlooked by her parents, she turned to her grandmother, whose adoration shriveled to rejection when Francesca was caught in bed with chess genius Lisa Sinsong on her eighteenth birthday. Francesca fled home and began her bohemian...

Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimké's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. Over...

"Once again, the author takes a remarkable shard of history and brings it to vivid life. In 1665, a young man from Martha's Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College. Upon this slender factual scaffold, she has created a luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. The narrator of the story is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless...

The story of the last empress of China.--from Cover.

In award-winning writer Francine Rivers's five-book Lineage of Grace series about women in the family tree of Jesus Christ, perhaps the most compelling installment is Unspoken, the love story of David and Bathsheba. This Old Testament saga of adultery, power, and battles fought both on the field of combat and in the human heart touches on the cost of poor choices, the need for forgiveness, and finding ultimate fulfillment -- themes that are relevant...

A memoir by Amelia Earhart, the aviatrix, describing her life and her romance with Fred Noonan, the navigator, after they disappeared on their round-the-world flight in 1937. On the subject of her life she writes, "Noonan once said any fool could have seen I was risking my life without living it." Of the desert island where they crashed, "We call it Heaven, as a kind of joke." A moving tale by a first novelist.

Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E.J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.

"1855: Virginia Reeve is summoned by an eccentric Brit with a compelling offer. Lady Jane Franklin wants her to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of the ships of her husband's lost expedition, and she's willing to pay handsomely. All four search attempts Lady Franklin has sponsored have failed. She has decided only a radical new approach can succeed: let women make the decisions. Lady Franklin will disavow all knowledge of the expedition...

Recounts the life of Frank Lloyd Wright as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin.

On the windswept fossil-strewn beaches of the English coast Mary Anning learns that she has "the eye"--She finds what no one else can see. When Mary uncovers an unusual fossilized skeleton she sets the religious fathers on edge the townspeople to vicious gossip and the scientific world alight. But as a woman Mary is barred from the academic community. Luckily she finds a champion in prickly Elizabeth Philpot a recent exile from London.