"When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she's not only North Carolina's richest woman, she's also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family's estate high in the Blue Ridge mountains. In the aftermath of her death, that estate--along with a nine-figure fortune and the complicated legacy of being a McTavish--pass...

"Anna Green thought she was marrying Liam "West" Weston for access to subsidized family housing while at UCLA. She also thought she'd signed divorce papers when the graduation caps were tossed, and they both went on their merry ways. Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the...

For decades, William Dorrit has been confined to Marshalsea, a debtor&;s prison, which he cannot leave until he pays what he owes&;meanwhile preventing him from getting a job in order to do so. His daughter Amy, born in Marshalsea, is now old enough to provide some help by earning money as a seamstress, and is free to come and go from the prison as she pleases. It is during one of her journeys to the outside world that she meets Arthur Clennam. Amy...

In 1921 F. Scott Fitzgerald was twenty-five and heralded as the most promising writer of his generation, owing to the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise. Recently married to the girl of his dreams, the former Zelda Sayre, Fitzgerald built upon his sudden prosperity with The Beautiful and the Damned, a cautionary tale of reckless ambition and squandered talent set amid the glitter of Jazz Age New York. The novel chronicles the relationship...

A romantic New England girl inherits an English fortune and marries an American living in Italy. Her subsequent disillusionment is described through her tragic marriage.

When Mr. Dashwood dies, he leaves his second wife and her three daughters at the mercy of his son and heir, John. John's wife convinces him to turn his step-mother and half-sisters out, and they move to a country cottage, rented to them by a distant relative. In their newly reduced circumstances Elinor and Marianne, the two eldest daughters, wrestle with ideas of romance and reality and their apparent opposition to each other. Elinor struggles in...

This classic tragicomic tale from George Barr McCutcheon transforms everyone's favorite caviar-and-champagne dream into a soul-shaking test of mistrust and reckless spending Popular, good-looking, and enterprising, Montgomery Brewster is the toast of New York. While celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday among friends, Monty receives word that his grandfather has died. Before long, New York is abuzz with the news. When Monty inherits $1 million from...

First published serially between 1859 and 1860, “The Woman in White” is Wilkie Collins’s epistolary novel that tells the tale of Walter Hartright, who encounters a woman all dressed in white on a moonlit road in Hampstead. Hartright helps the woman to find her way back to London. The woman warns him against an unnamed baronet and after they part he discovers that she may have escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright travels to Cumberland where...

"Benny Catspaw's perpetually sunny disposition is tested when he loses his job, his reputation, his fiancée, and his favorite chair. He's not paranoid. Someone is out to get him. He just doesn't know who or why. Then Benny receives an inheritance from an uncle he's never heard of: a giant crate and a video message. All will be well in time. How strange - though it's a blessing, his uncle promises. Stranger yet is what's inside the crate. He's a seven-foot-tall...

"As the older sibling to identical twins Violet and Lily, Cami Porter was always the odd sister out. The divide grew even wider when their parents split up--while the twins stayed in Cape Sanctuary with their free-spirited mother, Rosemary, fourteen-year-old Cami moved to LA with her attorney father. Nearly twenty years later, when Cami gets the terrible news that Lily has drowned saving a child's life, her mother begs her to return home to help untangle...