Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Literary Fiction

Hugh of Singleton, fourth son of a minor knight, has been educated as a clerk, usually a prelude to taking holy orders. However, feeling no certain calling despite a lively faith, he turns to the profession of surgeon, training in Paris and then hanging out his sign in Oxford. A local lord asks him to track the killer of a young woman whose bones have been found in the castle cesspit. She is identified as the impetuous missing daughter of a local blacksmith, and her young man, whom she had provoked very publicly, is in due course arrested and sentenced at the Oxford assizes.

On her 12th birthday, Sierva Maria - the only child of a decaying noble family in an 18th-century South American seaport - is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur.

On winter solstice, the birds disappeared, and the mist arrived. The inhabitants of Nebulah quickly learn not to venture out after dark. But it is hard to stay indoors: Cabin fever sets in, and the mist can be beguiling too. Eventually only six remain. Like the rest of the townspeople, Pete has nowhere else to go. After he rescues a stranded psychic from a terrible fate, he’s given a warning: He will be dead by solstice unless he leaves town - soon.

A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story. Just hours after marrying the beautiful Angela Vicario, everyone agrees, Bayardo San Roman returned his bride in disgrace to her parents. Her distraught family forced her to name her first lover; and her twin brothers announced their intention to murder Santiago Nasar for dishonoring their sister. Yet if everyone knew the murder was going to happen, why did no one intervene to stop it?

It is a stark and inhospitable place, where the landscape itself poses a challenge to survival, yet its strange, silent beauty has long fascinated scientists and adventurers. Now Antarctica faces an uncertain future. The international treaty which protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antarctica’s resources to be plundered, its eerie beauty to be savaged. As politicians wrangle over its fate, major corporations begin probing for its hidden riches.

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled 20 years before. Her mother and father have decided to leave two island summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property and favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different - a final attempt to suppress the truth and a cruel insult to the grievously injured.

In 1927, as Natalia Faber travels from Berlin to Prague with her mother, their train is delayed in Saxon Switzerland. In the brief time the train is idle, Natalia learns the truth about her father - who she believed died during her infancy - and meets a remarkable woman named Dr. Magdalena Schaeffer, whose family will become a significant part of her future. Shaken by these events, Natalia arrives at a spa on the shore of Lake Hevíz in Hungary. Here, she meets Count Miklós Andorján, a journalist and adventurer. The following year, they will marry.

Willy Cherrymill and his stepdaughter, Lacey, are deeply bruised by a past brimming with unanswered questions. It’s been 30 years since May DuBerry, Willy’s young wife and Lacey’s mother, abandoned them both, leaving Willy to raise Lacey alone. Lacey Cherrymill is smart, stubborn, and focused. She’s also single mother to a young daughter recently diagnosed with a devastating illness. The last thing she needs to think about right now is the betrayal that rocked her childhood. Reluctantly, she has returned to her rural beginnings, a former dairy farm in the Maryland countryside.

Hailed as one of the Great American Novels, The Great Gatsby delves into the dark corners of the Jazz Age to tell a tragic tale of obsession, love, and the gritty underbelly of the American dream. Through the eyes of unassuming narrator Nick Carraway, the story follows the enigmatic Jay Gatsby as he chases the object of his hopeless desire, the beautiful Daisy Buchanan.

Isha is a girl who loves animals but struggles in the confines of school. When she is sent away to live with her grandparents on the Indian countryside, she discovers a sacred grove where a young Bengal tiger has taken refuge. Isha knows that the ever-shrinking forests of India mean there are few places left for a tiger to hide. When the local villagers also discover the tiger, Isha finds herself embroiled in a life-or-death cultural controversy.

After the Last War destroyed most of the world, survivors form a new society in four self-sustaining cities in the Mojave Desert. Everything is carefully planned and controlled: the seasons, the weather - and the residents. To prevent mankind from destroying each other again, its citizens undergo a memory wipe every four years in a process called tabula rasa, a blank slate, to remove learned prejudices. With each new cycle, they begin again with new names, jobs, homes, and lives. No memories. No attachments. No wars.

The seventh of Joan Grant's Far Memory novels, So Moses Was Born, is set in Egypt, in the time just before the birth of Moses. The story is a familiar one: Found in the bulrushes, Moses's upbringing in the court of Egypt gave him the influence and power to set the Israelites free. Joan Grant enlarges the picture by depicting the events that led up to the discovery of the baby Moses, convincingly portraying the man she believed was his father, Ramoses II, through the words of his reclusive half-brother Nebunefer.

Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery. In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Asmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker's world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, 'Powers of Darkness'), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was published in Iceland in 1901 but remained undiscovered outside of the country until 1986, when Dracula scholarship was astonished by the discovery of Stoker's preface to the book.

From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best and the worst of human nature. Gabriel García Márquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictatorship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic descriptions, the novel transports the listener to a world that is at once fanciful and real.

In these 12 masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience. 

“What does ‘allegiance’ mean?” the New Teacher asked, hand over her heart. In this classic and chilling tale about an elementary school classroom in post-war occupied America, James Clavell brings to light the vulnerability of children and the power educators have to shape and change young minds. Originally written in the Cold War era, Clavell’s extraordinary and enduringly relevant allegory on the impressionability of the human mind is still read in schools around the globe today, and is a call to every person to keep questioning and keep learning.

After nearly two hundred years of housing retardants, as they were once known, the Beechwood Institute is closing the doors on its dark history, and the complicated task of reassigning residents has begun. Ella Jules, having arrived at Beechwood at the tender age of eight, must now rely on the state to decide her future. Ella’s aging parents have requested that she be returned to her childhood home, much to the distress of Ella’s siblings, but more so to Lynetta, her beloved caretaker who has been by her side for decades.

A groundbreaking masterpiece of early European modernism, originally published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unspools the vivid reflections of the titular young poet and nobleman. From his Paris garret, Brigge records his encounters with the city and its people, muses on his family history, and lays bare an alternately exquisite and grotesque atmosphere of death. With a poet’s attention to language, Rainer Maria Rilke forges a dazzlingly visual coming-of-age narrative, kaleidoscopic in its approach to time and its portraits of Parisian life.

Twelve-year-old Bo Bo lives with his uncle U Ba in Kalaw, a town in Burma. An unusually perceptive child, Bo Bo can read people’s emotions in their eyes. This acute sensitivity only makes his unconventional home life more difficult: His father comes to visit him once a year, and he can hardly remember his mother, who, for unclear reasons, keeps herself away from her son. Everything changes when Bo Bo discovers the story of his parents’ great love, which threatens to break down in the whirlwind of political events, and of his mother’s mysterious sickness.

Sarah never admits that she’s his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a “lot lizard”: a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever.