Things aren't looking so good for Cyril Paxton. Hoping to earn enough money to finally marry his true love, Daisy Strong, Cyril invests his savings in the stock market, and loses it all. Ruined and on the brink of emigrating to flee his creditors, he reads with amusement a newspaper story telling of the brazen robbery of the Duchess of Datchet's diamonds, worth half a million pounds. But who can imagine his surprise when he returns home and finds, thanks to a luggage mix-up on the train, that he is in possession of the jewels! Cyril is at first elated at his change of fortune, but he may not be so lucky as it seems. Inspector John Ireland of Scotland Yard is hot on his trail, suspecting him of being the thief. And worse yet, the real thieves are after him as well. And when Paxton falls into their clutches, he'll face a difficult choice: give up the jewels, or risk brutal torture and certain death! Richard Marsh was a versatile writer of ghost stories, horror novels, and romances, as well as thrilling mysteries like The Datchet Diamonds (1898). First appearing in the wake of the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Datchet Diamonds is one of the earliest modern detective novels. This edition reprints the unabridged text of the rare first edition and reproduces the original cover illustration from an early Victorian edition of the novel.

Product Description When Jack Rodenko shipped out as a sailor during World War II, he never imagined that real adventure would be waiting for him at home in New Orleans. The Crescent City after the war is at the heart of a rapidly changing America, and ex-sailor Jack Rodenko is caught up in a strange and shifting milieu as he tends bar at a seedy club called L’Êtoile. While struggling to build a new life, Rodenko becomes involved with a corrupt, greedy power broker, and falls in love with a striking photographer - relationships that will force him to choose between two decidedly different futures. First published decades after the author's death in 1972, The Unknown Constellations is the first novel by unsung postwar literary hero Henry Swados. Through these pages, we can trace the origins of a unique voice and an unerring conscience. From Library Journal Written in the 1940s, this is Swados's recently rediscovered first novel. (The late Swados was the author of ten books, including The Will, which received a National Book Award nomination in 1963.) The novel concerns Jack Rodenko, a disaffected seaman who puts ashore in New Orleans, hoping to rebuild a life shattered by an accident that occurred while in college. Soon, he is a protege of corrupt, power-hungry Shepard Ball and becomes enmeshed in Ball's schemes involving drugs, weapons, and politics. In the end, Jack must decide between wealth and easy success with Ball or self-respect and the love of Linda Lester, a beautiful photographer. While generally melodramatic, the novel is significant for sounding themes Swados would develop in later works: father-son conflicts, concern for the working class, and the tensions between public and private commitments. For academic and large public libraries.?Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This novel is an exploration of the structure and cycle of family life in the world according to Anna Hard, as daughter, baby, child, adolescent, adult, wife and mother.

This new novel extends Koch's achievements in his previous novels and takes the reader to Koch's native Germany. Set in Weimar and Frankfurt in Germany, in the pivotal years 1927 and 1928, the novel is triggered the International Music Exhibition of 1927 "The Summer of Music. The reader is introduced to three main characters: Hanni Geisel, an amateur musician and hostess of star-studded Saturday 'dejeuners'; her lover Erwin Herzberg, the editor of the culture sections of the Frankfurter Zeitung; and Hanni's husband, Dr. Hermann Geisel, a successful lawyer and art collector. They constitute the Weimar triangle of the title. Koch again uses a multi-format narrative technique so highly praised in the German reviews of Recollections, including stories, excerpts from imagined memoirs, invented diaries, letters and even a synopsis of a never-produced operetta about the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, Putsching with Putzi.

In the eighth novel in The Performers family saga, the lives of Miriam Da Silva and Claudette, granddaughter of the notorious Lilith, are destined to cross. Miriam, beautiful and rich, danced at the first ball of the 1892 Season, whilst Claudette, desperate to find a way of surviving in backstreet London, gambled all her charms and won a place on the stage of the Gaiety Theatre. Their paths crossed in the house of Mrs Lovibond - a house whose veneer of elegance concealed all the sordid vices of the Victorian underworld.

Nazi persecution, oppression behind the Iron Curtain, the struggle of strangers in a strange land. This sombre history haunts the adults in Ann Beaglehole's novel Replacement Girl while their children expand into the bright, wide open landscape of their adopted country.Set in fifties to seventies Wellington, Replacement Girl vividly brings the immigrant experience to life. The story moves back and forwards in time and between New Zealand and Budapest, as Eva grows up in a family struggling with the after-effects of earlier losses and adjustment to a new culture. Eva and her group of four friends, all immigrant children and 'different', have to make their own adjustments and choices to survive and thrive in 1950s Wellington. They just want to leave the parents' past behind and live the carefree life of their schoolmates.With sensitivity and humour, Ann Beaglehole takes the reader inside the immigrant experience so that we see mid-century New Zealand through their eyes. Replacement Girl explores the tensions between generations and cultures. It is a story of love, relationships and cross-cultural marriage.

Italy, the setting an enchanted lake southeast of Rome, and American heiress Maggie - famed for her beauty, wealth and steely will - is thetarget for an assortment of con men, jewel thieves, counterfeiters, adulterers and spongers. A dazzling, pacy thriller.This is one of the 22 novels written by Muriel Spark in her lifetime. All are being published by Polygon in hardback Centenary Editions betweenNovember 2017 and September 2018.

Wealthy Canadian scholar Harvey Gotham lives in splendid isolation in France and is working on a book about Job. He loves his wife, Effie,dearly but she has taken to planting bombs in supermarkets and has joined an anarchist group. Here, Spark returns to the Book of Job, whichhad always fascinated her, and 'the only problem' - the problem of suffering. Why does God allow it? A despairing and exhilarating read, TheOnly Problem is a masterwork.This is one of the 22 novels written by Muriel Spark in her lifetime. All are being published by Polygon in hardback Centenary Editions betweenNovember 2017 and September 2018.

Mark Alexandrovich Landau (1888-1957) was a Russian emigrant and wrote many historical novels.

Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’s last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo’s wife, aside from servicing two of Theo’s twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteen—taken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano students—contribute to Theo’s sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960’s, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira’s guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture.

"A novel to savor and think about, particularly the memorable memorial service with its unexpected speaker". -- Philadelphia Inquirer Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Her husband left her for another man. Her boyfriend may be cheating. Her mother's got a secret. Is everyone having great sex but Rachel? Lately, stand-up comic Rachel Katz's life has begun to resemble a not-so-funny comedy routine -- the kind where nobody laughs and everybody inches toward the door. It began when her husband cheated ... with another man. Now she's raising a ten-year-old son who's fixated on Barbra Streisand and wondering if her dentist boyfriend -- who won't stop flossing long enough to make love to her -- is having an affair. Enter Matt Clapton, a wickedly sexy washing machine repairman who likes Rachel's jokes and makes her feel like a woman for the first time in ages -- maybe in her entire life. With her mother busy planning a wedding Rachel isn't sure she wants, her son dead set on inviting Barbra to the reception, and the groom-to-be in South Africa, working on someone else's oral hygiene, the question is: What's she going to do about it? Especially when fame and fortune beckon in a comedy contest that could put her on the map ... and change her life forever. Spin Cycle tells a wickedly funny, shamelessly erotic story of lovers and liars, exes and children, parents and other strangers. This hip and hilarious new novel by the acclaimed author of Neurotica introduces a heroine who never loses her sense of humor and who discovers, somewhere between the rinse and spin cycles, that love -- and laughter -- can truly conquer all.

In the new novel from the author of Losing Me , one woman is about to discover what happens when you take the grand out of grandma. Recently widowed, Judy Schofield jumps at the chance to look after her two grandchildren for six weeks while their parents are out of the country. After all, she s already raised her own daughter and quite successfully, if she may say so herself. But all it takes is a few days of private school functions, helicopter parents, video games, and never-ending Frozen sing-alongs for Judy to feel she s in over her head. As weeks become months, Judy feels more and more like an outsider among all the young mothers with their parenting theories du jour, especially when she gets on the wrong side of the school s snooty alpha mom. But finding a friend in another grandmother and a man who takes her mind off all the stress almost makes it worthwhile. She just needs to take it one incomprehensible homework assignment and one major meltdown at a time. . . ."

"Now I am going to tell the story of something that happened one night years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed." The Incompletes begins with this simple promise. But to try to get at the complete meaning of the day's events, the narrator must first take us on an international tour-from the docks of Buenos Aires, to Barcelona, until we check in at the gloomy Hotel Salgado with the narrator's transient friend Felix in Moscow. From scraps of information left behind on postcards and hotel stationery, the narrator hopes to reconstruct Felix's stay there. With flights of imagination, he conjures up the hotel's labyrinthine hallways, Masha, the captive hotel manager, and the city's public markets, filled with piles of broken televisions. Each character carries within them a secret that they don't quite understand-a stash of foreign money hidden in the pages of a book, a wasteland at the edge of the city, a mysterious shaft of light in the sky. The Incompletes is a novel disturbed by this half-knowledge, haunted by the fact that any complete version of events is always just outside our reach"--

"We cannot help wincing, cannot help feeling that the author has committed an error of taste, cannot help hoping with all the vigour at our command that his example will not be followed. [...] We are compelled by conviction to express in clear terms the disfavour with which we regard audacious enterprises such as the one undertaken by the author of this novel." -- The Literary World, May 25, 1900 "Richard Marsh, author of A Second Coming , is the author also of 'The Beetle' and 'The Crime and the Criminal.' This, therefore, is his third coming. If one wishes to read one of his books, let it be 'The Crime' or 'The Beetle.' It may be better than 'A Second Coming.' It cannot easily be worse." -- The Critic, July, 1900 A Second Coming (1900) was the first attempt at serious literature by popular novelist Richard Marsh, and when it was published by the influential London publisher Grant Richards, whose publishing house helped launched the careers of George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and James Joyce, it appeared Marsh was on his way toward success as a respected literary writer. But the reviews were uniformly negative, decrying the book as blasphemous, and Marsh's bold and fascinating work was declared a failure and quickly consigned to oblivion. In A Second Coming , Marsh imagines what would happen if the long-awaited second coming of Christ took place in present-day London. How would he be received in a modern, industrialized world that had begun to question the relevance of his teachings and had tacitly given up hope of his return? Surprising and thought-provoking, Marsh's novel and the questions it raises are perhaps as relevant as ever. This edition features the unabridged text of the novel, a reproduction of its original cover, and a new introduction by Paul Fox.

Maxwell Bodenheim's 1934 novel Slow Vision depicts a young couple, a pair of average Americans swept up in labor struggles and reduced to painful subsistence, portraying the protagonists' gradual understanding of labor unions and the psychological, philosophical, and political trials that led to sympathetic affiliations in Socialism and Communism. Thus initiates their "slow vision," a simmering understanding of the manifestations of Leftist movements and of special relevance to the climate of the first two decades of the 21st century. Bodenheim's books-thirteen novels and nine volumes of verse-are mostly out of print. Some were resurrected in the late-1940s through the mid-1950s as cheap pulp paperbacks after Bodenheim had lost the rights to his own work. Slow Vision was not one of them. Presumably, nobody wanted to be reminded of the Great Depression. Slow Vision would be Bodenheim's last published novel and literary history has forgotten it.

Maxine Kumin's novel is onve of the first serious fictions to deal with the new possibiliti4es of man=woman relationships. It is about the genuine liberation of two people struggling honestly toward a mutually rewarding love. It is a refreshing and humanizing book, written with the grace and skill of one of America's best poets.

"The novel opens in 1945. Five Britons, shipwrecked on an island in the Far East in the early years of World War 2, listen to the general election results on their radio and learn that a Socialist government has been elected. They are rescued and return home by ship. While waiting to disembark at Southampton, James prays to God to "fix the election" and let him see "the England of all decent Conservatives' dreams." He hears a clap of thunder over his right shoulder and once on dry land, finds himself in a society designed entirely to suit people of his class. An entertaining satirical novel"--Review.