"A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from the author of the international best sellers Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault-a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate. 1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls-a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. Held is affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom, and compassion, a novel by a writer at the height of her powers"--

From the bestselling author of The Dovekeeperscomes a love story about one of history's most captivating 'invisible' women: Rachel, the mother of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Growing up on the idyllic island of St Thomas in the early 1800s, Rachel dreams of life in faraway Paris. Rachel's mother, a pillar of their tight-knit refugee community of Jews who escaped the European Inquisition, has never forgiven her daughter for refusing to live by the rules. But Rachel's fate is not in her own hands: in order to secure the future of her father's business, she is married off to a widower with three children. When her husband dies suddenly and his handsome nephew Frédéric arrives from France to settle the estate, Rachel seizes control of her life, beginning a defiant, passionate love affair that sparks a scandal affecting her entire family, including her favourite son, Camille Pissarro, who will one day become a founder member of the Impressionists and one of history's greatest artists. Set in a world of lush, exquisite beauty, The Marriage of Oppositesshows Alice Hoffman at the height of her considerable powers. The marriage of Rachel and Frédéric is an unforgettable story of an extraordinary woman and her forbidden love.

After nine years of separation from his native country because of the First World War, Louis finally sets foot in Austria and meets the woman he had been in love with and who had promised to wait for him. This novel is a poignant examination of the angst of nostalgia and the fragility of love.

What if destiny leads you to your soul mate, but the laws of time conspire to keep you apart? If her parents had never divorced, Laura wouldn't have to live in the shadow of Bruce, her mom's unpredictable boyfriend. Her mom wouldn't say things like "Be groovy," and Laura wouldn't panic every weekend on the way to Dad's Manhattan apartment. But when Laura spots a boy on a facing platform, lifting a camera to his face, looking right at her, Laura feels anything but afraid, and she can't forget him. Jonas, meanwhile, thinks nonstop about the pretty hippie girl he glimpsed on the platform -- trying to comprehend how she vanished, but mostly wondering whether he will see her again in a city of millions -- and whether if he searches, he would have any chance of finding her. In a lyrical meditation on love, Nora Raleigh Baskin explores the soul's ability to connect, and heal, outside the bounds of time and reason.

"Simon Burke has always preferred animals to people. When the countdown to adopting his own dog is unexpectedly put on hold, Simon turns to the PetShare app to find the fluffy TLC he's been missing. Meeting a grumpy children's book illustrator who needs a dog walker isn't easy for the man whose persistent anxiety has colored his whole life, but Jack Matheson's menagerie is just what Simon needs. Four dogs, three cats and counting. Jack's pack of rescue pets is the only company he needs. But when a bad fall leaves him with a broken leg, Jack is forced to admit he needs help. That the help comes in the form of the most beautiful man he's ever seen is a complicated, glorious surprise. Being with Jack--talking, walking, making out--is a game changer for Simon. And Simon's company certainly ... eases the pain of recovery for Jack. But making a real relationship work once Jack's cast comes off will mean compromise, understanding and lots of love"--

"As the creator and CEO of the popular Jewish dating app J-Mate, matchmaker Dara Rabinowitz knows the formula for lasting love--at least, for everyone else. When it comes to her own love life, she's been idling indefinitely. Until her beloved bubbe shares Dara's checklist for "The Perfect Jewish Husband" on national television and charming news anchor Chris Steadfast proposes they turn Dara's search into must-see TV. As a non-Jewish single dad, Chris doesn't check any of Dara's boxes. But her hunt for Mr. Perfect is the ratings boost his show desperately needs. If only Chris could ignore his own pesky attraction to Dara--a task much easier said than done when Dara starts questioning if "perfect on paper" can compete with how hard she's falling for Chris"--

By the award-winning and bestselling author of Journey to the River Sea, a novel that sings with characteristic Ibbotson warmth and wit.Eva Ibbotson's charming and warm-hearted tale, A Secret Countess was originally published as A Countess Below Stairs.Anna, a young countess, has lived in the glittering city of St Petersburg all her life in an ice-blue palace overlooking the River Neva. But when revolution tears Russia apart, her now-penniless family is forced to flee to England. Armed with an out-of-date book on housekeeping, Anna determines to become a housemaid and she finds work at the Earl of Westerholme's crumbling but magnificent mansion. The staff and the family are sure there is something not quite right about their new maid - but she soon wins them over with her warmth and dedication.Then the young Earl returns home from the war - and Anna falls hopelessly in love. But they can never be together: Rupert is engaged to the snobbish and awful Muriel - and anyway, Anna is only a servant. Or so everybody thinks . . .

Romantic, dramatic fiction set during World War II by the actor and author of Kiss Me Like a Stranger and My French Whore Something to Remember You By begins during the siege of Bastogne, Belgium on Christmas Day, 1944. In a foxhole where he is caring for five American soldiers, innocent but clever young medic Corporal Tom Cole is injured. Convalescing in wartime London, with its dimly lit blackout-compliant restaurants and mad dashes to the Tube station at the sound of the air raid sirens, Cole falls in love for the first time. But is the mysterious Danish girl he meets at the Shepherdess Café on the up and up? Cole is a cellist back home in the States, and Anna says she's a monitor at the War Office, scanning radio waves for incoming German planes. But is she? When Cole goes to the War Office one day to surprise his new lover, she's nowhere to be found. Gene Wilder's Something to Remember You By takes Cole on a quest for the woman he loves but no longer trusts, and ultimately parachutes him, a newly minted intelligence officer, behind enemy lines into a concentration camp to save her life and discover the truth.

A richly imagined story of unexpected love, independence, and belonging - The Morning Gift is a classic WWII romance from Eva Ibbotson, with an introduction from Sarra Manning. Eighteen-year-old Ruth lives in the sparkling city of Vienna with her family, where she delights in its music, energy and natural beauty. She is wildly in love with the brilliant young pianist Heini Radik and can't wait until they are married. But Ruth's world is turned upside down when the Nazis invade Austria and her family are forced to flee to England, and through a devastating misunderstanding she is left behind. Her only hope to escape Vienna comes from Quin, a young English professor, who unexpectedly offers her a marriage of convenience to bring her back to London.Ruth throws herself into her new life - but a secret marriage is more difficult than she expected, especially as she and Quin find themselves drawn together.'I have binged on Eva Ibbotson . . . her elegantly written, witty and well-observed fables' - Nigella Lawson, The TimesRediscover Eva Ibbotson, award-winning author of Journey to the River Sea, in her sweeping historical romances, including The Morning Gift, A Song For Summer and The Secret Countess.

A rich and witty classic novel of love, community and home from the award-winning and best-loved Eva Ibbotson. Now reissued with a brand-new cover. Susanna Weber's dress shop stands in the picturesque Madensky Square, a quiet little world of its own, nestled in the heart of glittering pre-war Vienna.As the winter of 1910 unfurls into spring, Susanna starts a journal about life in the Square, about the buildings and their colourful inhabitants. There's Frau Schumacher, with six daughters and a baby on the way, Professor Starsky and his menagerie of sickly reptiles, an aging bookseller, a teenaged Anarchist, and little Sigi - an orphaned child prodigy forced to play the piano all day, every day.And then there's her dear friend Alice, the only person who has noticed the heartbreak that hides beneath Susanna's brisk kindness and brilliant talent.A whip-smart observation of the passions and tragedies behind daily life, Eva Ibbotson's Madensky Square is a classic snapshot of Viennese life before WWI.

At the age of 12, Eva Salomon becomes disillusioned about all the "isms" raging through her world. Crushed by her father's rigid Jewish orthodoxy and by the cruelties of a burgeoning Nazi regime, she renounces all belief systems, and even belief itself. Five years later, when she and her father leave Germany for Palestine, she's still a skeptic, yet hopeful about a fresh start in a new country. But her yearning for unfettered freedom soon puts her at odds with collective pressures in the new-old homeland. Eva finds love with a man who is anything but "kosher." Duncan Rees is a British constable in the Palestine Police Force. As a gentile, he's taboo even in the secular circles of a society forging its new nationalist identity. What's more, he represents the British Mandate government, a regime seen to increasingly impede Zionist dreams for a Jewish state in the contested country. And so the relationship hits obstacles right from the start. Set during complex upheaval of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, Eva Salomon's War tells of the struggle to find a faith that doesn't blind, a love that doesn't lie, and solid human truths in the midst of ideological ferment.

Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Havana, Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback. At first, life in big-city Prohibition-era Havana is overwhelming, like nothing Pearl and Frieda have ever experienced--or could have ever imagined in the rural shtetl where they grew up. As the sisters begin to adjust, their plans for going to America together become complicated. Frieda falls for the not-so-dreamy man of her dreams while Pearl's life opens up unexpectedly, offering her a taste of freedom and heady romance, and an opportunity to build a future on her own terms. Though to do so, she must confront her past and the shame she has long carried. A heartbreaking, epic family story, Hotel Cuba explores the profound courage of two women displaced from their home who strive to create a new future in an enticing and dangerous world far different from anything they have ever known.

The characters in these thirteen masterful and engaging stories exist on the edge of danger, where landscapes melt into dreamscapes and every house is haunted. A drug dealer's girlfriend signs up for the first manned mission to Mars. A girl falls in love with a man who wants to turn her into a bird. A teenaged girl and her best friend test their relationship by breaking into suburban houses. A wife finds a gaping hole in the floor of the home she shares with her husband, a hole that only she can see. Full of longing and strange humor, these subtle, complex stories--about the love between a man and his pet crow, an alcoholic and his AA sponsor, a mute migrant and a newspaper reporter--show how love ties us to each other and to the world. The Dark and Other Love Stories announces the emergence of a wonderfully gifted storyteller whose stories enlarge our perceptions about the human capacity to love.

In Ariosto's epic 16th-century poem Orlando Furioso, the beautiful Angelica, chained, naked, to a rock and menaced by a sea monster is rescued by the valiant Ruggiero, riding a 'hippogriff', the offspring of a griffin and a mare - an entirely imaginary winged creature (as readers of Harry Potter know). Volatore, as this hippogriff calls himself, has escaped the poem in which he has been confined for centuries and is determined to find his Angelica, even if it takes him to the 21st century and involves some shape-shifting. He lands in contemporary San Francisco and the first person he sets eyes on is Angelica Greenberg, the Jewish owner of a San Franciscan art gallery, who has just dumped her fiance. Volatore rises to her window and they hit it off big-time. But no sooner have they met and fallen in love than events conspire to separate the two so that Volatore must not only seek Angelica but also find the perfect form in which to consummate his undying love. The first is too masculine, the second not enough so, but will the third be just right, and how will Angelica reconcile the imaginary and the real in the perfect lover?

James and Katherine are at a wedding in London. They spend a while watching and waiting. Speak. Exchange phone numbers. Meet up the following week... From then on not everything goes to plan. It is the 1990s, the end of the money-for-nothing years. James is a man with a varied past - entrepreneur, gambler, film producer, former dot com millionaire - now living alone in Bloomsbury. Katherine is married, but separated, working at an interim job in a city hotel. The relationship is beset with difficulties from the beginning, both external and of their own making. They are distracted- James with the latest in a long line of schemes, drawing him into the world of gambling and horse racing, Katherine by her husband, a photographer and paparazzo, who has suddenly reappeared. Narrated from different perspectives and at different times by both James and Katherine, and by a series of peripheral characters, March is a kaleidoscopic and complex portrait of a relationship, of contemporary England, and of the ebb and flow of money.Instantly recognisable and unbearably real, it is a love story unlike any you will have read.

In the year 1930, three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary to the chronicles of our committee and the conclusions of the British policeman, the people of the moshava knew that only two of the suicides had actually taken their own lives, whereas the third suicide had been murdered." This is the contention of Ruta Tavori, a high school teacher and independent thinker in this small farming community, writing seventy years later about that murder and about two charismatic men she loves and is trying to forgive--her grandfather and her husband--and her son, whom she mourns and misses.

"Something big stands between Amélie and Vincent: life Amélie and Vincent meet as students at the Sorbonne at the end of the 1980s. It's love at first sight for both, but neither dares confess their feelings to the other. Neither of them feels like they are 'good enough', no one makes the first move, or is courageous enough to take hold of the joy before them... They agree to meet again, but the young woman is late. And in those few minutes, it's not just a date she misses out on, but her entire life. The young man and woman get swept up by life as it carries them towards fates they no longer control, jobs they didn't choose, marriages and relationships that become rocky. Life that takes them down paths, through doors, into hallways, for ten, twenty or thirty years... It is the story of two lives in parallel across the decades, the story of Amélie and Vincent's relationships and careers, the story of chance encounters that bring them together again and again. But is it ever the 'right' time for this thwarted love?"--Amazon.com.

It is set in the summer of 1931, when twenty-year-old Nora Krieger returns to her small-town home in Lithuania from university in Berlin ready to present her new, mature self. Instead, her time at home becomes a period of unrequited love, difficult memories and introspection. Hopeful that her long wallks and intellectual banter with Albert Arin will lead to romance. Nora must abandon the notion when she discovers Arin's affair with his daughter's friend. Determined to come to terms with her relationship with her father, who was driven to madness after being tortured in the First World War, Nora must confront her own fear of losing her sanity. Young, educated and Jewish, she must accept the limits imposed on her by a class-conscious, increasingly anti-Semitic society.

Annie Markham's true love, nineteen-year-old Jake Mead, ran away from their relationship when meddling godmother, Susannah, stepped in. Now it's seven years later and Annie's wealthy family is heading toward bankruptcy. Susannah brings in the best consultant in England to rescue their London public relations agency and, as the Fates have decreed, the genius turns out to be Jake, who is out for revenge.

Love, Michigan, is famous for Winterfest, an annual athletic competition, but Tara, Erin, and Noelle are about to find out that there's a lot more to Winterfest than sports.