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.

Om livet i Delhi i begyndelsen af 1950erne for to unge, hvis familier lægger planer for deres fremtid

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.

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.

London vet Charlotte Walker has taken up a fellowship on the tiny, remote island of Tuga de Oro to study the endangered gold coin tortoises in the jungle interior. She can claim the best of reasons for this year in paradise - what better motivation than to save a species - but the reality is more complex. For Charlotte has a secret that connects her to the island, and has finally determined to solve the mystery that has dominated her life. But she will have little time for any of her declared or covert investigations. Inconveniently attracted to the new island doctor, Dan Zekri, Charlotte immediately finds herself the subject of local speculation and gossip. And not only do Tuga's tortoises need attention but so do the island's dogs and donkeys, not to mention the islanders themselves, determined to win Charlotte over with endless deliveries of cake until she relents and becomes vet to all their animals.

In a hushed, Italian town after the Second World War Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern to her mother, whose status anxiety manifests itself in acute hypochondria. Elsa hopes to live a life different to the one she's always known and when she meets Tommasino, it seems possible. Tommasino belongs to the De Francisci family, who owns the cloth factory where Elsa's father works, and whose lives and stories Elsa has known all her life. In the course of their secret meetings, Elsa and Tommasino begin to imagine another future for themselves, free from the constraints of shared history and expectation. But all of this is threatened when their relationship is revealed. In the course of their secret meetings, Elsa begins to imagine a future with Tommasino, free from the constaints of shared history and expectation. But all of this is threatened when their relationship is revealed.

A beautiful earth woman is kidnapped by Yargo, the incredibly attractive ruler of a distant world and begins a romantic adventure to exotic planets

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.

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.

"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 1833 and the British Navy is engaged in surveying the coastline of the Arabian Peninsula. Young and ambitious, Lieutenant James Wellsted is determined that his Navy career will be a path to glory. His plans go awry when two of his shipmates go missing while gathering intelligence and Wellsted must mount a daring rescue. Slavery is still rife throughout Arabia. Zena, a headstrong Abyssinian beauty, torn from her village, is now being offered for sale in the market of Muscat. However, her fortunes change when she finds herself the property of the Lieutenant. She must accompany him on his hazardous mission, little knowing the fate that awaits them. Each will be forced to make a choice - one that will change their lives forever.

Ten-year-old Floriana is captivated by the magnificent Tuscan villa just outside her small village. She likes to spy into the gardens and imagine that one day she'll live there. When Dante, the son of the villa's powerful owner, invites her inside and shows her the enchanting Mermaid Garden, she knows that her destiny is there, with Dante. But as they grow up, their romance jeopardizes everything they hold most dear. Decades later and hundreds of miles away, a beautiful old country hotel on England's Devon coast has fallen on hard times, and its owner, Marina, advertises for an artist to stay the summer. The man she hires begins to transform the fortunes of the hotel, and her family, but why is he really there?

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.