1917... It was inexplicable, impossible, but it had to be true--didn't it? When two young cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright from Cottingley, England, claim to have photographed fairies at the bottom of the garden, their parents are astonished. But when one of the great novelists of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, becomes convinced of the photographs' authenticity, the girls become a national sensation, their discovery offering hope to...

Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig) is a novella written by the German author Thomas Mann published in 1912. The work presents a great writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth. Tadzio, the boy in the story, is the nickname for the Polish name Tadeusz and is based on a boy Mann had seen during his visit to Venice in 1911. As the story opens, he is strolling...

"A finely atmospheric debut…Christie's novel is a worthy tribute to the technological revolution it reimagines, as well as a haunting elegy to the culture of print…One thinks of Donna Tartt's obsessive accounts of furniture decoration in The Goldfinch or even Philip Roth's lovingly twisted empathy with glovemaker Swede Levov in American Pastoral. Such novels of craft and specialization take a writerly delight in the most intricate details of a...

"A big, juicy biopic novel by the author of Mademoiselle Chanel about the scandalous life of Jennie Jerome Churchill, mother of Winston, an heiress from New York who married into one of England's most storied families but who always lived life on her own terms, as a royal mistress with a series of younger husbands and a son whose political rise she happily stage-managed"--

From the critically acclaimed author of The Baker’s Secret and The Curiosity comes a novel of conscience, love, and redemption—a fascinating fictionalized account of the life of Charlie Fisk, a gifted mathematician who was drafted into Manhattan Project and ordered against his morals to build the detonator for the atomic bomb. With his musician wife, he spends his postwar life seeking redemption—and they find it together. Graduating from Harvard...

Using the most current scientific and historical research, coupled with the latest computer graphic technology, this program pieces together the life of Jesus by following in the footsteps of the man in his early years, through his mission and final days. It is a detective story, searching for clues, reading between the lines and uncovering the evidence that is still available after nearly 2,000 years.

For an ambitious, keenly intelligent woman, lying proves to be the easiest way to get through life, in this Victorian-era classic. Lizzie Greystock is a woman of rare cunning and determination-both of which she uses to better her lot in life. This is especially true when she manages to convince the ailing Sir Florian Eustace to marry her shortly before his demise, leaving Lizzie both a wealthy widow and the mother to Florian's young son. A born...

An adventurous Irishman sets out to find his fortune among proper English society in this classic novel from Anthony Trollope. Sent to London to become a lawyer, young Phineas Finn proves himself to be a disappointing student but truly gifted in the ways of charm, culture, and fine appearance. It is the discovery of these talents that ultimately leads him to what he believes is his true calling: English Parliament. Through sheer luck and pluck, dashing,...

The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Inspired by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin, Maugham set out to capture, the disconnect between an artist's desire, to create and their obligations to their loved ones and society. Praised for its multifaceted portrayal of tortured genius and wasted talent, The Moon and Sixpence explores the distance between expectation and desire in a man whose decisions, however, hastily made,...

In a novel based on a real-life case, 1920s New York society is set ablaze when Alice Jones, a working-class woman with at least one black parent, marries Leonard "Kip" Rhinelander, the son of a wealthy, prominent family, who makes international headlines after he sues for annulment, accusing her of hiding her "Negro blood."