The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton

The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton
Author: Elizabeth Speller
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2012
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547547528

Struggling with trauma in the years following World War I, veteran Lawrence Bartram arrives in the village of Easton Deadall and is embroiled in a dangerous case involving a murdered woman who may be linked to the disappearance of a child years earlier.

The Return Of Captain John Emmett

The Return Of Captain John Emmett
Author: Elizabeth Speller
Publisher: Virago
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2011-04-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 074812697X

1920. The Great War has been over for two years, and it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914. Following the death of his wife and baby and his experiences on the Western Front, Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse. Yet death and the aftermath of the conflict continue to cast a pall over peacetime England, and when a young woman he once knew persuades him to look into events that apparently led her brother, John Emmett, to kill himself, Laurence is forced to revisit the darkest parts of the war. As Laurence unravels the connections between Captain Emmett's suicide, a group of war poets, a bitter regimental feud and a hidden love affair, more disquieting deaths are exposed. Even at the moment Laurence begins to live again, it dawns on him that nothing is as it seems, and that even those closest to him have their secrets . . .

The First of July

The First of July
Author: Elizabeth Speller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1639360972

On July 1st, 1913, four very different men are leading four very different lives. Exactly three years later, it is just after seven in the morning, and there are a few seconds of peace as the guns on the Somme fall silent and larks soar across the battlefield, singing as they fly over the trenches. What follows is a day of catastrophe in which Allied casualties number almost one hundred thousand. A horror that would have been unimaginable in pre-war Europe and England becomes a day of reckoning, where their lives will change forever, for Frank, Benedict, Jean-Batiste, and Harry. Elizabeth Speller once again sublimely captures the dangerously romantic atmosphere of war-torn Europe in her latest novel that will leave critics and readers astounded.

Passing Strange

Passing Strange
Author: Joseph Citro
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 343
Release: 1997-10-31
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0547527314

New England's dark hills, fogbound coasts, and hidden villages have inspired generations of writers such as Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and King. But these authors' dark imaginings pale when compared to little-known but well-documented and true tales. In this delightfully spine-tingling tour of all six New England states, Citro chronicles the haunted history and folklore of a region steeped in hardship and horror, humor and pathos.

Hav3n

Hav3n
Author: Tom Easton
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1849399328

It starts with a cough, a few aches and pains and a weird spot on the back of your neck. It is HAV3N, the worst disease the world has ever seen. With friends and loved ones dying in their thousands, the villagers of picture-postcard village Great Sheen are convinced this is more than just media hype. Their entire existence is under serious threat. So they barricade themselves in - and the infected out. Seventeen-year Josh, his sister Martha and their two friends survive the onslaught of HAV3N, along with only seventy-eight other villagers. But they now face a very different future. One in which they could be the only living teenagers in the world . . .

At Break of Day

At Break of Day
Author: Elizabeth Speller
Publisher: Virago
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0748129863

In the summer of 1913, the world seems full of possibility for four very different young men. Young Jean-Baptiste dreams of the day he'll leave his Picardy home and row down-river to the sea. Earnest and hard-working Frank has come to London to take up an apprenticeship in Regent Street. His ambitions are self-improvement, a wife and, above all, a bicycle. Organ scholar Benedict is anxious yet enthralled by the sensations of his synaesthesia. He is uncertain both about God and the nature of his friendship with the brilliant and mercurial Theo. Harry has turned his back on his wealthy English family, has a thriving business in New York and a beautiful American wife. But his nationality is still British. Three years later, on the first of July 1916, their lives have been taken in entirely unexpected directions. Now in uniform they are waiting for dawn on the battlefield of the Somme. The generals tell them that victory will soon be theirs but the men are accompanied by regrets, fears and secrets as they move towards the line.

Praying for Rain

Praying for Rain
Author: BB Easton
Publisher: BB Easton
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-04-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1732700729

From the author of 44 Chapters About 4 Men (inspiration for the Netflix Original series, Sex/Life) comes an immersive dystopian romance unlike anything you’ve ever read. "Consider us hooked. Addicted. Dying for more! A genius, unique premise with complex, intriguing characters, this story took us on the ride of our lives, and we CAN'T WAIT FOR MORE!!" - Max Monroe, New York Times Bestselling Author “None of this matters, and we’re all going to die.” With only three days left until the predicted apocalypse, the small town of Franklin Springs, Georgia, has become a wasteland of abandoned cars, abandoned homes, abandoned businesses, and abandoned people. People like Rainbow Williams. Rain isn’t afraid of dying. In fact, she’s looking forward to it. If she can just outrun her pain until April 23, she’ll never have to feel it at all. "Supplies. Shelter. Self-defense." Wes Parker has survived every horrible thing this life has thrown at him with nothing more than his resourcefulness and disarming good looks. Why should the end of the world be any different? All he needs are some basic supplies, shelter, and a sucker willing to help him out, which is exactly what he finds when he returns to his hometown of Franklin Springs. As society crumbles, dangers mount, and secrets refuse to stay buried, two lost souls are thrust together in a twist of fate—one who will do anything to survive and one who can’t wait to die. Perhaps, together, they can learn how to live. Before their time runs out.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad
Author: Jennifer Egan
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2010-06-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307593622

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” (The Chicago Tribune). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Long Song

The Long Song
Author: Andrea Levy
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2010-04-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 142992988X

The “brilliant” story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is coming into action (Reader’s Digest). Told in the irresistibly willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas, The Long Song is at once defiant, funny, and shocking. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her “Marguerite.” Together they live through the bloody Baptist War and the violent and chaotic end of slavery. An extraordinarily powerful story, “The Long Song leaves its reader with a newly burnished appreciation for life, love, and the pursuit of both” (The Boston Globe). Finalist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize The New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Following Hadrian

Following Hadrian
Author: Elizabeth Speller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2004-10-14
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780195176131

One of the greatest - and most enigmatic - Roman emperors, Hadrian stabilized the imperial borders, established peace throughout the empire, patronized the arts, and built an architectural legacy that lasts to this day: the great villa at Tivoli, the domed wonder of the Pantheon, and the eponymous wall that stretches across Britain. Yet the story of his reign is also a tale of intrigue, domestic discord, and murder. In Following Hadrian, Elizabeth Speller illuminates the fascinating life of Hadrian, rule of the most powerful empire on earth at the peak of its glory. Speller displays a superb gift for narrative as she traces the intrigue of Hadrian's rise, making brilliant use of her sources and vividly depicting Hadrian's bouts of melancholy, his intellectual passions, his love for a beautiful boy (whose death sent him into a spiral), and the paradox of his general policies of peace and religious tolerance even as he conducted a bitter, three-year war with Judea. Most important, the author captures the emperor as both a builder and an inveterate traveler, guiding readers on a grand tour of the Roman Empire at the moment of its greatest extent and accomplishment.