Winner of the Friends of American Writers Award for Fiction

As seamstresses, the young sisters Emilia and Luzia dos Santos know how to cut, mend, and conceal--useful skills in the lawless backcountry of Brazil, where ruthless land barons feud with bands of outlaw cangaceiros, trapping innocent residents in the crossfire. Emilia, a naive romantic, dreams of falling in love with a gentleman and escaping to a big city. Quick-tempered Luzia also longs for escape, finding it in her craft and secret prayers to the saints she believes once saved her life. But when Luzia is abducted by cangaceiros led by the infamous Hawk and Emilia stumbles into a marriage with the son of a wealthy and politically powerful doctor, the sisters' quiet lives diverge in ways they never would have imagined.

One woman knows the baking business, one woman can organize. Together they become rich. The raise thier Black and white familes with love and intelligence.
Equality and justice previal, until lowlife scumbuckets step in and turn the two women's lives upside down.
Through love, laughter, church ladies and gentlemen, streaking, cancer, a tearjerker funeral, the seeking of justice, and a white suit, "Imitation of Life: the Next Millennium" is a 21st century version, of a 1930s, uncomfortable America.

From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda (Hackett, 2015) comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members-including, among others, the dragon-slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.

The Patchwork Girls by Elaine Everest is a moving story about the ties of friends and family, set during the turbulence of the Second World War. 1939. After the sudden and tragic loss of her husband, Helen is returning home to her mother's house in Biggin Hill, Kent - the one place she vowed she'd never go back to again. Alone and not knowing where to turn, Helen finds herself joining the local women's sewing circle despite being hopeless with a needle and thread. These resourceful women can not only make do and mend clothes, quilts and woolly hats, but their friendship mends something deeper in Helen too. Lizzie is a natural leader, always ready to lend a helping hand or a listening ear. Effie has uprooted her life from London to keep her two little girls away from the bombing raids, and the sewing circle is a welcome distraction from worries about how to keep a roof over their heads and about her husband too, now serving in active duty overseas. When the reason for Helen's husband's death comes to light, her world is turned upside down yet again. The investigating officer on the case, Richard, will leave no stone unturned, but it's not long before his interest in Helen goes beyond the professional. As she pieces together old fabrics into a beautiful quilt, will Helen patch up the rifts in her own life?

A new stand-alone saga set in Yorkshire at the outbreak of the second world war and the unlikely relationship between a master and servant.As a small child, Nellie Peace was always dreaming but sensed her mother's rejection. Abandoned and sent into service at Beaumont House at an early age, Nellie is lost and alone until she meets the unpredictable and reclusive artist, Lucas Harrington and falls in love with him. This unlikely association between master and servant is encouraged by Lucas's gentle natured Aunt Alice as Lucas sees something unusual in Nellie and is compelled to paint her. Broken promises lead to inevitable heartbreak and Nellie flees Beaumont House in disgrace for London. Alone again, Nellie must learn to live and fend for herself and her new-born child. Can Nellie win a second chance of happiness and can she solve the mystery of her mother's tortured past? Nellie's Heartbreak was previously published as ALL THEIR DAYS in hardback by Linda Sole.

In this extraordinary breakout novel--a rich, devastatingly humorous epic of one unforgettable family--award-winning author Eric Dupont illuminates the magic of stories, the bonds of family, and the twists of fate and fortune to transform our lives. Over the course of the twentieth century, three generations of the Lamontagnes will weather love, passion, jealousy, revenge, and death. Their complicated family dynamic--as dramatic as Puccini's legendary opera, Tosca--will propel their rise, and fall, and take them around the world . . . until they finally confront the secrets of their complicated pasts. Born on Christmas, Louis Lamontagne, the family's patriarch, is a larger-than-life lothario and raconteur who inherits his mother's teal eyes and his father's brutish good looks and whose charms travel beyond Quebec, across the state of New York where he wins at county fairs as a larger-than-life strongman, and even in Europe, where he is deployed for the US Army during World War II. We meet his daughter, Madeleine, who opens a successful chain of diners using the recipes from her grandmother, the original American Fiancee, and vows never to return to her hometown. And we end with her son Gabriel, another ladies' man in the family, who falls in love with a woman he follows to Berlin and discovers unexpected connections there to the Lamontagne family that re-frame the entire course of the events in the book. An unholy marriage of John Irving and Gary Shteyngart with the irresistible whimsy of Elizabeth McCracken, The American Fiancee is a big, bold, wildly ambitious novel that introduces a dynamic new voice to contemporary literature. Translated from the French by Peter McCambridge.

1910. When eighteen-year-old Lorne Malcolm runs off on her wedding day with the landowner?s son, Daniel MacNeil, the jilted groom, turns to Lorne?s older sister, Rosa, for comfort. Rosa?s feelings for Daniel grow and the pair soon marry. But are tragedy and heartbreak just around the corner?

Far from the heart of the powerful Avan Empire, on the cold, Spireward edge of the tributary kingdom of Tyr, lies the serene, comfortable town of Longmyst. There, the humble son of the town's innkeeper enjoys his quiet, uncomplicated life. Nian is content to spend his days visiting with old friends and tending to the needs of an endless stream of guests from wilder, more dangerous places. His largest concern is helping his bold, elder sister care for their ailing father and his small, but thriving business. However, he is about to become entangled in events beyond his wildest dreams.

In the winter of 1951, a storyteller arrives at the home of nine-year-old Ronan O'Mara in the Irish countryside. The last practitioner of an honoredcenturies-old tradition, the Seanchai enthralls his assembled audience forthree evenings running with narratives of foolish kings and fabled saints,of enduring accomplishments and selfless acts- until he is banished from the household for blasphemy and moves on. But these three incomparable nights have changed young Ronan forever, setting him on the course he will follow for years to come- as he pursues the elusive, storyteller..and the magical tales that are no less than the glorious saga of his extraordinary i

A novel based on the lives of the brothers Mann has allowed the author to portray both the powerful story of their personal drama and the tragedy of a horrific era. Two of Germany's literary lions, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, are the central characters of Selig Kainer's novel, Brothers in Exile. Their rivalry is set against the background of Hitler's rise to power, and the novel opens in 1932 as Hitler becomes Chancellor. In real danger from the Nazi, Heinrich has already fled, while Thomas briefly nurtures the hope that his stature as a Noble Prize winner could be a balancing force against Hitler. The novel then takes the reader back to the powerful sturm und drang of Thomas and Heinrich's outwardly comfortable early family life. Their story is rife with love, rivalry, artistic strivings, and forbidden longings. With his deep affinity for the work of these two great writers, Selig Kainer has written an intimate account of them that reveals their rivalry and innermost conflicts, and illuminates the foreboding landscape of the demonic forces unleashed in Germany during their time. "It is a wonderful novel... One need not be a reader of either Mann brother to appreciate Brothers in Exile, for here the curious interplay between life and literature, between imagination and reality, is played out to the full." Jeffery Paine, former Literary Editor of the Wilson Quarterly, a judge of the Pulitzer Prize, author of Father India, Adventures with the Buddha, and Editor of Re-enchantment: Tibetan Buddhism comes to the West. "Thomas and Heinrich Mann grew up in Germany, portrayed Germany, then finally fled Germany, ending their lives in American and Swiss exile. Now, Selig Kainer has explored their early lives, not as an historian or biographer, but as a creative novelist, using the bones of their youth to X-ray their evolution as sons of imperial Germany, as nascent artists, and as siblings. Kainer's intricate fictional journey is a Bildungsroman at once tender, profound, epic and original. Enjoy " Nigel Hamilton, author of JFK: Reckless Youth and The Brothers Mann. "Selig Kainer dives into the complex relationship between Thomas and Heinrich Mann and comes back up with a pearl of a book. He transports us into the imagined landscape of their inner lives, their rivalries, discontents, desires and dreams. The vivid detail he brings to his story is gripping; his obsession with his characters thoroughly contagious." Andrea Weiss, author of In the Shadow of Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story.

Hardworking widow Dilly Carey has struggled out of poverty to make a successful life for herself. Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, Dilly should be content, but she is still troubled by the one secret she must never share. Olivia, the daughter Dilly gave away at birth, cannot find out the real truth about her parentage. It's time for Dilly to make her peace with the choice that she was forced to make. As Dilly finds the strength and courage to visit her son's grave on the battlefields of the Great War, will she also find a way to a new happiness - and a new love?

In post-WWII San Diego, Ben Prescott, an unhappily married lawyer, begins an affair with Aly, a mysterious young woman whose beautiful face hides a dark, dangerous core. When their relationship ends badly, Aly begins a vicious campaign to destroy him and everything he holds dear. Ben doesn't know it, but her actions will have devastating impacts for decades to come. As Ben tries to salvage what's left of his world, Aly aggressively pursues her dreams on her own terms. Her depraved lust for revenge cannot be sated by ruining Ben's life; Aly won't stop until generations of his family-including Zack and Alex, the two sons he had with Aly-pay as well. As she raises Ben's sons, even she has no idea that they may be the catalysts for her downfall as well as for the redemption of two families. Passion, regret, hate, love, and vengeance that crisscross a continent for thirty years finally collide in a serpentine showdown between a woman who would stop at nothing to gain her desires and the men whose lives she has inexorably altered. Those who survive will have to redefine a future that no one could ever have foreseen.

Shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Saga of the Year Award When Evie's dreams come crashing down, she's determined to still make something of herself in these trying times... It is 1939 and working class Evie Bishop has received a scholarship to study mathematics at Oxford when tragedy turns her life upside down. Evie must seek a new future for herself and, inspired to contribute to the war effort, joins the Women's Auxiliary Air Force as an Ops Room plotter. Posted to a fighter station on the Sussex Coast, Evie befriends two other WAAFs - shy, awkward May and flirty, glamorous Jess. Faced with earning the approval of strict officers and finding their way in a male dominated world, the three girls band together to overcome challenges, navigate new romances and keep their pilots safe in the skies. But the German bombers seem to know more than they should about the base's operations, and soon Evie, May and Jess are caught up in a world more dangerous than they ever imagined... This heartwarming, dramatic World War II saga is perfect for fans of Daisy Styles, Kate Thompson and Rosie Clarke. Praise for The Ops Room Girls 'A fabulous tale of courage, comradeship and romance.' Glynis Peters, author of The Secret Orphan 'A lovely book. Vicki Beeby is a saga author to watch.' Margaret Dickinson, Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author 'Full of excitement, energy and romance, this story kept me turning the pages eagerly.' Lesley Eames, author of The Brighton Guest House Girls 'An exceptional historical saga about young women forging new paths in an uncertain world at war... rich with historical detail, and a must read for historical fiction fans.' Andie Newton, author of The Girl I Left Behind 'An utter joy to read, from the first page to the last. I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone with a liking for strong characters, a taste for danger, and a deeply romantic soul.' Terri Nixon, author of Penhaligon's Gift 'Entertaining from beginning to end. I can't recommend it highly enough.' Gemma Jackson, bestselling author of the Ivy Rose series