Joanna Trollope Libri

Tuo nonno si è riproposto di lasciare la nonna con cui è sposato da quarant'anni per sposare una donna con cui ha una relazione da sette anni". Così Simon Stockdale spiega la situazione a suo figlio Jack. Ma che cosa significa una cosa del genere per un ragazzo alle prese con il suo primo amore? E cosa per la moglie di Simon che pensa che la suocera sia comunque la persona più manipolatrice che lei conosca? Sarà Simon a dover pagare il prezzo dei ricatti morali di sua madre? Ma chi è questa amante, una giovane avvocatessa che si è innamorata di un giudice che ha il doppio della sua età? Giusto la "Bella del giudice" come la chiamano in tribunale e una "persona vera" come la definirà il fratello gay di Simon, Alan

1988--As the rumblings of dissent and racial resentment began to erupt into a savage war between Boer and Briton, so three young men found their lives drawn together. Matthew Paget, son of an archdeacon, was turbulent, rebellious, and longing for excitement. Throwing away all the privileges that could have been his, he enlisted as a trooper--only to find himself loving the beautiful war-torn country of Africa and finally falling in love with a girl on the enemy side. Will Marriott, his cousin, was an officer who believed in England's greatness and the glory of battle. But as his comrades were maimed and killed, as he himself was wounded, and then betrayed by a one-time friend, so his values began to change. The one thing that never changed was his love for Frances, Matthew Paget's sister. Hendon Bashford was an upstart social climber, a swindler and a cheat. Half English, half Boer, he owed allegiance to no one while creating havoc in the lives of more honourable men. As the passage of war unfolded, so the lives of these three young men, and women they loved, moved towards a tumultuous climax.

On the fifteenth of February, 1879, the day on which Queen Supayalat of Mandalay ordered eighty members of of royal family to be clubbed to death, Maria Beresford celebrated her twenty-first birthday. On that day Maria knew nothing of Mandalay, the fairy-tale City of Gems. The selfish, difficult but heart-stoppingly beautiful daughter of a failed tea-planter in India devoted herself to pleasure. But when her father was sent to Burma, and she had to accompany him, she became embroiled in an exotic world of political intrigue. Her friendship with the Queen - a dangerous and unpredictable figure - and her growing closeness to Archie Tennant, a young man who has come east to seek his fortune after the ruin of his family business, brought her both danger and the key to her destiny.

Vanity Fair, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.

The Taverners had lived at Buscombe, the mellow stone manor house in Wiltshire, for generations. They had farmed the land and sent their sons to war (and even, latterly, to commerce) in a way of life that seemed timeless. But in 1870 a new generation is about to take control - Tom Taverner, dedicated, impulsive, deeply caring about his inheritance, and his sister Catherine, intelligent, humorous, but frustrated by the limited opportunities open to women in a man's world. Tom marries, and agricultural depression hits the estate. And suddenly it seems that everything which was so secure can no longer hold. Stretching in time from the 1870s to the outbreak of the second world war, and in distance from Crete to East Africa, this warmly satisfying novel is a triumph of storytelling.

A sweeping historical from the national bestselling author of Marrying the Mistress and Other People's Children. A young woman living in a crumbling villa on the Mediterranean island of Malta endures the deprivation and devastation of wartime bombing -- and learns that while life doesn't always go as planned, neither does love....