The rules of marriage . . . according to Miss Annabel Essex

A husband must be:

Rich.

Make that very rich. She's had enough of leaky roofs and thread-worn clothing.

English.

London is the center of the civilized world, and Annabel has a passion for silk and hot water.

Amiable.

Good-looking would be nice, but not necessary. Same for intelligent.

Isn't she lucky? She's found just the man! And her chosen

...

Four orphans who met as teenagers vowed to be a family. In adulthood they reunite at a film party in London and reevaluate their lives and commitments.

Recounts myths of the closing decades of the western frontier viewed through the eyes of Nellie Courtright and her brother Jackson, orphans that make good in the town of Rita Blanca in what would become the Oklahoma Panhandle.

Marianne Neumann takes a job as a placing agent with the Children's Aid Society in hopes of finding her younger sister. In 1858 New York she finds it's not always easy to offer children a better life. Former schoolteacher Andrew Brady suffers from a grief that won't go away-- and keeps hidden a secret from his past. As the two team up to place orphans across Illinois, a shocking tragedy threatens their work-- and changes one of their lives forever....

she's not just one of the guys

Annabelle Jordan and her two sisters were orphans in frilly dresses when they went to live with their sports-lawyer uncle in his world of locker rooms, bookies and gambling.

Now the girls are publicists in their uncle's firm, The Hot Zone. Despite her upbringing, Annabelle is all woman. She's naturally drawn to real men--like her latest client, businessman and former football legend...

One blustery night in 1928, a whale washes up on the shores of the English Channel. By law, all whales belong to the King, but twelve-year-old Cristabel Seagrave has other plans. She and the rest of the household and their guests-her sister, Flossie (known affectionately as "The Veg"); her brother Digby, the long-awaited heir to Chilcombe manor; Maudie Kitkat, maidservant; Taras, a hot-tempered visiting artist-build a theatre within the whale's skeleton....

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • From one of our most heralded writers comes the “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny” (The Washington Post Book World) life-and-death adventures of three misfit teenagers in the American desert.
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Alice, Corvus, and Annabel, each a motherless child, are an unlikely circle of friends. One...

Sixteen-year-old Tina and two friends leave Kenya and slip into the Congo, from where she and her mother fled years before, seeking revenge for her mother's murder but uncovering startling secrets.

After a diphtheria epidemic takes the lives of both her husband and daughter, Lily Nolan continues her work in a traveling medicine show. When the troupe arrives in the small town of Hope, KS, in 1866, Lily encounters Elijah Book, a preacher caring for an orphaned baby, and agrees to look after the child. Although attracted to the kindly Elijah, Lily distrusts him because of the childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her preacher father.
Prairie...

Years after his struggling parents are murdered in a house invasion, a successful teacher struggles to keep a deathbed promise to care for his brilliant but troubled sister, before false accusations trigger a reckoning with the past.