Emma Tennant

In a damp, old sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. The world-famous author of The Red Badge of Courage has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of a Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream.Though Crane's days are numbered, he and Cora live riotously, running up bills they'll never be able to pay, receiving visitors like Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and even planning a mad dash to Germany's Black Forest, where Cora hopes a leading TB specialist will provide a miracle cure.Then, in the midst of the confusion and gathering tragedy of their lives, Crane begins dictating a strange novel. The Painted Boy draws from Crane's erstwhile journalist days in New York in the 1890s, a poignant story about a boy prostitute and the married man who ruins his own life to win the boy's love. Crane originally planned the book as a companion piece to Maggie, Girl of the Streets, but abandoned it when literary friends convinced him that such scandalous subject matter would destroy his career. Now, with his last breath, Crane devotes himself to refashioning this powerful novel, into which he pours his fascination with the underworld, his sympathy for the poor, his experiences as a reporter among New York's lowlife—and his complex feelings for his own devoted wife.Seamlessly flowing between the vibrant, seedy atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Manhattan and the quiet Sussex countryside, Hotel de Dream tenderly presents the double love stories of Cora and Crane, and the painted boy and his banker lover. The brilliant novel-within-a-novel combines the youthful simplicity of Crane's own prose with White's elegant sense of form, offering an unforgettable portrait of passion in all its guises.

Takes up the story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy a year after their wedding, when gossip and troublesome relations again cause them discomfort.

Following the success of "Scarlett" and "Rebecca's Tale" this is the brilliant companion novel that captures the era and spirit of Charlotte Bronte's romantic classic, "Jane Eyre."

At a young age Pamela Sims is taken from her humble home in England to the French court, where she is brought up on a life of luxury as the illegitimate daughter of the beautiful Madame de Genlis. Recounted through the voices of the woman who was to become known as La Belle Pamela and her daughter, this novel vividly tells how her past shaped their extraordinary lives, capturing the atmosphere of eighteenth-century France and the complexity of a world where your origins create your identity.

Confessions of a Sugar Mummy provides the hilarious answer to the most pressing questions for women who have reached a certain age: am I past it?

The daughter of the celebrated Parisian actress Céline Varens, Adèle is a homesick, forlorn eight-year-old when she is first brought to Thornfield Hall by Edward Fairfax Rochester, her mother's former lover and -- though the grand estate's brooding lord refuses to acknowledge it -- quite possibly Adèle's father. Lonely and ill at ease in the cold, unfamiliar English countryside, the sad, precocious child longs to return to the glitter of Paris ... and to the arms of the mother who has been lost to her. But a small ray of sunshine brightens her eternal gloom when a stranger arrives to school and care for her: a mousy and serious yet intensely loving young governess named Jane Eyre. As the years pass, Adèle watches with wonder as an unexpected romance blossoms between her governess and her guardian -- even as her curiosity leads her deeper into the shadowy manor, toward the dark and terrible secret that is locked away in a high garret. And on Jane and Rochester's planned wedding day, it is Adèle who is instrumental in bringing about the fiery catastrophe that shatters her "family" and sends her fleeing, frightened and alone, back to France. But Paris is no longer the glamorous ideal she remembers. Intent on finding her mother, Adèle is soon lost in a world of sham sparkle and ruthless exploiters. Yet her will remains strong as she grows and learns, determined to follow her solitary odyssey to its inevitable conclusion, as she -- like Jane Eyre and the tormented Edward Rochester -- searches for salvation and love amid the ruins of misfortune.