Mermaid Books

A novella about the coming of age of a little English girl in colonial India. She and her baby brother are the dreamers in a large family, and share both the joys of childhood as well as its terrible tragedies. An utterly absorbing, moving and joyous story by a great storyteller

Clarinda Driessen und zu der Werra, is young and married by convenience to "poor Albert", a man many years her senior, but Clarinda is an intelligent woman, drowning in a loveless marriage and can count Goethe, no less, between her acquaintances from the culturate crowd and parlors in the city of Weimar. When Felipe, a dashing and misterious Spanish adventurer shows up, sweeping Clarinda off her feet and running away together to Mexico, where he has silver mines, Clarinda finds herself in the middle of Hidalgo's revolution, in a tale of love, lost love and bloody war, always overlook by the headless angel, like our heroin, a beautiful girl of angelic beauty, who loses her head for a love that almost costs her her life.

The lives of these two saints with similar names could hardly be more contrasting. St. Teresa, reformer of the Carmelites, 'busy woman and great saint', endured the religious mania of sixteenth-century Spain and lived in a state of near perpetual ecstasy. Thérèse, on the other hand, lived the quiet life of a nun in late-nineteenth-century France, was meek, devout and perhaps rather dim. She became a saint of the common people, largely because of the ordinariness of her life (excepting the odd vision).

As his naval battles with Napoleon conclude, Horatio Hornblower must rescue a man he knows to be a tyrant from the mutiny of his crew.