Scribner signature edition
Description
Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, 'Je vous demande pardon, ' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.I was looking at myself."Two men--one English, the other French--meet by chance in a provincial railway station and are astounded that they are so much alike that they could easily pass for each other. Over the course of a long evening, they talk and drink. It is not until he awakes the next day that John, the Englishman, realizes that he may have spoken too much. His French companion is gone, having stolen his identity. For his part, John has no choice but to take the Frenchman's place--as master of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a large and embittered family, and keeper of too many secrets.Loaded with suspense and crackling wit, "The Scapegoat" tells the double story of the attempts by John, the imposter, to escape detection by the family, servants, and several mistresses of his alter ego, and of his constant and frustrating efforts to unravel the mystery of the enigmatic past that dominates the existence of all who live in the chateau.
How the series evolves
Books in this Series
The scapegoat
Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, 'Je vous demande pardon, ' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.I was looking at myself."Two men--one English, the other French--meet by chance in a provincial railway station and are astounded that they are so much alike that they could easily pass for each other. Over the course of a long evening, they talk and drink. It is not until he awakes the next day that John, the Englishman, realizes that he may have spoken too much. His French companion is gone, having stolen his identity. For his part, John has no choice but to take the Frenchman's place--as master of a chateau, director of a failing business, head of a large and embittered family, and keeper of too many secrets.Loaded with suspense and crackling wit, "The Scapegoat" tells the double story of the attempts by John, the imposter, to escape detection by the family, servants, and several mistresses of his alter ego, and of his constant and frustrating efforts to unravel the mystery of the enigmatic past that dominates the existence of all who live in the chateau.
All the brave promises
Mary Lee Settle volunteered for service in the women's auxiliary arm of the Royal Air Force in 1942. She was a lone young American in a barracks full of British women. All the Brave Promises is her recollection and evocation of those war years. From her ignominious treatment at the hands of rowdy barracks mates to her friendship with young RAF pilots and her tracking of Allied planes through night fog and blackout, Settle successfully re-creates the heightened sense of danger that pervaded wartime Britain, the immobilizing fear she dealt with on a daily basis, the heady enthusiasm that sometimes broke the tense atmosphere, and the unbridgeable gulf that divided officers from the enlisted ranks. With a mixture of passionate honesty and earthy humor, this masterful, award-winning writer crafts a memoir that is as much a tribute to the generation that fought World War II as a moving account of one woman's extraordinary wartime experience.
The clam shell
Searching for an escape from mediocrity, the young heroine of The Clam Shell leaves her hometown of Canona, West Virginia, and enters a Southern women's college. She is not destined for the safe path, however; her brutal awakening comes in the form of a violent sexual assault through which she ultimately discovers her own hidden strength. Set in 1936, The Clam Shell continues the mesmerizing story Settle began in The Love Eaters.
KNOW NOTHING (Beulah Quintet)
2nd of 4 Novels (1837-1861) Pre-Civil War. Young love in a plantation family in the years before the Civil War. Second in a projected series of four novels based on the history of West Virginia. Before the Civil War, Peregrine Catlett considers freeing his slaves but believes he can only retain his plantation by slave labour. His son, Johnny, returns to his father's farm but stays only until the outbreak of hostilities. He ends up fighting family and friends with disastrous consequences.
O Beulah Land
O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet - Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom - is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and builds the beginning of a flourishing estate named Beulah. The novel closes shortly before the commencement of the Revolutionary War, with Lacey elected to the House of Burgesses and his family line firmly established in what is to become the state of West Virginia.
Voices against tyranny
Includes, concerning the Spanish Civil War, statements personal accounts, fiction, essays, and poetry by W.H. Auden, John Dos Passos, Louis MacNeice, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, William Carlos Williams, Federico Garcia Lorca, Thomas Mann, Antoine De Saint-Exupery, George Orwell, Kenneth Rexroth, Arthur Koestler, Wyndham Lewis, John Steinbeck, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Samuel Beckett, Luis Bunuel, I.F. Stone, Pablo Neruda, Dorothy Parker, Theodore Dreiser, and Salvador Dali.