Central Kansas Library System

"Although beautiful young widow Phoebe, Lady Clare, has never met West Ravenel, she knows one thing for certain: he's a mean, rotten bully. Back in boarding school, he made her late husband's life a misery, and she'll never forgive him for it. But when Phoebe attends a family wedding, she encounters a dashing and impossibly charming stranger who sends a fire-and-ice jolt of attraction through her. And then he introduces himself ... as none other than...

A classic tale of an orphan growing up in the 1800's of England. Intimately rooted in the author's own biography and written as a first-person narrative, "David Copperfield" charts a young man's progress through a difficult childhood in Victorian England to ultimate success as a novelist, finding true love along the way. Jeremy Tambling's provocative Introduction reveals subtle themes relevant today in Dickens' favorite work.

Desperate for money, Michael Tremayne, Marquess of Falconridge, allows his title to be auctioned off to the highest bidding father, only to find himself tied to the willful Kate Rose, who wants nothing more from her aristocrat husband than unending love.

Adam Deveril, Viscount Lynton, returns home from war to find his family in financial ruin. To help his family, he sacrifices his love for the beautiful Julia and marries plain Jenny Chawleigh, whose father is a wealthy businessman determined to marry his daughter into a title.

Twenty-seven-year old Anne Elliot is Austen's most adult heroine. Eight years before the story proper begins, she is happily betrothed to a naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, but she precipitously breaks off the engagement when persuaded by her friend Lady Russell.

During a day we meet 24 ancient Athenians from all levels of society and get to know what the real Athens was like by spending an hour in their company.

An anthology of interconnected short stories captures the lives and destinies of the Samuelsons, a family struggling with tragedy and divorce, in a series of portraits that chronicle Gretel Samuelson's journey through betrayal, grief, conflicting loyalties, friendship, and loss.

He was Sam Clemens, steamboat pilot, before he was Mark Twain, famous author. His better-known name originated with the lingo of navigation, and much of his writing was informed by his shipboard adventures on one of the world's great rivers. In this book, Twain offered recollections ranging from his salad days as a novice pilot to views from the passenger decks in the twilight of the river culture's heyday. Under the tutelage of the most celebrated...

"In 1815, a painter's daughter on the north Devon coast agrees to marry a stranger to avoid scandal, but her choice is complicated by the return of a former lover and a growing affection for the husband she barely knows"-- 1815. Sophie Dupont assists her father in his studio, keeping her own artwork out of sight. Along the north Devon coast, popular with artists and poets, she meets Wesley Overtree, the first man to tell her she's beautiful. Captain...

Three novellas set in the heart of America.