Known for its advances in literature, industrialization, politics, and science, the Victorian era was a prominent time in British history. However, author Lytton Strachey remembers Queen Victoria as a person instead of just focusing on her accomplishments. First starting with a brief history of her predecessors and origins, Victoria was crowned just as she came of age. Having only been eighteen, Queen Victoria was widely unfamiliar to her subjects...

Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed—and what hasn’t. Following (but not too closely) a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis in the south...

Presents an account of the period immediately following Winston Churchill's ascendancy to Prime Minister and how he met the challenges of the Blitzkrieg. "May 1940. Britain is at war. The horrors of blitzkrieg have seen one Western European democracy after another fall in rapid succession to Nazi boot and shell. Invasion seems mere hours away. Just days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill must deal with this horror--as well as a skeptical...

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire. The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of...

West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.

"World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroads...

"If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?" - CANDIDE Candide is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. It is the absurdly melodramatic story of a young man, Candide, living a sheltered life who clings desperately to "the best of all possible worlds," one which is abruptly interrupted by a series of painfully disillusioning events that set him off on a wide-ranging journey....

"The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation. A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: A mother's husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects...

Recently retired, Harold Fry lives in a small English village with a wife who seems irritated by everything he does. Little differentiates one day from the next until a letter arrives in the mail from a woman he hasn't heard from in twenty years. Queenie Hennessy, in hospice, is writing to say goodbye. Harold pens a quick reply, but a chance encounter at the corner mailbox convinces him that he must deliver it in person. So Harold sets off on a six-hundred...