Captain Charles Ryder returns to the country estate of Brideshead. There he indulges in a sentimental journey that takes him back twenty years to his schoolmates at Oxford and to his seduction by the Marchmains.

Mrs. Forrester, the resident aristocrat in the fading railroad town of Sweet Water, Nebraska, is widely admired for her attention to the conventions of her position as the wife of an executive, but privately she chafes at the restrictions that bind her to her much-older husband and their way of life.

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside--but he's not alone. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch's massive fortune. With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park--a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore--Nicholas's childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage. As her relatives...

The Age of Innocence is the haunting story of the struggle between love and duty in Gilded Age New York told through the eyes of Newland Archer and his betrothed, May Welland. A young lawyer on the rise, Newland Archer needs only a society wife to solidify his position, but finds himself torn after he meets and falls deeply in love with May's disgraced cousin, the Countess Olenska. Edith Wharton's twelfth novel, following classics like The House of...

"The story of the Astors is an extraordinary but true tale of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention -- and of cunning, determination, hard work, hubris, infighting, and greed. One of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, John Jacob Astor first arrived in New York in 1783 and built a fortune through a ruthless expansion of his beaver trapping business, which he grew into an empire through real estate that enriched him at the expense of...

Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be. Parties, dinners, charity luncheons, balls, and strict exercise and beauty regimes fill her daily schedule to an exhausting degree. Her secretary can hardly keep up. To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is unwell, and her son is...

When her beloved nanny, Hannah, left without a trace in the summer of 1987, seven-year-old Jocelyn Holt was devastated. Thirty years later, returning to the house, and forced to confront her troubled relationship with her mother, Hannah is present when human remains are uncovered in a lake on the estate. Desperate to piece together the gaping holes in her memory, Jo must uncover who her nanny really was, why she left, and if she can trust her own...

"When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after...

It is London, 1914. World War I looms on the horizon, women are fighting for the right to vote, and explorers are pushing the limits of endurance in the most forbidding corners of the earth. The plot begins as the 19th century was drawing to a close and the chaos of World War I was just beginning. It's a love story as well as a cautionary history lesson.

"One of Nancy Mitford’s most beloved novels, Love in a Cold Climate is a sparkling romantic comedy that vividly evokes the lost glamour of aristocratic life in England between the wars. Polly Hampton has long been groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, the fearsome and ambitious Lady Montdore. But Polly, with her stunning good looks and impeccable connections, is bored by the monotony of her glittering debut season in London. Having just...