Pearls
Journey to Rhyolite
Kashmiri Shawl
New York City, 1860: Now a successful poet featured in national magazines, Anna Wheeler is astonished to learn that the daughter she bore upon her return was not stillborn, as she was told, but has been kidnapped. When Anna hears the baby described as “dark-skinned,” she realizes that Ashok, the man she’d left behind in the tumult of the rebellion, is the true father, not her blond, fair-skinned husband. In her own racially inflamed nation on the verge of its own war, Anna throws respectability to the wind, learns to take risks, break rules, and trust strangers in a determined search for the little girl. Then a deranged voice arises from her tormented past, making demands that compel her back to India. Anna must confront the evil that set her running in the first place. Will her daring quest for her child, and for the love of her life, end in triumph or in heartbreak?
Turquoise
Santa Fe Cameron, named for the place of her birth, was the child of a Spanish mother and a Scotch father and inherited from both a high degree of psychic perceptivity. Natanay, an American Indian, saw this and gave the little orphan a turquoise amulet as a keepsake; this turquoise, the Indian symbol of the spirit, dominates her life.
For Santa Fe Cameron, life is made up of violent contrasts: the rough wagon of the gay young Irish medicine vendor who brings her East and the scented hansom cabs and carriages waiting before her own Fifth Avenue mansion; the glittering world of the Astors and a dreary cell in the Tombs. All the color, excitement, and rich period detail which distinguish Anya Seton’s novels are here, together with one of her most unusual heroines.
Queen of Swords (Wilderness #5)
To claim the child, Hannah, Luke, and Jennet must journey first to Pensacola. There they learn a great deal about the family that has the baby. The Poiterins are a very rich, very powerful Creole family, totally without scruple. The matriarch of the family has left Pensacola for New Orleans and taken the child she now claims as her great-grandson with her.
New Orleans is a city on the brink of war, a city where prejudice thrives and where Hannah, half Mohawk, must tread softly. Careful plans are made as the Bonners set out to find and reclaim young Nathaniel Bonner. Plans that go terribly awry, isolating them from each other in a dangerous city at the worst of times.
Sure that all is lost, and sick unto death, Hannah finds herself in the care of a family and a friend from her past, Dr. Paul de Guise Savard dit Saint-dâ-Uzet. It is Dr. Savard and his wife who save Hannah’s life, but Dr. Savard’s half brother who offers her real hope. Jean-Benoit Savard, the great-grandson of French settlers, slaves, and Choctaw and Seminole Indians, is the one man who knows the city well enough to engineer the miracle that will reunite the Bonners and send them home to Lake in the Clouds. With Ben Savard’s guidance, allies are drawn from every segment of New Orleans’s population and from Andrew Jackson’s army, now pouring into the city in preparation for what will be the last major battle of the War of 1812.
Drums of Autumn (Outlander)
It began at an ancient Scottish stone circle. There, a doorway, open to a select few, leads into the past—or the grave. Dr. Claire Randall survived the extraordinary passage, not once but twice.
Her first trip swept her into the arms of Jamie Fraser, an eighteenth-century Scot whose love for her became a legend—a tale of tragic passion that ended with her return to the present to bear his child. Her second journey, two decades later, brought them together again in the American colonies. But Claire had left someone behind in the twentieth century—their daughter, Brianna….
Now Brianna has made a disturbing discovery that sends her to the circle of stones and a terrifying leap into the unknown. In search of her mother and the father she has never met, she is risking her own future to try to change history … and to save their lives. But as Brianna plunges into an uncharted wilderness, a heartbreaking encounter may strand her forever in the past … or root her in the place she should be, where her heart and soul belong….
Finding Emilie
Lili du Châtelet yearns to know more about her mother, the brilliant French mathematician Emilie. But the shrouded details of Emilie’s unconventional life — and her sudden death — are elusive. Caught between the confines of a convent upbringing and the intrigues of the Versailles court, Lili blossoms under the care of a Parisian salonnière as she absorbs the excitement of the Enlightenment, even as the scandalous shadow of her mother’s past haunts her and puts her on her own path of self-discovery.
Laurel Corona’s breathtaking new novel, set on the eve of the French Revolution, vividly illuminates the tensions of the times, and the dangerous dance between the need to conform and the desire to chart one’s own destiny and journey of the heart.
Vivaldi’s Virgins
Abandoned as an infant, fourteen-year-old Anna Maria Dal Violin is one of the elite musicians living in the foundling home where the “Red Priest,” Antonio Vivaldi, is maestro and composer. Fiercely determined to find out where she came from, Anna Maria embarks on a journey of self-discovery that carries her into a wondrous and haunting world of music and spectacle, bringing eighteenth-century Venice magically to life.
“Quick gives us a vivid sense of both the pleasures and the frustrations of living within [the] cloistered world…of Venice….An accomplished novel.”-Chicago Tribune
“Anna Maria’s strong spirit shines throughout….Quick creates a hauntingly authentic setting rife with cruel punishments and brief moments of grand rewards.”-Publishers Weekly
“An affecting tale…a diverting and entertaining read.”-Philadelphia Inquirer
“Captivating.”-iRedbook
“Quick has chosen a fascinating backdrop. Her novel shimmers with details about music and Venice in the early 1700s, as well as life within the Piet�…A good read.”-Booklist
Tokaido Road
Disguising her loveliness in the humble garments of a traveling priest, and calling herself Cat, Lady Asano travels the fabled Tokaido Road. Her only tools are her quick wits, her samurai training, and her deadly, six foot-long naginata. And she will need them all, for a ronin has been hired to pursue her, a mysterious man who will play a role in Cat’s drama that neither could have ever imagined. . . .
