She is the symbol of success, the beautiful woman who parlayed her inheritance into an international conglomerate. Winner of a unique position among the wealthy and world-renowned. And she's a survivor, indomitable as her father, the man who returned from the edge of death to wrench a fortune in diamonds from the bleak South African earth. Now, celebrating her ninetieth birthday, Kate surveys the family she has manipulated, dominated, and loved: the fair and the grotesque, the mad and the mild, the good and the evil -- her winnings in life. Is she the...

Despite its buoyant tone, this blend of fairy tale, ghost story, romance and mystery proves a disappointment. First novelist Atherton creates a potentially appealing heroine in bewitched and bewildered Lori Shepherd, but never places her in danger, thus sacrificing suspense. Recently divorced and newly bereaved by her beloved mother's death, Lori is scraping by as an office temp in Boston when she receives a letter from a Boston law firm informing her of the death in England of Miss Dimity Westwood. Lori is shocked because she had thought adventurous Dimity was her mother's fictional creation, the star of made-up bedtime stories. Courtly lawyer William Willis and his attentive son Bill inform Lori that Dimity left instructions that she and Bill go to her Cotswolds cottage to prepare a collection of "Aunt Dimity" stories for publication. They find the cottage haunted by the ghost of Dimity, who blocks their efforts to trace the secret of her WW II romance with a gallant flier. That all ends happily comes as a surprise to none but Lori.

Life in exile has taught the passionate Princess Amy to hate injustice, and on the enchanting English isle of Summerwind, she finds injustice personified in the powerful and wickedly handsome Jermyn Edmondson, marquess of Northcliff. Since he has stolen the islanders' livelihood, Amy decides to steal him. She kidnaps the arrogant nobleman, chains him with his own manacles, and holds him for ransom.

It's a simple plan, destined to succeed. Surely Jermyn's uncle will pay his ransom. Alas, his uncle would be delighted if someone killed his nephew and left him to inherit the title and fortune. And holding the furious, guileful, sensual Jermyn chained in her basement provides a challenge to Amy's restraint...and her virtue.

How could such a little revenge and blackmail go so passionately wrong?

"We are eternal."The Buddhists believe that each life, each consciousness, is like a single candle flame, but that there is a continuity between each flame. Imagine lighting one candle with the flame of another, then using that flame to light the next, and that to light the next, and on and on forever. A thousand flames, all passed from one to another across the generations. Each is a different light, each burns in a totally different way. But it is, nevertheless, the same flame. "Now, I'm afraid, it is time for me to extinguish your flame. But don't worry… the pain I give you will mean you will burn brightest at the end.' An environmental campaigner and former left-wing radical is murdered, his body scalped. A second scalped murder victim, a geneticist researching the possibility of inherited memory is found. The media latch on to a new serial killer whom they call The Hamburg Hairdresser. Jan Fabel and his murder team have nothing to go on other than a single red hair left as a signature at each scene, each hair cut from the same head, at least twenty years previously. Connections begin to appear: a long disbanded terrorist group and its infamous leader; a mummified body over 1500 years old; and a killer who believes he has been reincarnated to exact a terrible revenge on those who betrayed him in a previous life. 

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched The Eighth Day, a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful story tracing the fate of his and the victim's wife and children. At once a murder mystery and a philosophical story, The Eighth Day is a "suspenseful and deeply moving" (New York Times) work of classic stature that has been hailed as a great American epic.

Meet Ashley Patterson, the brainy, babelicious "computer whiz" and confused heroine of Tell Me Your Dreams. Although she has a cushy job at Global Computer Graphics, a fast-growing start-up in Silicon Valley, her life falls short of fulfilling. She's lonely, shy, and absolutely convinced she's being stalked. What's worse, the only sympathetic ear around is her father, Dr. Patterson, the heartless heart surgeon, who has the charm of an electric eel and the compassion of a tarantula. Given her options, Ashley looks to the heavens for support and offers up an ultimatum to the Almighty: "I'll make a deal with you, God. If it doesn't rain, it means that everything is all right, that I've been imagining everything." Of course, it starts raining buckets just paragraphs later, setting off a car alarm of an omen about our computer cutie's fate.
Enter Toni Prescott and Alette Peters. They both work with Ashley at Global Computer Graphics, but the similarities end there. Toni is a saucy, British vixen with a penchant for Internet dating and discotheques. La bella Italiana Alette, on the other hand, is a wannabe artist who prefers quiet, dreamy weekends with beefcake painters. Reminiscent of junior high school, Toni and Alette do their best to keep Ashley out of their cool clique, but find it difficult when a string of murders irrevocably binds them together. Based on a true story and laden with realistic details--not to mention a whopper of an ending--Tell Me Your Dreams is vintage Sheldon. However, there is one necessary caveat: avoid moviegoer types who insist on telling you the entire plot before you have a chance to see it. You should be doing this anyway, but take extra care with this book. Once the surprise ending is blown, so is the fun in reading it.

"It is among such communities as these that happiness will find her last refuge on earth..". Against this backdrop Hardy tells a vivid story of life in rural Wessex which centres on the independent and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. She decides to manage the farm she has inherited and finds herself in a powerful position for a woman of the 1840s. But power brings tragic complications when she has to decide between three rival suitors.

Macbeth is Shakespeare's great tragedy of a fall into evil. The Norton Critical Edition text is based on the First Folio (1623), the only authoritative text of the play. It is accompanied by an introduction, detailed explanatory annotations, and textual notes. 

A rich "Sources and Contexts" section provides readers with an understanding of Macbeth's origins through the works of Seneca, Raphael Holinshed, and The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents and the Death of Herod. The cultural controversies surrounding the play—free will, predestination, witchcraft, tyrannicide, and equivocation—are debated by various authors. Adaptations of Macbeth are included for comparative reading, among them Welcome Msomi's recent South African retelling, uMabatha.

Four hundred years of critical interpretation of Macbeth are represented in seventeen judiciously-chosen essays, among them assessments by Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Siddons, A. C. Bradley, Janet Adelman, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Orgel, and Peter Holland.

An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features: Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages.