A hundred years ago sevants underpinned middle- and upper-class life in Ireland, and domestic service was the major source of employment for women before social conditions changed utterly after the First World War and labour-saving appliances took their place. Two generations on, the domestic servant is an almost extinct species. This book examines an area of life which has never been adequately reflected in Irish literature, labour or social history. The author of this pioneering study ba...

A hundred years ago sevants underpinned middle- and upper-class life in Ireland, and domestic service was the major source of employment for women before social conditions changed utterly after the First World War and labour-saving appliances took their place. Two generations on, the domestic servant is an almost extinct species. This book examines an area of life which has never been adequately reflected in Irish literature, labour or social history. The author of this pioneering study ba...

The sequel to New York Times bestseller Below Stairs, Servants' Hall tells a gripping real-life tale reminiscent of Downton Abbey's Lady Sybil and Tom Branson and makes a perfect gift book for fans of the popular series and film.Margaret Powell's Below Stairs became a sensation among readers reveling in the luxury and subtle class warfare of Masterpiece Theatre's hit television series Downton Abbey. Now...

In the late 1960s, riding the crest of the counterculture movement, Cea’s family left a comfortable existence in California to live off the land in northern Alberta. But unlike most commune dwellers of the time, the Persons weren’t trying to build a new society—they wanted to escape civilization altogether. Led by Cea’s grandfather Dick, they lived in a canvas Teepee, grew pot, and hunted and gathered to survive.Living out her grandparents’ dream with her teenage mother, Michelle, ...

In the 1960s, Kamal Al-Solaylee’s father was one of the wealthiest property owners in Aden, in the south of Yemen, but when the country shrugged off its colonial roots, his properties were confiscated, and the family was forced to leave. The family moved first to Beirut, which suddenly became one of the most dangerous places in the world, then Cairo. After a few peaceful years, even the safe haven of Cairo struggled under a new wave of Islamic extremism that culminated with the assassinati...

Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba has one hope to survive: she must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister's ...

WINNER of the 2014 RBC Taylor PrizeThe Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship bet...

“A mesmerizing novel about a family in crisis.”— Miami HeraldA disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy, from Wally Lamb, the New York Times bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed and I Know This Much Is True.After 27 years of marriage and three children, Anna Oh—wife, mother, outsider artist—has fallen in love wit...

"The Girl Who Fell from the Sky can actually fly." — The New York Times Book ReviewRachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes, and beauty...

#1 New York Times BestsellerAvailable in a special hardcover edition, Christina Baker Kline’s smash bestseller, a captivating historical novel that is “a lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history” (Ann Packer).Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of aband...

Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction PrizeIn 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once.Only three people are privy to the secret — the baby's parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and a trusted neighbour, Thomasina. Together the adults make a difficult...

New York Times and USA Today BestsellerWith the dead of a bitter Vermont winter closing in, evil is alive and well . . .Frank Rath thought he was done with murder when he turned in his detective's badge to become a private investigator and raise a daughter alone. Then the police in his remote rural community of Canaan find an '89 Monte Carlo abandoned by the side of the road, and the beautiful teenage girl who owned the car seems to have disappea...