The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is a masterwork of emotional complexity, heartbreak, and redemption by celebrated English author Thomas Hardy.Drunk and outraged, Michael Henchard auctions off his own wife and daughter for five guineas. The following morning, he searches for his family to no avail and, with the clarity of sobriety, swears off liquor for the next 21 years. In that time, he becomes a successful grain merchant and the titular Mayor of Casterb...

Baker and chaotic nymph Pippa Crumb has a problem: every time she imagines a cake, she gets transported into that universe. One adult teddy-bear cake order later, she wakes up claimed by a brotherhood of massive, randy teddy bears who have decided she is their fated mate. What starts as "oh crumbs, not again" turns into a night of playful group claiming, size-difference fun, knotting and breeding. This lighthearted paranormal romance is packed with silly teddy-bear chaos, why-choose heat, ...

Charlotte wants nothing more than to get away from high society in New York City where she can never say the right thing or act as one of her station should. When she hears of mail order brides, she knows it's her one chance to finally find a suitor who will accept her for who she is.Joshua has worked hard preparing his new homestead and now he just needs a wife to help take care of his home. Will Charlotte give up and return to the home she loves, or will Joshua show her that she ...

The Wessex short stories: the hangman who comes to supper and does not say what he does; the three strangers; a wife who takes her husband's arm to a dead man's hand for a cure; the Trumpet-Major's Melancholy Hussar deserting for love. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; these came from what he was told as a boy by people who had seen it, and the withered arm is not a metaphor.

Amy has finally graduated, and she's excited to move on to her internship with a law firm in London. What she doesn't expect is to be invited to a ball by an eccentric old woman—or that she actually decides to go.William has spent most of his life helping his aunt Nellie with the time traveling groups who come through Twickenham Manor. But this time it's different.

A young astronomer works from a column on a hill; the lady of the manor, ten years older and married to an absent husband, climbs it to see the stars. Hardy set out to make the emotions of two people small against the interstellar distances, and the Bishop of Wakefield thought it immoral. It is the least read of his Wessex novels and the tenderest.

The daughter of a railway millionaire buys a Norman castle and cannot decide anything — church or chapel, one suitor or the other — while a young architect restores her battlements and a photographer forges a picture. Hardy trained as an architect and dictated much of this from bed during a near-fatal illness; it is his novel about the new money meeting the old stones, and about a woman who is lukewarm on principle.

A butler's daughter has published a book of verse, married a rich man's son, been widowed at twenty-one, and now goes about London society as a lady while her father waits at table and her sisters are in service — and four men want to marry her. Hardy called it a comedy and his readers, who wanted another Far from the Madding Crowd, did not forgive him; it is his one novel about class as a performance, and the performance is brilliant.

The stories where Wessex stops being pastoral: a schoolmaster's wife who cannot forgive her son's face; a man who exchanges his child; a tranter's tale told on a carrier's van; the son who is ashamed of his mother at Oxford. Hardy trained as an architect and restored churches; these 1894 tales are his coldest, and the irony of the title is not gentle — the ordinary arrangements of respectable life are the trap.

A young woman with no money takes a post as a lady's maid to a wealthy spinster, and finds that the household's secrets involve the architect she once loved. Hardy published it anonymously at thirty-one, after paying his own guarantee against loss, and wrote it to a publisher's brief: give us a plot with mystery in it. The Wessex he would spend his life mapping is already visible underneath the sensation.

Build a fiddle with a character and voice all its own, with this step-by-step guide to practical fiddle making Folk Fiddle – Making, Crafting and Decorating is a richly illustrated guide for makers who want to step beyond classical violin conventions and create instruments that celebrate the artistry, storytelling and freedom of folk music. Drawing on years of hands-on experience, luthier Emma Hardy takes you through each stage of the process, from choosing timber and designing body shapes...

This debut novel from a former NFL player is a hard-hitting, heart wrenching crime novel that brilliantly blends elements of jazz, football, and a gritty portrait of a city divided—perfect for fans of S.A. Cosby and Walter Mosley.Coltrane Davis is at once a knight and a hustler. He has risen to wealth and success, graduating from San Diego's back alleys to the halls of power through his partnership with Saul Sollman, a crooked kingmaker among the city's elite. Runn...