A Lit Hub Best Book of 2016 • One of Electric Literature's Best Novels of 2016 • An Entropy Best Book of 2016“The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First...Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment.” —Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book ReviewMargaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the sh...

From the "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill) author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life.“Luminous” (The Guardian) and “brilliantly odd” (The Irish Independent), Danielle Dutton's writing is as protean as it is beguiling. In the four eponym...

Margaret the First dramatizes the life of Margaret Cavendish, the shy, gifted, and wildly unconventional seventeenth-century duchess. The eccentric Margaret wrote and published volumes of poems, philosophy, feminist plays, and utopian science fiction at a time when "being a writer" was not an option open to women. As one of the Queen's attendants and the daughter of prominent Royalists, she was exiled to France when King Charles I was overthrown. As the English Civil War raged on,...

A warm-spirited elegy to an abandoned work, brilliantly comic and wryly contemplative, by one of the great artist-investigators of our time.Originally published in 2008 in the groundbreaking Atelos series, To After That (TOAF) introduced a new kind of writing—somewhere between criticism and memoir and philosophy—that Renee Gladman has continued to explore in books like Calamities and My Lesbian Novel.TOAF is a recuperativ...

The true story of a woman hanged in colonial Portsmouth for burying her stillborn out-of-wedlock baby.On a cold December morning in 1768, thirty-one-year-old Ruth Blay approached the gallows for her execution. Standing on the high ground in the northwest corner of what is now Portsmouth's old South Cemetery, she would have had a clear view across the pasture to the harbor and open sea.The eighteenth-century hanging of a schoolteacher for concealing the birt...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.Three sisters. An absent prince who promised to protect them. And the wolf is at the door…Once upon a time…When war breaks out, Rudolf promises Portia and her sisters he will protect them. But his father falls in battle, and Rudolf is forced to return home to command his father’s armies.Shifting alliances turn Portia and her family from friends to sworn enemies. To win the war, Rudolf must conque...

The critically acclaimed author of The Fool's Tale, Nicole Galland now approaches William Shakespeare's classic drama of jealousy, betrayal, and murder from the opposite side. I, Iago is an ingenious, brilliantly crafted novel that allows one of literature's greatest villains—the deceitful schemer Iago, from the Bard's immortal tragedy, Othello—to take center stage in order to reveal his "true" motivations. This is Iago as you've never known him, his past and inf...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceA young woman seeks a new life in the American West, posing as a wealthy widow, in this “gorgeously written” historical fiction novel set at the turn of the 20th century (Entertainment Weekly).“Deliciously ambitious . . . delivers one memorable character after another . . . flat–out terrific.” —Carl Hiaasen, New York Times bestselling authorDulcy...

**A vividly told, triumphant story that follows one of the thousands of young Irish women shipped to Australia after the Famine as part of the Earl Grey Scheme, whose indomitable bravery in an exotic, danger-laden land helped shape a new country. For readers of Ellen Marie Wiseman, Sarah Loudin Thomas, Amanda Skenandore and Marie Benedict.They survived Ireland’s Great Hunger to build a new society in untamed Australia . . .**1848: The girls, 4,000 in all, ...

From award-winning journalist Jack Ford, a riveting and colorful dual timeline novel of Lee Carson, the heroic yet elusive female journalist who defied convention and danger to report from the front lines of WWII, combining breathtaking wartime narrative with a compelling Cold War espionage tale for fans of Christine Mangan, Pam Jenoff, Erika Robuck, and Kate Quinn.Washington, DC, April 1954: Lee Carson, former war correspondent, is frustrated that her journalism c...

A riveting crime thriller from a New York Times bestselling author.Mathew Sedley returns home to his isolated cottage to find a dollhouse in his hallway. It’s a perfect replica of his home – inside and out – except that this dollhouse has a miniature figure of a woman lying in a pool of blood on the spare bedroom floor.A sadistic serial killer is terrorising rural Somerset. Each murder is heralded by the discovery of a dollhouse, an exact replica of the pla...

From the brutal horrors of Jamaican plantations to the teeming streets of 19th century London, through lavish manor houses and across dangerous seas, escaped enslaved siblings survive the American War of Independence and arrive in London to seek their fortune in this page-turning, immersive story of survival, betrayal, secrets, and the quest for true freedom.On a terrifying night in 1768, Daniel and his young sister, Pearl, narrowly escape their brutal life of slav...