Grieving the death of her mother,19 year old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to stay with friends at their home in Tuscany.Lucy has her own reasons for agreeing to travel to the Villa Grayson:Niccolo Donati captured her heart four years ago,her first love,a memory she has cherished even though the letters have stopped coming,she would dearly love to see him again.And she wishes to solve the riddle found in her mother's diary-Sara was a free spirit eager for all kinds of experience and shy of responsibility and her record of times past casts a shadow that hasn't faded.Lucy's nubile presence stirs up the torpid Italian summer lives of all those at the villa.Only the dying and old remember the passion and pain of youth with sensitivity equal to Lucy's.By the time she solves her own riddles,the lives of those who summer at the Villa Grayson will never be quite the same again.
From the acclaimed writer Susan Minot, author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories and Folly, and the legendary filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor (winner of nine Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture), The Sheltering Sky, and Little Buddha, comes a hauntingly beautiful film about innocence, seduction, and the pain and pleasures of youth. Following the death of her mother, nineteen-year-old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to Italy to stay with old family friends and to have her portrait done. She is eager to renew her acquaintance with Niccolò Donati, the handsome young boy from a neighboring family with whom she shared her first kiss on a visit four years earlier, and anxious to solve a riddle left in her mother's diary, the answer to which may change Lucy's life forever.
A dark romance from USA Today bestselling author Julia Sykes Valentina hates me. That doesn't stop me from kidnapping her, stealing her away for myself. She was brought into my home when we were teenagers, her virgin body sold to my father to pay a debt. She became the only light in my dark criminal underworld, and I couldn't help loving her. Now, ten years have separated us, and I've established my reputation as the most notorious, sadistic drug lord on the west coast. I don't care if she's grown to hate me. I'm finally powerful enough to claim Valentina for myself, and no one can stop me. A decade hasn't dulled my obsessive need for her. I'll kill anyone who tries to take her from me. Valentina was always meant to be mine. Nothing will stop me from possessing her, body and soul. Keywords: dark romance, capture fantasy, antihero, kidnapping, romantic suspense, standalone
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal
One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.
USA Today bestseller For five centuries, a witch’s curse has bound the trolls to their city beneath the ruins of Forsaken Mountain—time enough for their nefarious magic to fade from human memory and into myth. But a prophecy has spoken of a union that will set the trolls free, and when Cécile de Troyes is taken beneath the mountain, she learns there is far more to the myth than she could have imagined. Cécile has only one thing on her mind after she is brought to Trollus: escape. But if she is to succeed, she must bide her time and find a way to outsmart the clever, fast, and inhumanly strong trolls that hold her captive. But while awaiting the perfect opportunity, Cécile unexpectedly falls for the enigmatic troll prince to whom she has been bonded and married. Their love gradually changes her perspective, opening her heart to new friends and opening her eyes to the hardships of the enslaved half-troll, half-human creatures of Trollus. As rebellion brews and the political games of Trollus escalate, Cécile becomes more than a trapped father’s daughter. She becomes a princess, a witch, and the hope of a people—someone who has the power to change Trollus forever.
From Anne Rice, author of Beauty's Kingdom, the third book in the erotic Sleeping Beauty series Before E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You,, there was Anne Rice’s provocative take on the timeless fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty. “ In the final volume of Anne Rice's deliciously tantalizing erotic trilogy, Beauty's adventures on the dark side of sexuality make her the bound captive of an Eastern Sultan and a prisoner in the exotic confines of the harem. As this voluptuous adult fairy tale moves toward conclusion, all Beauty's encounters with the myriad variations of sexual fantasy are presented in a sensuous, rich prose that intensifies this exquisite rendition of Love's secret world, and makes the Beauty series and incomparable study of erotica. In it, Anne Rice, writing as A.N. Roquelaure, makes the forbidden side of passion a doorway into the hidden regions of the psyche and the heart.
Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg's Stealing Rembrandts is a spellbinding journey into the high-stakes world of art theft Today, art theft is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises in the world, exceeding $6 billion in losses to galleries and art collectors annually. And the masterpieces of Rembrandt van Rijn are some of the most frequently targeted. In Stealing Rembrandts, art security expert Anthony M. Amore and award-winning investigative reporter Tom Mashberg reveal the actors behind the major Rembrandt heists in the last century. Through thefts around the world - from Stockholm to Boston, Worcester to Ohio - the authors track daring entries and escapes from the world's most renowned museums. There are robbers who coolly walk off with multimillion dollar paintings; self-styled art experts who fall in love with the Dutch master and desire to own his art at all costs; and international criminal masterminds who don't hesitate to resort to violence. They also show how museums are thwarted in their ability to pursue the thieves - even going so far as to conduct investigations on their own, far away from the maddening crowd of police intervention, sparing no expense to save the priceless masterpieces. Stealing Rembrandts is an exhilarating, one-of-a-kind look at the black market of art theft, and how it compromises some of the greatest treasures the world has ever known.
Sterling Glass has built a nice appraisal business in her small Virginia town. She's sought after to examine antiques, research their history, present her clients with approximate values, and help them distinguish good antiques from not so good ones. And when family skeletons are unearthed among the heirlooms, she is the soul of discretion. It's a world she navigates with ease. But that's before she's called in to examine a diamond brooch found tucked inside an oven mitt over at the Salvation Army thrift store. And before the appraisal of an extremely modest estate turns up a tea urn—hidden inside a basket—worth at least fifty grand. Things aren't adding up, and Sterling, never one to let go of loose ends, starts asking questions. It's not long before she uncovers an intricate plot involving a slew of antique pieces, the oldest families in Leemont, some sophisticated scammers, crooked antiques dealers, and shifty people at the best New York auction houses. Add to that one elderly man who's just trying to preserve his family's treasured collection of bronze and ivory Art Deco sculptures, and suddenly Sterling finds herself ensnared in a mystery laced with greed, deceit, and danger. Stealing with Style, the first in the Sterling Glass series, introduces a writer of great wit who has a grand sense of the mystery hidden in our most treasured possessions.
