Marcella Abbott can't believe it. Her family is giving up their house in Portland, Oregon, and their comfortable life in the city to live year-round on Washington State's Olympic peninsula when her father's business is ruined. Nahcotta's okay for the summer, but Marcella doesn't much like the peolple who live there. In fact, she thinks they're stupid, oafish, country bumpkins. But three things change her mind forever: a new friend, a beached whale, and the incredibly mysterious "lady from the sea."
Traveling separately to Ornemouth, England, a town by the North Sea where they had spent a summer together as children, Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman reassess the course of their individual lives and decisions over the past thirty years of separation.
THE PERFECT MILE meet SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA in this compelling tale of how nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “A mesmerizing new historical novel” (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Lisa See, the bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, about female friendship and devastating family secrets on a small Korean island. Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility—but also danger. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook find it impossible to ignore their differences. The Island of Sea Women takes place over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers. Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point. “This vivid…thoughtful and empathetic” novel (The New York Times Book Review) illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge and the men take care of the children. “A wonderful ode to a truly singular group of women” (Publishers Weekly), The Island of Sea Women is a “beautiful story…about the endurance of friendship when it’s pushed to its limits, and you…will love it” (Cosmopolitan).
The Caribbean in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and into the eighteenth century, is under pirate rule. To maintain his claim to the islands, the King of England appoints Lord John Hume as governor of the Bahamas. Hume, along with his wife and daughter, Abigail, set sail. Colleen Edwards, daughter of an English Privateer, meets Abby while on an errand for her father. An immediate bond forms between the two women and the infrequency of their contact leaves them both hungry for a more permanent arrangement. When Abby is captured and held for ransom by the notorious pirate Jack Rackham, Colleen and her father set out to rescue her, but when Charles Edwards is wounded, Colleen continues on the quest alone. If she can succeed in freeing the woman she loves, will it be possible for the two of them to create a life together?
The final thrilling chapter in the Tristan and Isolde trilogy Isolde, heir to the throne of the queens, is now a sovereign in her own right. With the glories of the throne comes the responsibility of a queen, and Isolde knows she must return to her beloved Western Isle. She can no longer tolerate her marriage to King Mark of Cornwall, a marriage she has accepted for years to save her country from the threat of war—and to be near her only love, Mark’s nephew, Tristan of Lyonesse. And so she leaves Cornwall and comes home to Ireland, where her lords face a growing threat from the warlike Picti, who live in the barren highlands to the north of England. The Picti have a bold new king, Darath, who is determined to take the riches of Ireland for his own people, whether by war or by marriage with Isolde. Isolde gathers her armies to confront the Picti while facing a violent conflict with King Mark, who vows he will not let a prize like Isolde, and Ireland, slip from his grasp. Isolde is last in a line of famous warrior queens who have guarded Ireland from time before memory, and now she—and her knight, Tristan—must play out their fate and face her enemies in a final battle, a war that could spell ruin for them both. To download a free copy of the discussion group guide in this book visit CrownPublishing.com.
A remarkable wartime memoir, unusually personal and frank, chronicling the bleak and arduous journeys onboard an anti-submarine trawler in the Arctic ocean during World War IIGraeme Ogden's memoir is the story of HMS Lady Madeleine, an ocean-going trawler converted to an antisubmarine role as part of the convoys to supply the Soviet Union as it faced the savage onslaught of the German army. This was a voyage fraught with storms, icebergs, and subzero temperatures in peacetime alone, but now the convoys faced worse—the fearsome gauntlet of German aircraft, submarines and surface raiders strung out along the coast of Norway, waiting to meet them. Ogden commanded the vessel in question, keeping diaries of his harrowing experiences of those years, which also cover his time on the equally perilous Atlantic convoys. These accounts were rediscovered and published as a memoir in the 1960s, illustrated with exquisite line drawings by Richard Elsden, who also sailed on these voyages. This is a very different kind of war memoir, vivid and bittersweet, in which the human elements take centerstage against the backdrop of great events.
