At the Queen's Summons
At the Queen's Summons

Author: Susan Wiggs

Publisher: MIRA

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1426840500

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Feisty orphan Pippa de Lacey lives by wit and skill as a London street performer. But when her sharp tongue gets her into serious trouble, she throws herself upon the mercy of Irish chieftain Aidan O'Donoghue. Pippa provides a welcome diversion for Aidan as he awaits an audience with the queen, who holds his people's fate in her hands. Amused at first, he becomes obsessed with the audacious waif who claims his patronage. Rash and impetuous, their unlikely alliance reverberates with desire and the tantalizing promise of a life each has always wanted—but never dreamed of attaining.

The Mermuring Maiden
The Mermuring Maiden

Author: Michele Lamar Richards

Publisher: KarmiChange

Published: 2017-08

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 099936135X

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When an African prince returns from university he sires a child with a sea goddess inspiring his father to make him care for not only the bi-elemental child, but the other child born of no one’s womb in their village—a nomad boy, however the medicine man takes advantage of the villager’s trepidation with the exotic children and plots to restore the shaman as leader by initiating a war between those in the villages and the beings in the sea.

Dickens and the Business of Death
Dickens and the Business of Death

Author: Claire Wood

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-03-05

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1316241211

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Charles Dickens is famous for his deathbed scenes, but these have rarely been examined within the context of his ambivalence towards the Victorian commodification of death. Dickens repeatedly criticised ostentatious funeral and mourning customs, and asserted the harmful consequences of treating the corpse as an object of speculation rather than sympathy. At the same time, he was fascinated by those who made a living from death and recognised that his authorial profits implicated him in the same trade. This book explores how Dickens turned mortality into the stuff of life and art as he navigated a thriving culture of death-based consumption. It surveys the diverse ways in which death became a business, from body-snatching, undertaking, and joint-stock cemetery companies, to the telling and selling of stories. This broad study offers fresh perspectives on death in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, and discusses lesser-known works and textual illustrations.