Fiction Books

Robert Holton has returned from Europe and settled into a solitary existence working for a New York stockbroker. He suppresses memories of nights of love in Florence as he tries to succeed in the city, but when Carla turns up he has to choose between conventionality and the fraught path of love.

Excerpt: "There stands in one of the northern counties of Scotland, in the midst of a wild and wooded landscape, with the background of a fine range of hills, and in the vicinity of a noble trout-stream, a great palace, uninhabited and unfinished. It is of the French-Scottish style of...

The Greatest Heiress in England by Mrs. Oliphant

Phoebe, Junior: A Last Chronicle of Carlingford follows the exploits of its heroine, Phoebe Beecham, as she learns the true history of her family history. She has been raised to have the manners of a lady. When she goes on a long visit to her shop-keeper grandparents in Carlingford she expects she...

One of Queen Victoria's favorite writers, Margaret Oliphant's novels were often set in her native Scotland. In the popular novel Merkland, a spirited young Scottish woman is laid low by adversity and comes to learn about the value of honoring others' needs before one's own.

There was once a poor peasant woman who sold milk. Every day she filled her cans with milk and went to a near-by town and sold it, returning with her cans empty. One day, when she set out she took her little baby daughter with her. In each hand the mother carried a milk can, and the baby held to...

Reveille was over at the military school, and the three boys on the end of the line nearest the mess hall walked slowly toward the broad steps of the big brick building ahead. They differed greatly in type, but of this they were unconscious, for all were deep in thought. “I am going home”...

Down on the edge of the Poppy Field there is a very large, wide lake; the largest lake you have ever seen. Of course there are deeper lakes across the mountains where you have never been, but Poppy Lake is quite deep enough. When you turn your back and lean down and look between your legs so that...

The house of Penton is one of the greatest in the county of which it is an ornament. It is an old house, but not of the kind which is now so generally appreciated and admired. It is not Elizabethan nor Jacobean, nor of the reign of Queen Anne. The front is Grecian, or rather Palladian, in heavy...

Kate Courtney, fifteen, is an heiress with a house in the country - and a rather inflated idea of what her position entails. But she has no one who cares anything about her. She believes she has found happiness when she goes to live with her aunt Mrs Anderson and her cousin Ombra (whose name means...