Rosie and Abigail are like family, Ina Merriweather used to say. That is, until the day Ina cast out her housekeeper, Rosie, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Abigail. Abigail felt deeply betrayed, especially by Ina's daughter Lila, who was her closest friend. Now, twenty-five years later, an old score is about to be settled, and an old love rekindled. Abigail is now a self-made woman who has built an empire out of the homemaking skills she learned...

The psychologically charged affairs between residents and servants on a posh London street escalate to violence involving a handsome valet who is sleeping with a lord's wife and daughter, an au pair who aids her mistress's affair, and a disturbed gardener.

She gave him her innocence . . .

Lady Aline Marsden was brought up to marry a man of her own class, but from the moment she meets John McKenna, she risks everything to be with him.

He gave her his heart

Although their love is forbidden, McKenna's passion for the beautiful Aline is too compelling to deny.

When their secret is discovered, their world is shattered. McKenna is forced to leave forever, unaware that the only reason

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The story of a gentleman in 18th century England marrying a servant girl, a challenge to the social hierarchy. This shows a typical representative of the middle class which had already challenged the aristocracy and was beginning to impose its ideal of Protestant respectability and hard work on England and the world.

The moving abolitionist novel that fueled the fire of the human rights debate in 1852 and melodramatically condemned the institution of slavery through such powerfully realized characters as Tom, Eliza, Topsy, Eva, and Simon Legree.

"In a richly romantic novel set in stunning Positano, Italy, Sara Alexander weaves a story of love, family loyalty, and sacrifice spanning five decades ... Nestled into the cliffs in southern Italy's Amalfi coast, Positano is an artist's vision, with rows of brightly hued houses perched above the sea and picturesque staircases meandering up and down the hillside. Santina, still a striking woman despite old age and the illness that saps her last strength,...

Captures the delicate balance of class and gender in contemporary India as witnessed through the lives of two women--Sera Dubash, an upper middle-class housewife, and Bhima, an illiterate domestic hardened by a life of loss and despair.

A novel of class conflict in 19th century England, featuring a butler who advises a nouveau riche on how to be a gentleman. The upstart is Samuel Fairbrother, owner of a boot factory who buys a mansion, but doesn't know how to dress, eat or receive. To his consternation, his daughter falls in love with the butler. By the author of The Obsession.

Determined to set the historical record straight, and clear her conscience, Temperance Flowerdew-the wife of Virginia's first two governors-puts quill to paper, recounting the hardships that nearly brought the Jamestown colony to its knees, and the extraordinary sacrifice of her servant girl, Lily. When she stepped aboard the Falcon in 1609, Temperance Flowerdew was not only setting sail from England to the distant shores of America, she was embarking...