English Renaissance

The first African American poet to achieve international fame, Paul Laurence Dunbar used his prodigious literary gifts to chronicle and celebrate Black life as he saw it. He utilized both traditional poetic forms and contemporary dialect in a range of styles—lyrical, conversational, and playful—as diverse as his themes. This collection, containing the entirety of Dunbar’s poetry, captures his still vital expressions of love, work, and family. It also serves as a revelatory expression of Dunbar’s frustrations with racial injustice and oppression.

London, 1628. Nicolaes de Pelgrom, assassin and devoted servant of George Villiers, will do whatever his master asks of him—even if that means enduring the perilous voyage to the Indies to exact a grieving widow's revenge. Making that same journey is Jeronimus Cornelisz, a conniving apothecary determined to escape the backstreets of Amsterdam and become rich beyond imagination. Hired by a criminal mastermind to escort precious cargo to the Indies, he will kill anyone who stands in his way.

When soldiers attack the inhabitants of a Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Lithuania, Abigail manages to escape both the attack and her abusive husband, Reuven. She travels over land and sea to Venice, where she settles in another ghetto. Believing Reuven is dead, Abigail falls in love with her widowed neighbor, Daniel. But before Abigail and Daniel announce their betrothal, her violent husband reappears.

The running wolf inscription told the world that a Solingen blade was at its throat. When a German smuggler is imprisoned in Morpeth Gaol in the winter of 1703, why does Queen Anne's powerful right-hand man, the Earl of Nottingham, take such a keen interest? At the end of the turbulent 17th century, the ties that bind men are fraying, turning neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend and brother against brother.

How far would you go to keep a deathbed promise? Surrounded by the bodies of slain monarchs, a dying prince extracts a promise from his friend, Horatio: “Tell my story”. Rival kings of warring nations strive to lay claim to the throne, now vacant, but what will happen to the people who live there, at Helsingør’s Krogen Castle? How will Horatio preserve his honor and the prince’s legacy while surviving this murderous kingdom and the men who would rule it? This historical adventure story tells the fictional tale of how Horatio’s oath gave birth to the legend of Hamlet.

February, 1586. When the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, learns that Ursula is to visit her relatives in Devon, he asks her to find out what has happened to two of his local agents, who have been strangely silent recently. On arrival in the small Devon village of Zeal Aquatio, Ursula discovers that both spies in question have met with mysterious - and fatal - accidents. Or is there more to it than that? What did the two spies find out that got them killed?

Orphaned at birth, Eliza lives with her beloved Grandparents in a waterlogged Somerset cottage surrounded by willow beds where she ekes out a living making laundry baskets and eel traps. Although poor she is content, until childhood friend Clem regales her with tales of his adventures along the river and she begins to wonder what life is like beyond the Droves. When fate brings handsome, wealthy Theo to her workshop she is instantly attracted and a rosy future beyond the Droves beckons.

Surrounded by her large family, Loma is happy living in the judería of Alcalá de Henares, Spain, and wants nothing more than to someday have a family of her own. Still, when her intimidating grandfather, her Belo, decides to bring her along on his travels, she's excited to join him. Belo has the ear of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Loma relishes her adventures with him, adventures that are beyond the scope of most girls of the time. She soon learns just how dangerous the world is for the Jews of Spain, and how her grandfather's influence keeps their people safe.

Spanning 2,000 years, The Everlasting follows four characters whose struggles resonate across the centuries: an early Christian child martyr; a medieval monk on crypt duty in a church; a Medici princess of Moorish descent; and a contemporary field biologist conducting an illicit affair. Outsiders to a city layered and dense with history, this quartet separated by time grapple with the physicality of bodies, the necessity for sacrifice, and the power of love to sustain and challenge faith.

Melody, Asia, and Sasha are successful women working in the careers they've always wanted. They excel in life, they excel in their chosen professions, but in their relationships, they fail miserably. From scandalous affairs and drug-induced sexcapades to secret pregnancies and death in a love triangle, these cousins have the personal drama on lock. But when backstabbing and betrayal infiltrate their relationships with one another, the once-tight trio quickly finds that blood is nowhere near as thick as water.

Deceived into leaving Haiti and Cuba by Mr. and Mrs. Vega, Billie and Carmine are confronted with a harsh reality once on American soil. The teens realize they are sex workers for the Pricey Pussy Empire, and the couple who lured them to the US actually run their own division for the underground flesh-for-sale operation. Billie and Carmine will suffer through human indecency, cruel punishment, and sexual assault in hopes of breaking the chains of captivity. There is an expensive price tag attached to vengeance, and once it is theirs, they may just end up paying with their souls.

After unwittingly helping her mother poison King Louis XIV, 17-year-old alchemist Mirabelle Monvoisin is forced to see her mother's Shadow Society in a horrifying new light: They're not heroes of the people, as they've always claimed to be, but murderers. She herself included. Mira tries to ease her guilt by brewing helpful curatives, but her hunger tonics and headache remedies cannot right past wrongs or save the dissenters whom her mother vows to purge.

Lukas wants only two things: to rebuild his castle home in time to make it through the coming winter and to reconnect with the sister who was stolen from him in a plot against his family. But then an astrologer appears with foreboding news: his old adversary, Inquisitor Waldemar von Schönborn, has stolen three royal artifacts, which are required to coronate a new German emperor. With these valuable objects - the sword, the crown, and the scepter - he could blackmail the empire. The treasures are currently hidden in three different places in the old imperial city of Prague.

In this thrilling adventure by bestselling author Oliver Pötzsch, thirteen-year-old Lukas has been trained as a swordsman by his father, a nobleman who was once a famed Musketeer. When the threat of war and accusations of witchcraft spread across the land, Lukas's life is forever changed. He flees his home and vows to find his missing sister.

"No one wanted you. But I did." Kat's true identity is a secret, even from her. All she has ever known are Grace and Anna and their small village. Kat wants more - more than hours spent embroidering finery for wealthy ladies and more than Christian, the gentle young farmer courting her. But there are wolves outside, Grace warns. Waiting, with their eyes glowing in the dark... nd Grace has given Kat safety and a home when no one else would.

Renowned scholar Patrick Collinson is Regius Professor of Modern History, Emeritus, Cambridge. He states, "The Reformation (and Counter Reformation) was the blast furnace in which the modern state was forged." This engaging work offers a concise overview of the ecumenical revolution of the late medieval and Renaissance periods. Narrator John McDonough's presentation of the spiritual and the secular elements that led to religious reform will captivate listeners.

Bestselling author Leonard Shlain explores the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci, seeking to explain his singularity by looking at his achievements in art, science, psychology, and military strategy (yes), and then employing state of the art left-right brain scientific research to explain his universal genius. Shlain shows that no other person in human history has excelled in so many different areas as Da Vinci and he peels back the layers to explore the how and the why.

In seventeenth-century Rome, an arrogant and reckless artist named Caravaggio drinks and brawls his way through his violent, insatiable life, all while painting some of the world’s greatest religious works of art. But it is his bitter feud with Giovanni Roero, a brutal knight in the Maltese Order of St. John, that is his fatal error. Now, in the village of Monte Piccolo, a priest claims to have discovered a lost painting by the famed artist in the storage room of an orphanage. Retired professor A. R. Richman believes it’s a delusional dream.

Believing fiction to be an invaluable tool for social change, Pauline E. Hopkins used her first novel to challenge the racist and sexist assumptions of her time. Contending Forces operates on an epic scale - with settings ranging from antebellum North Carolina to post-Civil War Boston - and Hopkins surveys this panorama with an eye in particular on the intersections of race, class, and gender relations.

Today, we take for granted that a telescope allows us to see galaxies millions of light years away. But before its invention, people used nothing more than their naked eye to fathom what took place in the visible sky. So how did four men in the 1500s - of different nationality, age, religion, and class - collaborate to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun? With this radical discovery that went against the Church, they created our contemporary world. Heaven on Earth is an intimate examination of this scientific family.