Historical Letters

Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who’s traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for—a boyfriend. But not any boy. She wants the “Real Thing,” to be in love with someone who loves her equally. Then Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything.

Chicago, 1944. Liz Stephens has little interest in attending a USO club dance with her friends Betty and Julia. She doesn't need a flirtation with a lonely serviceman when she's set to marry her childhood sweetheart. Yet something happens the moment Liz glimpses Morgan McClain. They share only a brief exchange - cut short by the soldier's evident interest in Betty - but Liz can't forget him. Thus, when Betty asks her to ghostwrite a letter to Morgan, stationed overseas, Liz reluctantly agrees.

When Elias Byrne, the reclusive keeper of Kilbane Lighthouse, receives an anonymous letter foretelling the exact time and fate of a doomed ship, he becomes an unwilling witness to a disaster no one could stop. Days later, a cryptographer from Bletchley Park arrives with orders to investigate the impossible—messages that predict future tragedies with chilling accuracy.

Carl Brooke, a scholar of ancient Near Eastern languages, now spends his twilight years chronicling the adventures of his youth as a leading member of the Agora Society, a society dedicated to the betterment of man. Fans of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot will enjoy Carl Brooke and his Agora Society in these five very different cases.

After growing up in Zanzibar as part of the ruling Omani Sultanate, Sayyida Salme, the daughter of the Sultan and his surie concubine Djilfidan, took a fateful step that shaped the rest of her life. She could not have imagined what challenges lay ahead. When she chose to follow her love and became Emily Ruete, she found herself on a path to self-exile, as she moved from East to West, South to North. Taking on a new culture, language, faith, even identity, she crossed borders only to find new barriers.

Becky Nelson fled her childhood home and risked irreparable damage to her relationship with her only sister for an independent life in Kansas. The bookish bachelorette had no sooner settled in the Sunflower State when her path crossed with Henry, a ruggedly handsome farmer. The draft selects the seemingly untouchable Henry, and the couple rushes to make their union permanent before the war carries him to far-off lands. As the days turn to months, their letters give Becky and Henry the strength to go on as he serves his country, and she shares their home with an unlikely guest.

La pasión ha llegado a Middleton esta temporada de la mano del señor Bright. Vive un romance lleno de tensión, sentimientos y atracción. Tu corazón palpitará hasta el último momento. Una trilogía de romántica histórica que te enamorará. Comienza la temporada social en Middleton y todas las miradas están puestas en Margaret Westworth, una de las solteras más codiciadas del condado. Después de años de bailes, de ser objeto de rumores entre los habitantes del condado y de rechazar a pretendientes muy bien posicionados, su familia ha perdido la esperanza.

"England, 1940. Dearest Ruby, you must have heard the news by now. The very worst has happened. Our countries are at war. What can I do? How can I stop this nightmare from happening? One day soon we’ll be together again. I swear. I love you. E. x". Ruby Summers is a tapestry of memories, her ninety-six years laced with both love and loss. The echoes of a wartime Norfolk summer, where young Ruby's heart entwined with Edmondo's under orchard skies, are as vivid as ever. Yet a single, haunting secret - born from a love tested by war and a betrayal that shattered her - remains locked within her.

It is 1890. In the twilight of his years, Carl Brooke records his reminiscences as a member of the Agora Society. Each letter describes the society's involvement in solving a crime, often coming to the aid of Captain Barnwell of the Boston police.

Sicily, 1939. Seventeen-year-old Concetta has just received life-changing news: her family is leaving their sun-drenched Sicilian village and moving to America. Desperate to stay with her secret love Gaetano—a fisherman's son her father would never accept—Concetta spends one last night with him beneath a blanket of stars. There, among the citrus-scented air and cricket song, he hands her a leaving gift: a fountain pen, with a promise to keep their love alive through letters – and return to one another one day.

The deepest currents of passion seldom break the surface of literature. Romantic classics abound; but however skilled a writer may be in verbalising an emotional experience, he cannot publicly evoke the heat of blood, the yearning of soul, bared in perfect intimacy between two beings. But letters can do this, and songs never meant to be sung by any but the lover, or the beloved.

It is 1828. Fate has brought four people together in a modest house in Abingdon, Virginia. All of them have experienced great losses in their lives, with the three adults consumed by their grief and regret. The fourth, an innocent, is a recently orphaned young boy working through his own sadness but learning to adapt to his new living situation. Alexander Dromgoole, a Revolutionary War veteran and Indian trader, is a frail and ailing old man, living out the last years of his life being boarded out by the town's Overseers of the Poor.

Katherine Arthur and her family are back and it’s time to collect the money Mrs. Mellet left them in her will. The tidy sum will allow the family peace of mind and a future that’s stable and fulfilling. But when things don’t go exactly as planned, Katherine steps up to do more than her share. Hired as a kitchen mistress, her intuition (with the help of a mysterious recipe book), cooking prowess, and work ethic make her the perfect partner for the enigmatic, wealthy woman next door. Then Aleksey Zurchenko arrives.

When her sister volunteers to help renovate the two cottages she owns in France, Merle is happy to have company. The cottages are a disaster–especially one that has mostly been inhabited by rodents for years. But inside the cottage are surprises. A packet of letters dating from World War One intrigue Merle. What happened to this soldier who was writing to his girlfriend back in England? Does his last letter, telling her to forget him, mean something terrible happened to him?

In 1642, a pregnant Hester Prynne is found guilty of adultery, shunned by her neighbors, and forced to wear a scarlet letter 'A' on her dress. Meanwhile, Hester's husband - long thought to be lost at sea - has returned to Boston under the assumed name 'Roger Chillingworth' and plots to uncover her lover's identity. After her daughter Pearl is born, Hester is frequently visited by both Reverend Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, but always refuses to name her lover.

Letters discovered in a tin box hidden in the foundation of a small cottage in Normandy reveal a terrible secret, a desperate whisper between the lines. Antoine's world was collapsing. His beautiful Marianne, his precious daughter Ariéle, missing. The lives of hundreds - perhaps thousands - of allied soldiers preparing to storm Juno Beach on D-Day literally are in his hands.

Miss Arabella Leeds, the teenage daughter of a prominent New York family, and Aubrey Paxton, the pampered "high-yellow" house servant of wealthy New Orleans slaveholders, are destined to meet and fall in love. But before their paths can cross, and their romance commence in London, each must forsake complacency and comfort, the familial and familiar, for a journey toward self-discovery and the allure of the forbidden. Arabella must abandon the gentlewoman's prescribed path and redefine her convictions - particularly those regarding her own sexuality.

1891: Living separately for three years, 14-year-old twins Katherine and Tommy Arthur have done their best to make each boarding house feel like home. But unrest grows as they are driven to questionable actions just to survive. Meanwhile, their desperate mother is confronted with breaking yet another promise to her children. Then a miracle descends. Hope rises on a cold, rainy night and changes everything. If Jeanie could just get word to Katherine and Tommy, she knows she can set their lives right again.

Who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side - "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: He hints at a much worldlier past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse.

These letters were arranged in two volumes by Albert Bigelow Paine, Samuel L. Clemens's literary executor, as a supplement to Mark Twain, A Biography, which Paine wrote. They are, for the most part, every letter written by Clemens known to exist at the time of their publication in 1917. They begin with a fragment of a letter from teenaged Sam Clemens to his sister, Pamela, and conclude with a letter to his attorney two weeks before his death. These letters give us some degree of insight into the evolution of Twain's style of speech and prose over the period of his lifetime.