Letters Literature

Millie Leclair is a mess, complete with a dead-end career and a flatlining love life. So when she inherits her great aunt's oceanfront B&B in a resort town in South Carolina's Lowcountry, she doesn't hesitate to pack up her car and set off on a new adventure. It'll be fun. Of course, life seldom goes according to plan. The B&B is barely habitable for one person, let alone ready to open for business. With dwindling funds, Millie has no choice but to roll up her sleeves and tackle the repairs by herself. Yeah, so much fun.

The correspondence between Carrie Allsop and David Mayer reveals, piece by piece, the painful details of a devastating affair between their spouses. With each commiserating scratch of the pen, they confess their fears and bare their souls. They share the bewilderment over how things went so wrong and come to wonder where to go from here. Told entirely through the letters of two comforting strangers and those of two illicit lovers, Evidence of the Affair explores the complex nature of the heart. And ultimately, for one woman, how liberating it can be when it’s broken.

In the Wakemont family, it’s tradition to arrange a marriage before the ink is dry on your birth certificate. I was five hours old when my father promised me to the son of a man with “more money than God.” As we grew older, my future groom and I were encouraged to exchange “love letters” to get better acquainted—except the correspondence he sent read more like hate mail. Slade Delacorte hated the arrangement. But more than that, he hated me. He was moody, intense, arrogant, and darkly gorgeous. A villain—not a prince. The last man on earth I’d ever marry (if I had the choice).

Germany, 1939. A tumbledown farmhouse, on the outskirts of a close-knit village in the heart of the rolling hills of Bavaria. A once happy family home torn apart by Nazi rule. And one young girl who refuses to give up on what she believes in...London, 2018: When 94-year-old Imogen receives a letter addressed to her in neat, unfamiliar handwriting, she notices the postmark is stamped from Germany - and it sends shivers down her spine....

It’s the summer of 1891, New York City, in the early days of Fiona Finnegan’s marriage to Nicholas Soames. When Fiona senses a quiet love blossoming between her widowed uncle, Michael Finnegan, and his neighbor, Mary Munro, she’s thrilled and hopes that Michael will soon propose to Mary. But one night, at a family supper, a surprise announcement tears these hopes asunder.

Maddox Lovelace. The captivating football player I met in college. The one I only knew for a week. A week that was...life-changing. Until my phone rang, and I had no choice but to go home. I left Maddox a letter, putting my feelings on paper, giving him my number, hoping he'd call. But he didn't call. He never called. He got drafted into the professional league and lived like a king while I stayed home and struggled to stay afloat.

Penniless and downtrodden at the loss of his wife and one of his daughters, Samuel Clemens turned to writing. The short stories and essays in Letters from the Earth find Clemens—under the pseudonym of Mark Twain—at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever. Written as diary entries, Twain penned a series of letters from the point of view of a dejected angel on Earth who observes the many curious natures of man. These pieces, gathered by Twain's literary executor, feature sharp takes on the inconsistencies of Christianity and farcical criticisms of American life.

While researching why Freud failed to win a Nobel Prize at the Nobel Archives in Sweden, a psychiatrist makes an unusual discovery. Among the piles of papers in the "Crackpot" file are letters addressed to the executor of Alfred Nobel's will, written by several notable Nobel laureates - including Rudyard Kipling and Marie Curie - each offering an explanation of why and how Stonehenge was constructed. Diligent research uncovers that Alfred Nobel added a secret codicil to his will, a prize for the Nobel laureate who solves the mystery of Stonehenge.

Leanna Chupp has always made her own way in her small community of Birch Creek. Though some may call her unconventional - strange, even - Leanna is passionate about her faith. Her unique outlook on life has meant she's never had many suitors pursuing courtship, but she is happy being single and believes she always will be. But when Roman and Leanna find themselves working together again, everything changes. Neither of them fit squarely within the strictures of the Amish faith, but could their differences be the one thing that helps them?

Kiran Mathur knows firsthand how dangerous love can be. After all, her sister's marriage in India nearly destroyed Kiran's family. So she's decided to redeem romance herself - by not falling for anyone who might disappoint her parents. That is, that was her plan right up until she met her new neighbor, Nash Hawthorne. Nash is a dedicated psychologist and committed to being alone. His family life has taught him the inevitability of abandonment, and he isn't ready to question his beliefs. But spending time with Kiran makes him start to experience emotions he's never felt before.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER “[A] five-star read . . . If you love a family saga, sprinkled with historical fiction elements, and strong female protagonists, you need to read this book.”—theSkimm Discover a little town in southern Italy that might be just like every town—with women and men...

After disappearing amidst a spray of bullets, antiques dealer Sarah Lester leaves behind no body, only questions. Sarah’s friends are left dealing with the aftermath of her disappearance, including an investigation into the provenance of her antiques, which threatens to crush The Old Curiosity Shop. As Sarah struggles to reunite with her father, she continues the search for her mother, unaware the violent colonial past has followed her home, putting herself, and those she loves in danger.

Told through a mix of true stories and new fiction, Dear Orchid opens the heart in unexpected ways: through loss and love, silence and recovery, and the hard-won resilience of people who don’t always fit the mold. With tenderness and heart, Dear Orchid is an Asian American author's homage to Mary-Louise Parker’s Dear Mr. You, through letters to a girl newly freed from East Berlin, an aunt lost to Communist-era borders, and Purple Heart-decorated heroes. These intimate portraits explore the messy beauty of friendship, family, disability, and belonging.

Letters of a Woman Homesteader is a frontier classic by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, a widowed young mother who accepted an offer to assist with a ranch in Wyoming. In Stewart's delightful collection of letters, she describes her homesteading experiences to her former employer, Mrs. Coney.

A road trip with Gabe and her friends leads Sylvia to discover more about her mother’s veiled past yet throws up several questions, too. The stack of unopened letters addressed to her family will hopefully provide answers. As she delves into the contents, a startling revelation emerges: the letters allude to a clandestine union between two magician families, hinting at the elusive identity of Sylvia’s father. Full of hope, she embarks on a quest to find the author of the letters.

In Regency England, one letter will alter a young woman's fate when it summons her to Briarton Park--an ancient estate that holds the secrets of her past and the keys to her future. Sarah E. Ladd returns with another low-spice Regency romance, perfect for fans of Julie Klassen. Cassandra Hale...

Pearl Harbor, 1941: On the morning of December 7, Ginny is flying her little yellow plane above the sparkling seas when she spots an unknown aircraft closing in on her. She recognises the red symbol of the Japanese fighter planes almost too late. Somehow, she manages to land unscathed, but the choices she is forced to make in the terrible hours that follow have tragic consequences....

Doretta Schwartz used to be so happy and passed her positive attitude along to friends in several letters she wrote each month. But that all changed the day she learned of her fiancé’s death and a heavy weight of depression fell upon her. Feeling empty, she puts away her letter writing and won’t even respond to calls from friends. William’s twin brother, Warren, is also grieving his loss, while at the same time, trying to be supportive to his parents and Doretta. Doretta responds to Warren’s friendship, but is he just becoming a replacement for the once-in-a-lifetime love she lost?

In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka’s Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic 23-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka’s complex genius and his even more complex character. For 36-year-old Kafka, she was “a living fire, such as I have never seen.” It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.

Letters for My Father explores grieving and making sense of a relationship between a father and son while also being so much more. Written by the influential existential psychologist Louis Hoffman, who has worked extensively with grieving throughout his career as a psychotherapist, this is also a book of love, self-exploration, relational depth, and the world and realities that shaped his relationship with his father. As Hoffman journeys into grieving, he journeys into himself and into existence.