#1 New York Times bestselling author and “queen of royal fiction” (USA TODAY) Philippa Gregory brings to life the passionate, turbulent times of seventeenth-century England as seen through the eyes of the country’s most famous royal gardener. John Tradescant’s fame and skill as a gardener are unsurpassed in seventeenth-century England, but it is his clear-sighted honesty and loyalty that make him an invaluable servant. As an informal confidant of Sir Robert Cecil, adviser to King James I, he witnesses the making of history, from the Gunpowder Plot to the accession of King Charles I and the growing animosity between Parliament and court. Tradescant’s talents soon come to the attention of the most powerful man in the country, the irresistible Duke of Buckingham, the lover of King Charles I. Tradescant has always been faithful to his masters, but Buckingham is unlike any he has ever known: flamboyant, outrageously charming, and utterly reckless. Every certainty upon which Tradescant has based his life—his love of his wife and children, his passion for his work, his loyalty to his country—is shattered as he follows Buckingham to court, to war, and to the forbidden territories of human love.

50 easy projects to make your Christmas very merry. From quilts, wall hangings, table runners, ornaments to stockings.

Saltwater Joys is set in Ireland’s Eye, a ghost town located on the edge of Newfoundland and Labrador—one of hundreds of fishing outports forced to resettle during the province’s confederation with Canada. The grave consequences of resettlement for the people and culture of Newfoundland and Labrador are illuminated in this intimate tale of one family’s experience across two generations. In the fall of 1965, John Lee, a young fisherman, makes a tragic decision that changes the course of his life, pushing him to a self-imposed exile and to the brink of insanity. Twenty years later, John must face the demons of his past when a young woman ventures to the rocky shores of Newfoundland in search of her roots. This work of literary fiction explores themes of love, suffering, survival and redemption through two parallel love stories—love for a woman and love for a province. The reader will come to know Newfoundland and Labrador and all it has to offer in its vast natural beauty, poetic language, close-knit communities, bountiful hospitality, ghost stories, folklore and colourful culture. Saltwater Joys is a mournful and haunting story that will surely captivate and call you home.

Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons is a literary approach to consciousness where Donald Wesling denies that emotion is the scandal or handmaid of reason--rather emotion is the co-creator with reason of human life in the world. Discoveries in neuro-science in the 1990s Decade of the Brain have proven that thinking and feeling are wrapped with each other, and regulate and fulfill each other. Accepting this co-creative equality, we reveal a new role for literature, or a traditional role we've repressed: literature as a set of processes in time where we've thought feeling through stories about the lives of imaginary persons. We need these stories in order to practice emotions for when we return to the world from reading. Donald Wesling argues that to be more accurate in our dealings with stories, we require a grammar of this new recognition, where we build up traditional stylistics by a more careful tracking of emotion-states as these are set into writing. The first half of Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons offers a creative stock-taking of the current state of scholarship on emotion, based on wide reading in several fields. The second half gives three focused studies, rich in examples, of emotion as cognition, as story, and as historical structure of feeling.

The Joys of Life and The Miracle are books that vary from a fictitious frame of story writing. It is beautiful and lovely with a very happy ending. But the best part is the actual books and how the stories unfold. Its every childs fantasy and quite compelling, hence the titles.