Lori Smith follows Jane Austen's life and lore through England, and through emotional journeys filled with grace and hope instead of stagnation and despair.

"Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and on going impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote. Ian's childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition...

"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But she has only rarely given readers a glimpse into her...

An intimate portrait of the nineteenth-century literary master's relationships with definitive women in his life discusses the mysterious Ellen Ternan; creative muse Maria Beadnell; and his beloved late sister-in-law, Mary Scott Hogarth.

Tells the story of how the publishing industry rose from virtual obscurity during the Victorian age to dominate English and world literature, and relates personal anecdotes about authors, editors, and publishers of the era and their attempts to make decent living.