Marguerite is sparkling and beautiful as she dances around her fountain, but Benjamin is too shy to dance with her. Only when the villainous Randolph gets in the way does Benjamin realize how brave he really can be. Rachel Elliot's sumptuous words and Petra Brown's lush illustrations combine to make this a beautiful book to treasure for years to come.

Marguerite is sparkling and beautiful as she dances around her fountain, but Benjamin is too shy to dance with her. Only when the villainous Randolph gets in the way does Benjamin realize how brave he really can be. Rachel Elliot's sumptuous words and Petra Brown's lush illustrations combine to make this a beautiful book to treasure for years to come.

This book derives from the conviction that Marguerite Blessington (1788–1849) merits scholarly attention as a travel writer, and thus offers the first detailed analysis of Blessington’s four travel books: ‘A Tour in The Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820’ (1822), ‘Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821’ (1822), ‘The Idler in Italy’ (1839) and ‘The Idler in France’ (1841). It argues that travelling and travel writing provided Blessington with endless opportunities to reshape her public personae, demonstrating that her predilection for self-fashioning was related to the various tendencies in tourism and literature as well as the changing aesthetic and social trends in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The sweet fragrance of the otherwise odorless Marguerite Garden of Nona Luisa puts the whole neighborhood under a strange spell. The Magic and the Real intertwine in the process of reading almost as the memory of a dream intertwines with reality upon waking. The book contains mysterious toads, an absurd secular ritual of listening to snails, the end of the world, the vice of smoking, playful reminiscences of childhood, as well as daily poems written to the beloved. To the only Love, with millions of stories and names. A refreshing saga in which even Destiny and Karma are Elements of the Magic constituting the corpus of this narrative that the author masterfully set. You will read The Marguerite Garden of Nona Luisa And Other Stories in one sitting, all the while walking through numerous psychological and philosophical spaces of the human.

A sweeping epic in the vein of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and inspired by a true story, this stunning US literary debut captures the never-before-told journey of the Baleine Brides: a ship full of young women plucked from a Paris asylum and sent to marry settlers in North America's rough Louisiana Territory. Paris, 1720. La Salpêtrière hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds. Halfway across the world, France's colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it. So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female “volunteers” of childbearing age—orphans, prisoners, and mental patients—to be shipped to New Orleans. Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve-year old orphan, a mute ‘madwoman,’ and an accused abortionist. Charlotte, Pétronille, and Geneviève, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures. Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity—pirates, slavedrivers, sickness, war—but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and a friendship forged in fire that will sustain through the years. At once a gorgeously written work of startling depth and emotion and a gripping drama marrying high-seas adventure with pioneer grit, Pelican Girls is a powerful, thought-provoking novel about female friendship and desire and the daunting compromises women are forced to make to survive.

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