"Powers of the air, be here now. So mote it be." Conceived on May Morning, Nell is claimed by the piskies and faeries as a merrybegot, one of their own. She is a wild child: herb gatherer and healer, spell-weaver and midwife...and, some say, a witch. Grace is everything Nell is not. She is the Puritan minister's daughter: beautiful and refined, innocent and sweet-natured...to those who think they know her. But she is hiding a secret -- a secret that will bring everlasting shame to her family should it ever come to light. A merrybegot and a minister's daughter -- two girls who could not have less in common. Yet their fates collide when Grace and her younger sister, Patience, are suddenly spitting pins, struck with fits, and speaking in fevered tongues. The minister is convinced his daughters are the victims of witchcraft. And all signs point to Nell as the source of the trouble.... Set during the tumultuous era of the English Civil War, The Minister's Daughter is a spellbinding page-turner -- stunning historical fiction that captures the superstition, passion, madness, and magic of a vanished age.

Call them prayers or curses. Fictions or true stories. Mary Dalton's new poems are voices caught in print, fashioned from the vigorous idioms and cadences of Newfoundland speech. Readers will, likely for the first time, encounter words like "conkerbells", "drite", "mollyfoostering", "mawmouth" and "elt"--potent words rich with the music of their centuries-old origins. The Atlantic landscape, its water and weather, is made to play a memorable role in these poems, reflecting the often anarchic vitality of a complex, sea-dependent people. But the true marvel of Merrybegot, Dalton's third book, is the linguistic energy, the "salt accent," of its various speakers. The title, Merrybegot (a child born outside marriage), aptly suggests this poetry's extraordinary originality. Here is a language, and a community, rendered in all its exuberant and irreverent life.

The Merrybegot casts a powerful spell over its readers. Utterly bewitching. Abi Elphinstone.In a remote west-country village, all is not as it seems. Rumours of bad magic and witchcraft are spreading. The piskies are whispering in the orchard and an ill wind is blowing. The fingers of blame are all pointing to Nell, the cunning woman's granddaughter.With the Witchfinder General on his way, Nell is alone, trapped, and in fear for her life. Who can she trust? And who will save her?This amazing story is being reissued with a stunning new cover by Karl James Mountford for a new generation of readers to enjoy.

This new novel in the “wonderfully absorbing” (Library Journal) Secrets of the Tudor Court series, features a tailor’s daughter who suspects she is an illegitimate offspring of King Henry VIII. Audrey Malte is illegitimate, though her beloved father—tailor to King Henry VIII—prefers to call her “merry-begot,” saying there was much joy in her making. Then Audrey visits the royal court with her father, and the whispers start about Audrey’s distinctive Tudor-red hair and the kindness that the king shows her. Did dashing Henry perhaps ask Malte to raise a royal love child? The king’s favor, however, brings Audrey constraint as well as opportunity. Though she holds tender feelings for her handsome music tutor, John Harington, the king is pressuring her to marry into the family of treacherous, land-hungry Sir Richard Southwell. Audrey determines to learn the truth about her birth at last. The answer may give her the freedom to give her heart as she chooses . . . or it could ensnare her deeper in an enemy’s ruthless scheme.

In mid-nineteenth-century London, destitute Ivy, whose main asset is her red hair, comes to the attention of a painter of the pre-Raphaelite school who, with the connivance of her family, is determined to make her his model and muse.

Mary Dalton's fifth collection, Hooking, is a series of centos that, on one level, draw inspiration from a traditional Newfoundland craft. Like a hooked rug made up of strips of fabric cut from old clothes, the cento is stitched together from lines scissored out of other poems. Dalton's cento variants, however, range across continents and epochs, rummaging among poems contemporary and canonical in celebration of the recombinatory energies of language. As Dalton's lines hook together syntactically and emotionally, they create a striking music, by turns subtle, startling and dazzling.

Red Ledger is Mary Dalton's fourth book of poems, and follows the success of her highly praised and prize-winning collection Merrybegot. In Red Ledger, Dalton's wit leaps forward to create yet another series of pressure-packed, tough-minded poems inseparable from their Atlantic source. The immediacy and precision of her diction and the large scope of her thinking evoke an elemental world in ways that recall the oral traditions from which Dalton has often drawn inspiration. Rarely has the formidable Newfoundland character found such authentic expression. Ranging from erotic lyrics to riddles, from parables to social-political meditations, Red Ledger is the work of an exceptional poet who has once again struck out on her own.

Tanya is no ordinary girl. She can see fairies. But not the fairies we imagine. Evil fairies who cast spells on her, rousing her from her sleep and propelling her out of bed. At wit's end with her daughter's inexplicable behavior, Tanya's mother sends her away to live with her grandmother at Elvesden Manor, a secluded countryside mansion on the outskirts of a peculiar Essex town. There is plenty to explore, as long as Tanya stays away from Hangman's Wood- a vast stretch of forest, full of catacombs and notorious for people losing their lives. Fifty years ago a girl vanished in the woods, a girl Tanya's grandmother will not speak of. As Tanya learns more about this girl, she finds herself dangerously close to vanishing into the fairy realm forever. Debut author Michelle Harrison weaves an intricate mystery into a beautiful and haunting fantasy that captures a rich world of fairy lore where only the color red can offer protection.

Every family has its secrets. . . . Hazel Louise Mull-Dare has a good life, if a bit dull. Her adoring father grants her every wish, she attends a prestigious school for the Daughters of Gentlemen, and she receives no pressure to excel in anything whatsoever. But on the day of the Epsom Derby—June 4th, 1913—everything changes. A woman in a dark coat fatally steps in front of the king's horse, protesting the injustice of denying women the vote. Hazel is transfixed. And when her bold American friend, Gloria, convinces her to stage her own protest, Hazel gets a taste of rebellion. But her stunt leads to greater trouble than she could have ever imagined—Hazel is banished from London to her family’s sugar plantation in the Caribbean. There she is forced to confront the dark secrets of her family—secrets that have festered—and a shame that lingers on.