Arcadia Public Library

Peter receives a piece of land as a gift for his upcoming wedding. While preparing the property to build a home for his new family, he finds human remains in the ground. He decides to keep the discovery to himself so that all of the wedding arrangements can go on as planned. However, the deeper he tries to keep his secret, the more he seems to be under control of something -- or rather someone -- as strange visions and events begin to haunt the celebratory...

The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking,...

An epic saga of the upstairs and downstairs residents of an English country house which spans some 240 years and includes the stories of its original architect, a Victorian family that shared four decades of family history, soldiers billeted in the house during World War I, and a young couple who restores the house in the 1950s.

"It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders--migrants fleeing the plague--find no...

Ever since the first milords embarked on a Grand Tour in the seventeenth century, the passion for developing collections has been a national trait of England. As a result, the country's aristocratic palaces became repositories of treasure gathered from around the globe. But so too, thanks to the spread of an Empire providing goods from across the globe, did almost every residence in England. Romantic English Homes features 14 such houses. Large or...

Leaving London to move into a beautiful house in the country, Miranda and David find their marriage succumbing to long-standing conflicts until a mysterious Frenchman arrives to tend their garden, bringing with him a healing energy that is drawn from nature.

From the author of "The House at Riverton" comes a story of outer and inner journeys as "Nell," abandoned as a child, leaves her adoptive parents in Australia and travels to England to trace her story, to find her real identity--a quest that ultimately leads her to Blackhurst Manor on the Cornish coast and the secrets of the doomed Mountrachet family.