Akron Public Library

The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece-a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied...

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,...

When Elizabeth Bennet meets Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time at a ball, she writes him off as an arrogant and obnoxious man. He not only acts like an insufferable snob, but she also overhears him rejecting the very idea of asking her for a dance! As life pits them against each other again and again, Darcy begins to fall for Elizabeth's wit and intelligence and Elizabeth begins to question her feelings about Darcy. But when Darcy saves her youngest...

Desperate Lavinia Gray gets some unexpected help from Parth Sterling, the richest bachelor in England, with finding a husband, and as they work closely together, she vows to convince him that he is the only man for her.

As a member of the Junior Ganymede Club--an association of butlers and valets that is in reality an arm of the British intelligence service--Jeeves must ferret out a Fascist spy, with the help of his hapless employer, Bertie Wooster.

"In Uneasy Lies the Crown, the thrilling new mystery in Tasha Alexander's bestselling series, Lady Emily and her husband Colin must stop a serial killer whose sights may be set on the new king, Edward VII. On her deathbed, Queen Victoria asks to speak privately with trusted agent of the Crown Colin Hargreaves, slipping him a letter with her last, parting command: Une sanz pluis. Sapere aude. "One and no more. Dare to know." The year is 1901 and the...

"In 1903, tensions between Britain and Germany are starting to loom over Europe, something that has not gone unnoticed by Lady Emily and her husband, Colin Hargreaves. An agent of the Crown, Colin carries the weight of the Empire, but his focus is drawn to Italy by a series of burglaries at his daughter's palazzo in Florence--burglaries that might have international ramifications. He and Emily travel to Tuscany where, soon after their arrival, a stranger...

Miss Dido Kent vacations at a cousin's home and encounters distasteful dealings among Surrey's upper classes in the wake of a neighbor's sudden death, a situation that poses complications to her romance with Mr. William Lomax.

"In skillfully intertwined storylines from the dawn of the twentieth century and the heyday of the Roman Empire, Tasha Alexander's bestselling series brings Lady Emily and her husband to Pompeii, where they uncover a recent crime in the ancient city. Some corpses lie undisturbed longer than others. But when Emily discovers a body hidden in plain sight amongst the ruins of Pompeii, she sets in motion a deadly chain of events that ties her future to...

When their neighbor, a young aristocrat, is murdered, Lady Emily Hargreave and her husband Colin examine the motives of those closest to him to catch a killer amidst dark secrets and forbidden passions.