The year is 1903, and the garrison of Yangambi on the banks of the River Congo is under the command of Captain Lalande Biran. The captain is also a poet whose ambition is to amass a fortune and return to the literary cafes of Paris. His glamorous wife Christine has a further ambition: to own seven houses in France, a house for every year he has been abroad. At Lalande Biran's side are the ex-legionnaire van Thiegel, a brutal womaniser, and the servile,...

Distraught at the loss of his inspiration, Lionel Savage, a poet from Victorian London, accidentally conjures the Devil and realizes that he has inadvertently sold his rich wife's soul to him, and plots a rescue mission to Hell with an assortment of unlikely companions.

"Upstate New York, 1928. Laura Kelley and the man she loves sneak away from their judgmental town to attend a performance of the scandalous Ziegfeld Follies. But the dark consequences of their night of daring and delight reach far into the future.... That same evening, Bohemian poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her indulgent husband hold a wild party in their remote mountain estate, hoping to inspire her muse. Millay declares her wish for a new lover...

"Eliza is a thirtysomething struggling single mother and poet. Sasha, a twentysomething yearning for direction in life, just moved back in with her parents and dabbles as a sex worker. The two strike up an unlikely friendship that, as it veers toward something more, becomes a deeply resonant exploration of how far people are willing to go to find intimacy in a society that is increasingly not conducive to it." --Provided by Publisher.

"Introducing 14th century poet Geoffrey Chaucer as a memorable new amateur sleuth in the first of an ingeniously-conceived medieval mystery series... April, 1380. About to set off on his annual pilgrimage, Comptroller of the King's Woollens and court poet Geoffrey Chaucer is forced to abandon his plans following an appeal for help from an old friend. The Duke of Clarence, Chaucer's former guardian, has been found dead in his bed at his Suffolk castle,...

When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time. It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that...

"A perfect storm of comedic proportions erupts in a DC bookstore over the course of one soggy summer week--narrated by two very different women and punctuated by political turmoil, a celestial event, and a perpetually broken vacuum cleaner. Independent bookstore owner Sophie Bernstein is burned out on books. Mourning the death of her husband, the loss of her favorite manager, her only child's lack of aspiration, and the grim state of the world, she...

A post-mortem photographer unearths dark secrets of the past that may hold the key to his future, in this captivating debut novel in the gothic tradition of Wuthering Heights and The Thirteenth Tale . All love stories are ghost stories in disguise. When famed Byronesque poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned post-mortem photographer, is charged with a simple...

Novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo, about Afro-Latina Xiomara Batista who turns to journalling poetry. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours her frustration onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself...

Challenged to write a poem about a historical whaler her Cape Cod community reveres, a creative girl discovers the poetry journal of a 19th-century woman who shared a romance with a mysterious sea captain.