Fiction

A young Roman soldier falls in love only to discover that his sweetheart belongs to a strange new cult--a group that meets in secret to worship their one and only god. The romance of Marcus Vinicius and Lygia unfolds amid the decadence of ancient Rome, where bloodthirsty crowds flock to gladiatorial contests and a mad emperor sets fire to his own city. With its captivating blend of fictional and real characters, this historical novel contrasts the worldly opulence of the Roman aristocracy wit...

The Plaque Journal by Michael D. O'Brien This is Michael O'Brien's fourth novel in the Children of the Last Days series, the third book in a trilogy. The central character is Nathaniel Delaney, the editor of a small-town newspaper, who is about to face the greatest crisis of his life. As the novel begins, ominous events are taking place throughout North America, but little of it surfaces before the public eye. Set in the not-too-distant future, the story describes a nation that is quietly shi...

What secrets lie behind the doors at Misselthwaite Manor? Recently arrived at her uncle's estate, orphaned Mary Lennox is spoiled, sickly, and certain she won't enjoy living there. Then she discovers the arched doorway into an overgrown garden, shut up since the death of her aunt ten years earlier. Mary soon begins transforming it into a thing of beauty--unaware that she is changing too. But Misselthwaite hides another secret, as mary discovers one night. High in a dark room, away from the re...

As the Envoy of the Four Kingdoms, Wes has had his purpose decided since birth: sacrifice the treasures of the people to the dragon gods, and they will keep Kaveryth safe.For five years, he's been forced to watch his Kingdom fall into ruin while carrying an unbearable grief of his own. The Elders insist that they must continue to be faithful to the Dracodei, but Wes is beginning to doubt that their protectors are holding up their end of the bargain.Despite his misgivings, he continues to fulf...

After acquiring Christ's Robe, Marcellus then sets forth on a quest to find the truth about the Nazarene's garment -- a quest that reaches to the very roots and heart of Christianity and is set against the vividly limned background of ancient Rome.Here is a timeless story of adventure, faith, and romance, a tale of spiritual longing and ultimate redemption.

In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O'Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O'Connor's unique view of life--infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the necessity of salvation. These classic ...

The Astounding Achievements of Mother Cabrini: A Novel Based on the Life of Mother Frances X. Cabrini Her passion became her reality. Children were her life, and God's messenger Mother Frances X. Cabrini dedicated her entire life to caring for poor Italian immigrants who sought refuge in the slums of New York City in the early 1890s. A devout champion of education and proper health care for the poverty-stricken, Cabrini forged a path of survival for young children by building schools, orphana...

1876, Philadelphia. Caroline Martin's life has finally taken a turn for the better. After years of hard work, she has met a virtuous and wealthy man whose love seems to promise the kind of life realized only within the comforting novels she keeps on her night table. Tragedy, however, will teach Caroline of the complexity with which God Himself authors the lives of those who turn toward him. Gold Medal winner for Religious Fiction in the 2010 IPPY Awards. Parents Guide WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD...

Daughter of a noble Roman family, Agnella had heard tell of the vain beliefs and foul practices of the Christians. Everyone knew that they murdered infants and drank their blood from silver vessels. They venerated a criminal who died ignominiously on a cross. They worshipped a god with the head of an ass. What good person wouldn t hate such a vile sect? Yet Agnella s experiences of the rites of Aphrodite had given her reason to wonder why her own gods encourage such shameful behavior. When Di...

There is something different about Angelina. She is passionate and idealistic by nature, thanks to her Italian mother. But her German father's influence makes her stubborn and headstrong as well. With Europe embroiled in World War II and her father missing on the Russian front, Angelina journeys alone to seek out her mother's family in Italy. There she finds a kindred spirit--her cousin Giulia, two years her senior.Both girls are idealistic atheists and ardent Communists. With Fascist Italy r...

Book 5 of the Fairy Tale Novels Series Alex O'Donnell and the 40 Cyberthieves is a book written by Regina Doman. When his computer hacker dad discovers a secret website, Alex O'Donnell and his girlfriend Kateri become embroiled in a mystery that leads to sudden wealth, and murder. A modern retelling of the classic Arabian Nights tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." This book is a great read for anyone who loves suspenseful mysteries with a touch of the supernatural. Parents Guide Sexualit...

The tale of Heathcliff's and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, shocked the book's first readers, with even Emily's sister Charlotte claiming, "Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is."  Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectib...

Best-selling novelist Michael O'Brien returns to the theme of people of faith striving to find their way through a societal collapse during the rise of new dimensions of totalitarianism. Set in the near future, all of North America is plunged into crisis as basic communications and other services suddenly and inexplicably fail. As the tension mounts, a disparate group of people come together from several directions, apparently by coincidence. Many of them are strangers to each other, and some...

Historical in substance, romantic in spirit, heroic in scale, A Distant Trumpet is a novel of the American West. At its center is Matthew Carlton Hazard, born in 1857 at Fox Creek, Indiana; raised by his mother after his father's death in the Battle of Chickamauga; and designated, at the solemn age of seven, by President Abraham Lincoln himself to the Army of the United States. Commissioned in 1880 as second lieutenant of cavalry, Matthew reports for duty to Fort Delivery, Arizona, where he w...

The definitive paperback editions of L.M. Montgomery's beloved novels get a brand-new look for the next hundred years! On a blustery November day the King children and Sara, the Story Girl, come up with a great idea that will help them endure the dreary winter season. They will publish a magazine of their thoughts and adventures. From "Personals" and "Fashion Notes" to an etiquette column and stories of the most interesting happenings in Carlisle, Our Magazine is simply the most entertaining ...

The eighth and final installment in the Rose Years series, which tells the story of the spirited daughter of the author of the beloved Little House series. Rose Wilder has become an independent young woman. She leaves Rocky Ridge Farm, first for Kansas City to learn how to be a telegrapher, then for San Francisco. Her dream is to work for a year or two, save a little money, and then marry Paul Cooley, her childhood sweetheart. But the big city has all sorts of surprises in store for Rose, and...

Emily Starr was born with the desire to write. As an orphan living on New Moon Farm, writing helped her face difficult, lonely times. But now all her friends are going away to high school in nearby Shrewsbury, and her old-fashioned, tyrannical aunt Elizabeth will only let her go if she promises to stop writing! All the same, this is the first step in Emily's climb to success. Once in town, Emily's activities set the Shrewsbury gossips buzzing. But Emily and her friends are confident -- Ilse's...

One morning, attorney Dan Geary, seventy-seven years old, finds himself in the middle of a rolling, polychrome landscape. The greens are bold and bright. Birds sing in the distance. Tall grasses surge like a sea before the wind. He has never seen anything quite like it. But somehow--with the doctors and beeping monitors suddenly gone--he knows exactly where he is: the afterlife.What a relief not to be floating on a cloud, playing a harp. Instead, a hiking pack full of gear sits on his back, a...

Once a long time ago a little girl named Laura Ingalls lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little house made of logs. She grew up and wrote nine books about her childhood - the famous Little House stories. Laura had a daughter of her own named Rose, who grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, also in a little house made of logs. "Little House on Rocky Ridge" is the beginning of Rose's story, which starts where the book "The First Four Years" ends.

Fascinating for Latin learners and for Tolkien fans of all ages, The Hobbit has been translated into Latin for the first time since its publication 75 years ago. In foramine terrae habitabat hobbitus. ('In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.') The Hobbit, is one of the world's most popular classic stories, appealing to adults as much as to the children for whom J.R.R. Tolkien first wrote the book. Translated worldwide into more than 60 modern languages, now Hobbitus Ille is finally pu...

Philip Lawler, one of America's most respected Catholic writers and cultural critics, bursts onto the fiction scene with a riveting debut novel that plunges readers into the hidden battles of the Church in the 1980s. Lawler exposes beneath the surface of parish life and chancery politics a world of secrets, compromises, and spiritual warfare -- where the faithful struggle to survive and a young priest discovers that he has a special mission -- and powerful enemies. At the center is Fr. Andy M...

Meet Rose Wilder...the last of the Little House girls. Hard times at Rocky Ridge Farm force Rose and her family to move into the little town of Mansfield, and Rose wonders how she will ever survive. In town everything seems so different. Noisy trains race by at all hours, the streets are crowded with people, and the town folk seem so much fancier. Will Rose and her family learn to enjoy town life, far away from Rocky Ridge Farm?

"She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older— the natural consequence of an unnatural beginning." Eight years ago, Anne Elliot drew back her consent to marry Fredrick Wentworth, the headstrong and spirited naval commander of a yet-certain career or established fortune, in the conviction that she acted for his own good. Forbearing, selfless, and pensive, she would as yet have married him against the wishes of her vain and rank-obsessed father, Sir Walt...

"She was not often invited to join in the conversation of the others, nor did she desire it. Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions; and, in observing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she found entertainment that could only have been heightened by having Edmund to speak to of what she felt." In early 19th century England, Fanny Price, at ten years ol...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall tells the story of Helen Graham, the estranged wife of a dissolute rake, desperate to protect her son from his destructive influence, in full flight from a shocking world of debauchery and cruelty. Drawing on her first-hand experiences with her brother Branwell, Anne Brontë's novel scandalized contemporary readers and still retains its power to shock today. The new introduction by Josephine McDonagh sheds light on the intellectual and cultural context of the novel,...

The gates of Drancy Internment Camp in the northeast suburbs of Paris served as a holding pen for thousands of Jews during the German occupation of France in World War II. Jean Wahl, philosophy professor, poet, bachelor at the top of Parisian society before his arrest, was among those very few who escaped. In this searing historical novel by W. C. Hackett, the story is told in Wahl's own voice, from the moment he passed beyond the gates of the camp to his harrowing flight for the Free Zone in...

The second book in the Rose Years series, the story of the spirited daughter of the author of the beloved Little House series. Rose Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, is the last of the Little House girls. Going fishing for the first time, starting in a new school, saving the farmhouse from a fire--these are just a few things that happen during young Rose Wilder's first year at Rocky Ridge Farm. She and her parents, Laura and Almanzo, have moved to the Missouri Ozarks to begin a new lif...

Dante Alighieri's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a timeless epic rooted in the history and culture of the early Italian Renaissance. Now available in a sparkling new translation, The Divine Comedy Volume 1: Inferno captures all the power and meaning of Dante's original work. This comprehensive edition features Mark Musa's celebrated translation into blank verse that perfectly preserves Dante's simple and natural style, allowing readers to fully appreciate the richness of this classic poem...

Enthusiasm, in the religious sense, is more akin to fanaticism than fervor. As Monsignor Ronald Knox describes, it is that recurring situation in Church history in which men and women, seek to be less and less "of the world" and more and more attentive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Their assumption is audacious yet simple: grace does not perfect nature; it destroys and replaces it. The inevitable result: separation, secession, schism. In twenty-three informative and entertaining chapter...

This book puts into spiritual, theological, philosophical, psychological, moral, historical, cultural, and political perspective the incredible evil we have witnessed and suffered over the past four years, amounting to the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. The plandemic was not only an all-out assault on every human being on the planet, but also an assault on reality itself. Though its most obvious effects were economic and political, at its core it was a spiritual and psycholog...

The chequered life of Ludolph the Carthusian (c. 1295-1378) found its spiritual contentment in the writing of his colossal work on the Vita Jesu Christi in Latin. The book on the Life of Christ occupied some forty years of Ludolph's life in a charterhouse in Mainz. It has been styled as a summa evangelica and as it contains a series of meditations, spiritual instructions and prayers, it has also served to many a medieval scholar as a collation of dogmatic and moral dissertations. These are st...

This book will help you understand that you can study dog poetry, become the Minnesota Twins closer, run for president of the United States, become a Franciscan friar in Albuquerque, put oranges in a circle, teach conflicting political theory at the University of Idaho, attend Mass literally underground in a subterranean cathedral hundreds of feet below the desert floor, play no-pads tackle football on Boise State’s blue turf, write tracts while sunbathing atop Namur’s castle in summer, discu...

Religious leaders do not teach about Hell to scare people to come to Church, though the fear of Hell often leads souls to turn back to God. Hell is the result of mankind's free will, not God's malice. French novelist Léon Bloy said: "The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint." Since only saints are in Heaven, the greatest tragedy, then, is to go to Hell.In these gripping pages, Dan Burke and Patrick O'Hearn present the most common r...

Stella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly-and inexplicably-breaks off their engagement, Stella throws herself into a tough South Chicago teaching assignment. There she meets Peter Clavier (P.C.), a psychologist-activist whose uncle-a pastor-has long prophesied for Peter a future of otherworldly greatness. As Stella draws out Peter's past, the novel follows P...

One of the most eminent poets and essayists of the last century in Italy, Tito Casini (1897-1987) devoted the last years of his life to a passionate protest against the desecration of the centuries-old Roman liturgy, the spiritual home of millions and a cultural treasure that could never be rivaled, let alone replaced. His defense of tradition was unique in mode, combining lampoon, lamentation, and lyricism in a philosophic poetry that transcends mere polemic. Perhaps the most unique of his w...

What is truth and what is fiction? In this optimistic play, of uncertain origin, Goobet enquires into the nature of truth, encountering a range of philosophical characters who happen to be passing by the village green. The play is upbuilding for Goobet, an unlettered bumpkin, but also for us in our own day. It turns out that a "walkynge-trewth" is one that is lived and performed in real time, rather than statically mirrored, which means that our work of reading is implicated in the general af...

Spring has come to the abbey, and the community is busily preparing for the May Day weekend and the arrival of Boy Scouts who will hold their annual camp on the abbey grounds. When a Boy Scout named Antoine is sent home in disgrace, Fr Gabriel accompanies him to his house, which has become the scene of a violent crime. Antoine's father, Charles, has been found dead, apparently killed during a botched burglary. Suspecting there was more to the crime than what first meets the eye, Fr Gabriel jo...

Come and mend your broken hearts here. Just when Azalea should feel that everything is before her--beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing--it's taken away. All of it. And Azalea is trapped. The Keeper understands. He's trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. So he extends an invitation. Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest, but there is a cost. The Keeper like...

The Year of Thamar's Book is set in the months from the spring of 2015 to the summer of 2016. An elderly recluse living in a quiet village in Burgundy discovers he is not as alone in the world as he has for many years assumed. His grandson, well-educated but ignorant, comes to the village to help the old man make a book of the pile of chaotic manuscript that tells the story of a difficult, painful yet luminous life. As he writes, and listens, the young man learns a good deal, and begins to co...

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadDon Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray--he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants--Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world togethe...

In the years since his graduation from St. Marquis University, Blake Yourrick has fled his family and Milwaukee, rotating from job to dead-end job-working the Bakken oilfields in Dakota and even signing on as the night caretaker of a rural abbey graveyard. Deep in student debt and estranged from his misanthropic, alcoholic father, Blake is haunted by the memory of his mother's death-and by his relationship with his college mentor, a defrocked priest named Theo Hape, who is known for his adven...

The seventh book in the Rose Years series, the story of the spirited daughter of the author of the beloved Little House series. A whole new world opens up for Rose Wilder when she leaves Rocky Ridge Farm and moves to Louisiana to live with her aunt Eliza Jane. Rose is sixteen now, and she thrives in a city brimming with excitement and adventure. Rose even finds herself becoming an independent young woman with her own ideas, ambitions, and dreams.

Home is where the heart is At twenty years old, Pat Gardiner has never regretted staying at her beloved home of Silver Bush. She has the wild stories of housekeeper Judy Plum to amuse her, a countess to entertain, a cat named Bold-and-Bad to keep out of trouble, and her younger sister Rae to care for. But she does miss her friend Jingle Gordon, who's away at college. He's the only boy who ever truly understood her, and their little spot called Happiness is much lonelier without him. Eventuall...

A beautiful clothbound edition of Anne Brontë's most enduring novel, to accompany her sisters' greatest books in Penguin Hardcover Classics Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. For mor...