Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

"London, 1865 Vera Sorokina loves immersing herself in tales of adventure, mystery, and romance. Her own days are filled with the mundane work of running the book and print shop she owns with her father. Brogan Donnelly has built a career as a penny dreadful writer, yet he feels dissatisfied. Brogan and Vera's paths cross, and the attraction is both immediate and ill-advised. When the growing criminal enterprise run by the elusiv and violent Mastiff...

Jonathan Swift's world-famous books from Gulliver's Travels to A Modest Proposal are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. Half-orphaned, a Dubliner by birth, but a man who would always insist he was English, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a figure of great contradictions. An essayist, political pamphleteer, poet, and cleric who became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, Swift satirized the powerful but aspired to political...

"Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy, and back-breaking. It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone, and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were...

Oscar Wilde was one of the first and unquestionably one of the greatest self-publicists ever. Above all, and with that exceptional streak of modernity which characterises much of Wilde's life and works, he understood the power of the image in his campaign of promoting himself. As early as his Oxford days he had himself photographed with his contemporaries in loud check suits of the latest fashion. Later, when he toured America to lecture on aesthetics...

With the bookshop where she works about to close, Laura Horsley finds herself agreeing to help organize a literary festival deep in the heart of the English countryside. But when an innocent mistake leads the festival committee to believe that Laura is a personal friend of the author at the top of their wish-list, she finds herself travelling to Ireland to persuade the notorious recluse (and her literary hero) to come out of hiding.

The author offers a memoir of growing up in Ireland with a violent father and selfless mother as the eldest of seven children, describing the strong influence of his mother's love, and the impact of the landscape of his youth on both his life and work.