Daughter Of Fortune

From the New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, Isabelle Allende, comes a passionate tale of one young woman's quest to save her lover set against the chaos of the 1849 California Gold Rush. Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him. As Eliza embarks on her perilous journey north in the hold of a ship and arrives in the rough-and-tumble world of San Francisco, she must navigate a society dominated by greedy men. But Eliza soon catches on with the help of her natural spirit and a good friend, the Chinese doctor Tao Chi’en. What began as a search for love ends up as the conquest of personal freedom. A marvel of storytelling, Daughter of Fortune confirms once again Isabel Allende's extraordinary gift for fiction and her place as one of the world's leading writers.

Katie O'Dwyer flees the constraints of her rural Irish upbringing for the excitement of London. Here she meets and falls in love with William Melville: the imposing head of the Melville fashion dynasty. Elusive, charismatic; married. Their affair is brief but passionate. Katie conceives a child. Fifteen years later she succumbs to cancer; and her beautiful daughter Caitlin finds that she must go to live in England, with the father she has never met. Her half-sisters - cold, high-achieving Elizabeth, and spoilt princess Amber - react to her with hostility; while their elegant mother is too high on valium to notice what goes on. Reeling from her mother's death, unable to fit into this alien world, Caitlin is sent away to boarding school. It is here that something happens which is so awful, so brutalizing, it will change Caitlin forever . . . Over the next fifteen years the sisters' lives will take them in very different directions. Golden girl Elizabeth will enter the family business, hoping to fulfil her destiny of taking the helm; longing above all for her father's approval. But Caitlin remains William's favourite; even though she has rejected his love and his money. In fact, Caitlin's success as a high-fashion designer has been achieved entirely on her own terms. Amber, meanwhile, is too beautiful for her own good. Spoilt but unloved, she craves attention: this makes her easy pickings for predatory men. But the sisters' paths will continue to cross. Because the simple truth is that, no matter how far you go, you cannot escape the claims of family.

“Riveting! Camilla, high-five! Amazing work!”—Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered An audacious novel of feminine rage about one of the most prolific female serial killers in American history--and the men who drove her to it. They whisper about her in Chicago. Men come to her with their hopes, their dreams--their fortunes. But no one sees them leave. No one sees them at all after they come to call on the Widow of La Porte. The good people of Indiana may have their suspicions, but if those fools knew what she'd given up, what was taken from her, how she'd suffered, surely they'd understand. Belle Gunness learned a long time ago that a woman has to make her own way in this world. That's all it is. A bloody means to an end. A glorious enterprise meant to raise her from the bleak, colorless drudgery of her childhood to the life she deserves. After all, vermin always survive.

'A terrific novel' Angela Carter Koko won't do what is expected of her. Defying her family's wishes, she has brought up her eleven-year-old daughter alone in her apartment. And now, after a casual affair, she is unexpectedly pregnant again. What will this mean for her already troubled relationship with her daughter? As she faces the future, memories of her own childhood loss flood into her consciousness, threatening to overwhelm her. Combining the beauty and unease of a dream, this haunting novel is an unflinching portrayal of a woman's innermost fears and desires. 'As relevant today as when it was published ... at once powerfully uplifting and achingly sad' Japan Times

A sequel to Daughter of Fortune, New York Times bestselling author, Isabel Allende, continues her magic with this spellbinding family saga set against war and economic hardship. Aurora del Valle suffers a brutal trauma that erases from her mind all recollection of the first five years of her life. Raised by her ambitious grandmother, the regal and commanding Paulina del Valle, she grows up in a privileged environment, free of the limitations that circumscribe the lives of women at that time, but tormented by horrible nightmares. When she is forced to recognize her betrayal at the hands of the man she loves, and to cope with the resulting solitude, she decides to explore the mystery of her past. Portrait in Sepia is an extraordinary achievement: richly detailed, epic in scope, intimate in its probing of human character, and thrilling in the way it illuminates the complexity of family ties.

In the exotic interstellar civilization of the Second Starfaring Age, youthful wanderers are known as Children of Fortune. This is the tale of one such wanderer, who seeks her destiny on an odyssey of self-discovery amid humanity's many worlds.

An “intimate, lovely novel, most of whose concerns swirl about the pain and joys of motherhood,” from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Rules of Magic (People). Rae Perry has been in love with Jessup since high school. Two weeks before her eighteenth birthday, they ran away from Boston together and have been moving ever since—five states in seven years. Now they are in Southern California in what they call “earthquake weather,” a time when anything can happen, and Jessup is restless again. This time, Rae fears, he plans to leave without her. Lila Grey is a fortune-teller. More than a quarter century ago, on a cold and icy night in New York City, she gave birth to a daughter she never saw again. Lila is determined to find her lost child, even if it means an end to her happy life with Richard, the loving husband she refuses to let into her past. It is Lila who tells Rae she is pregnant—but the other symbol she reads in Rae’s tea leaves, she refuses to reveal. From that moment forward, their fates are inextricably linked. While Rae searches for the strength to navigate an uncertain future alone, Lila sets out to resolve her history once and for all. This luminous novel, a New York Times Notable Book, is an enthralling tribute to the profound mysteries of motherhood and childbirth from a writer who, in the words of Amy Tan, “takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things.”

Maria Espinosa should not have survived the 1679 cholera epidemic in Mexico City, nor should she have survived an Apache raid on the caravan transporting her to a sister in remote Santa Fe, in the royal colony of New Mexico.