Esme S Gift

Terror was within. Terror was without. Like her mother, she was at the water’s mercy. In the enchanted world of Aeolia, fifteen-year-old Esme Silver faces her hardest task yet. She must master her unruly Gift—the power to observe the past—and uncover the secrets she needs to save her mother, Ariane. In between attending school in the beguiling canal city of Esperance, Esme and her friends—old and new—travel far and wide across Aeolia, gathering the ingredients for a potent magical elixir. Their journey takes them to volcanic isles, sunken ruins and snowy eyries, spectacular places fraught with danger, where they must face their deepest fears and find hope in the darkest of places. Esme’s Gift, the second instalment in the Esme trilogy, is a gripping fantasy adventure for readers 12 years and over.

This was her last chance. Her hand twisted high in the air. When fifteen-year-old Esme Silver objects at her father’s wedding, her protest is dismissed as the action of a stubborn, selfish teenager. Everyone else has accepted the loss of Esme’s mother, Ariane—so why can’t she? But Esme is suspicious. She is sure that others are covering up the real reason for her mother’s disappearance—that ‘lost at sea’ is code for something more terrible, something she has a right to know. After Esme is accidentally swept into the enchanted world of Aeolia, the truth begins to unfold. With her newfound friends, Daniel and Lillian, Esme retraces her mother’s steps in the glittering canal city of Esperance, untangling the threads of Ariane’s double life. But the more Esme discovers about her mother, the more she questions whether she really knew her at all.

Terror was within. Terror was without. Like her mother, she was at the water's mercy. In the enchanted world of Aeolia, fifteen-year-old Esme Silver faces her hardest task yet. She must master her unruly Gift - the power to observe the past - and uncover the secrets she needs to save her mother, Ariane. In between attending school in the beguiling canal city of Esperance, Esme and her friends - old and new - travel far and wide across Aeolia, gathering the ingredients for a potent magical elixir. Their journey takes them to volcanic isles, sunken ruins and snowy eyries, spectacular places fraught with danger, where they must face their deepest fears and find hope in the darkest of places. Esme's Gift, the second instalment in the Esme trilogy, is a gripping fantasy adventure for readers 12 years and over.

You are cordially invited to celebrate Christmas, Fortune-style, with these brand-new stories! Let bestselling authors Barbara Boswell, Jennifer Greene and Jackie Merritt enthrall you with a Texas-size celebration! Determined to repay the people who stood by him in his darkest hours, Ryan Fortune bestows on them three special gifts intended to bring love and the promise of family…. The powerful sheik. Ryan gives wealthy sheik Nico Tan-efi his prized signet ring with hopes that the brooding ruler can woo back his ex-fiancéeé. His daring rescuers. Two strangers are each given a home—only it's the same house! Can Ryan's matchmaking scheme pull these orphans together? The diligent doctor. Two million dollars allows researcher Dr. Maggie Taylor to hire her sexy rival to her cause, only his cause is loosening her tightly leashed passion!

An unexpected Christmas arrival… …on his doorstep! In this Pups that Make Miracles story, twelve years ago neurologist Charles ended his engagement to orthopedic surgeon Harriet to fulfill his duty to his family—he couldn’t let Harriet sacrifice her surgical dreams for him. But a recent chance reunion at a medical conference led to one more unforgettable night… And what should’ve been the perfect goodbye is now just the beginning… Harriet’s arrived at Heatherglen Castle Clinic—pregnant!

Piecing together the evidence . . . Genealogist Sophreena McClure is an expert at unearthing other people’s secrets. Using old documents and photographs, Soph and her business partner, Esme Sabatier—also a gifted medium—trace family histories and create heritage scrapbooks. Their latest client, Dorothy Pritchett Porter, is thrilled with their research into Morningside’s most prestigious clan. But before Dorothy can proudly display her new scrapbooks on Founders’ Day, she’s found murdered. It seems the ties that bind can also strangle, for Dorothy has been killed using the Pritchett family pearls. Pegged as prime suspects, Sophreena and Esme turn their investigative skills from the dearly departed to the alive and dangerous, hoping to pin down the real killer among Dorothy’s kinfolk. Sophreena’s scrapbooking club members, crafty in more ways than one, pitch in to help. As the Pritchett ancestral roots turn out to be more tangled than anyone suspected, Sophreena wonders just how many skeletons lurk in this family closet—and whether she and Esme are destined to join them. . . .

'This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.' This collection of nine stories includes the first appearance of J. D. Salinger's fictional Glass family, introducing Seymour Glass in the unforgettable 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish'. 'The most perfectly balanced collection of stories I know' Ann Patchett

From the Costa Award winning, bestselling author of THIS MUST BE THE PLACE and I AM, I AM, I AM, comes an intense, breathtakingly accomplished story of a woman's life stolen, and reclaimed. 'Unputdownable' Ali Smith Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris's questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family's history?