Lost Innocence

June, 1968. America is in a state of turbulence, engulfed in civil unrest and uncertainty. Yet for Whitney Dane - spending the summer of her twenty-second year on Martha's Vineyard - life could not be safer, nor the future more certain. Educated at Wheaton, soon to be married, and the youngest daughter of the patrician Dane family, Whitney has everything she has ever wanted, and is everything her all-powerful and doting father, Charles Dane, wants her to be. But the Vineyard's still waters are disturbed by the appearance of Benjamin Blaine. An underprivileged, yet fiercely ambitious and charismatic young man, Blaine is a force of nature neither Whitney nor her family could have prepared for. As Ben's presence begins to awaken independence within Whitney, it also brings deep-rooted Dane tensions to a dangerous head. And soon Whitney's set-in-stone future becomes far from satisfactory, and her picture-perfect family far from pretty. A sweeping family drama of dark secrets and individual awakenings, set during the most consequential summer of recent American history.

When Alicia Carlyle returns to the home of her childhood after the tragic death of her husband, she is hoping to put the past behind her. But first she must come face to face with the woman who nearly destroyed her marriage and tore her family in two - her sister-in-law, Sabrina. Their enmity runs deep, but Alicia is determined to make a fresh start for herself and her two children, Nathan and Darcie, and to heal her fractured relationship with her beloved brother. However, just when it looks as if they might have a chance at a brighter future, Sabrina's fifteen-year-old daughter, Annabelle, accuses seventeen-year-old Nathan of a crime he insists he didn't commit. And once more the two families are locked in a battle that is fraught with mistrust, betrayal and lies - a battle that threatens to destroy them all...

Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this time she wrote ten novels, over one hundred short stories and countless reviews and journal articles. While earlier novels are now acknowledged as Modernist texts, her later novels can be read through the lens of postmodernism; they can be considered variously as romantic fiction, marriage novels, war time spy thrillers and psychological drama but, throughout her novels, she consistently questioned notions of identity, sexuality and the loss of innocence. A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen offers a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction which focuses specifically on this loss, foregrounding the psychological conflicts experienced by her protagonists. It examines the subject not only across the range of her fiction, but also in relation to her unfolding narrative structures through a chronologically based discussion of her novels and selected short stories, interwoven with biographical information and drawing on unpublished letters. This book investigates the dominant kinds of innocence that Bowen represents throughout her fiction: the innocence attributed to childhood, sexual innocence and sexual morality, and political innocence, and argues that the transition from innocence to experience plays an important role in the epistemological journey faced both by Bowen’s characters and her readers.

A Cambodian woman sold into sexual slavery at the age of twelve describes the horrors she experienced until she managed to escape and discusses her role as an activist for the young women whom she has rescued from the region's brothels.

Undercover officer George Raffield's job was to pose as a student in the small town of Midlothian, Texas and infiltrate the high school drug ring. When Raffield's cover became suspect, word spread through a small circle of friends that the young officer would pay with his life. No one stopped it. On a rainy fall evening in 1987, Raffield was lured to an isolated field. Three bullets were fired-one unloaded into his skull. The baby-faced killer, Greg Knighten, stole eighteen dollars from Raffield's wallet, divided it among his two young accomplices, and calmly said, "it's done." With chilling detail, Carlton Stowers illuminates a dark corner of America's heartland and the children who hide there. What he found was an alienated subculture of drug abuse, the occult, and an unfathomable teenage rage that exploded at point blank range on a shocking night of lost innocence...

Destiny always has a cruel way of Proving things. One has the power to make his mark on the world, only thing needed is motivation and nothing beats Revenge. Betrayed deeply in love and prosecuted in a totally false case, a simple and innocent lad embraces darkness and is rewarded greatly. Having lost faith in humanity, a dark hero rises who takes the world by storm. True love is just a myth these day.

Violinist Ella Stafford isn't used to parties, so it's little wonder she's overwhelmed by brooding Russian Vadim Aleksandrov! The throbbing, raw attraction places fragile English beauty Ella out of her depth… And into Vadim's arms! Soon she finds herself sharing his Mediterranean villa, attending glamorous parties and being showered with luxuries. Ella should feel elated. Yet there is darkness in Vadim's past that even Ella's virginal sweetness cannot penetrate. But will the baby she's carrying make him learn to love?

Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this “irresistibly readable” novel by the New York Times-bestselling author (The New York Review of Books). This “powerful and disconcerting” novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement (The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. “[A] beautiful but disturbing novel.”—The AV Club “McEwan’s evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family.”—The New Yorker