Lyra

A Man of Straw by Daphne du Maurier"Behind every quiet face lies a hidden storm; behind every grand gesture, a hollow soul."Before she became the world-renowned "Mistress of Suspense" with Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel, Daphne du Maurier was already a...

Agatha Christie, already famous for her Poirot crime stories among others, had determined that a pen name would give her the freedom to pursue other types of literature. Giant’s Bread, originally published in 1930 under the name of Mary Westmacott,...

New York detective Ebenezer Gryce enlists Amelia Butterworth to help investigate a series of mysterious disappearances in a village in the Berkshire Hills. When Miss Butterworth goes to stay with the family of an old friend in their decaying village...

Hannah Mole, the child of poor farmers, is now a forty-year-old woman who spent her life working as a governess in the households of the wealthy. Not having the freedom to live life as she desires, she contents herself by making ironic comments in...

Plum Bun, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s second novel, explores the tensions between racial identity and individual ambition, especially as they relate to gender and social class. Published a year before Nella Larsen’s novella “Passing,” Plum Bun was one of...

Mimi Bellamy is dead—stabbed multiple times and discovered in a deserted cottage. Now, two people close to her are on trial for her murder her husband, Stephen Bellamy, and her friend, Sue Ives. The prosecution claims they killed her out of revenge,...

The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by American author Wallace Thurman that tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Emma Lou in her journey to college at...

The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins was published in 1875. As in many of Collins’ novels, it deals with themes considered sensational or scandalous by Victorian society, and features a strong-willed, intelligent woman unwilling to be bound by...

Published posthumously in 1903, The Pit: A Story of Chicago is the second installment of Frank Norris’s ambitious, yet unfinished, trilogy The Epic of the Wheat. Set against the frenetic and cutthroat environment of the Chicago Board of Trade, the...

The story follows Barakah, an English governess who arrives in Cairo seeking a sense of belonging that she feels is missing from her life in the West. In a dramatic shift of fate and identity, she marries Yûsuf Bey, the son of a powerful Pasha, and...