When faith and restoration are common ground, can the attraction between two people grow from a whisper of understanding into a proclamation of love?

She can’t recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge) she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they always had done, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her… When Janice starts cleaning for Mrs B – a shrewd and tricksy woman in her nineties...

Television shows such as Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs have captivated millions with the inside story of aristocratic Edwardian households. But what was life really like for the people who kept such a household running? Maloney takes readers behind the scenes to describe servants' daily life in this now vanished world.

"Daniel is desperate for a fresh start at life, so when someone slides a note under his door offering him the groundskeeper's position at an old estate, it seems too good to be true. Alarm bells start ringing when he arrives at Craven Manor. The mansion's front door hangs open, and leaves and cobwebs coat the marble foyer. It's clear no one has lived there in a long time...but he has nowhere else to go. Against his better judgment, he moves into the...

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, here is “an intricate and dazzling novel” (The New York Times) about the perfect butler and his fading, insular world in post-World War II England.
 
This is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of a butler named Stevens. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country...

"Widely recognized as one of literature's most gripping ghost stores, this classic tale of moral degradation conerns the sinister transformation of two innocent children into flagrant liars and hypocrites. The story begins when a governess arrives at an English country estate to look after Miles, aged ten, and Flora, eight. At first, everything appears normal but then events gradually begin to weave a spell of psychological terror. One night a ghost...

When Mrs. A. first enters the narrator's home, his wife, Nora, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. First as their maid and nanny, then their confidante, this older woman begins to help her employers negotiate married life, quickly becoming the glue in their small household. She is the steady, maternal influence for both husband and wife, and their son, Emanuele, whom she protects from his parents' expectations and disappointments. But the family's...

A modern-day homicide detective is working as an undertaker's assistant in Victorian Scotland when a serial poisoner attacks the men of Edinburgh and leaves their widows under suspicion. Edinburgh, 1869: Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is adjusting to her new life in Victorian Scotland. Her employers know she's not housemaid Catriona Mitchell-even though Mallory is in Catriona's body-and Mallory is now officially an undertaker's assistant....

In 1578 Hungary, sixteen-year-old Anna is elevated from scullery maid to chambermaid by the young and glamorous Countess Elizabeth Bathory, falling completely under the Countess's spell until Anna realizes that she is not a friend but a prisoner of the increasingly cruel and murderous Elizabeth. 1570s Hungary. Anna Darvulia is working as a scullery maid for the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. When Elizabeth takes a liking to Anna, she is vaulted to the...

"A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her. Lauren Groff's new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a...