With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor, Paul Emmanuel. Charlotte Brontë's last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully...

"A gripping multigenerational novel that explores the history and human cost of colonialism in the Congo. April 1958. When the Brussels World's Fair opens, Robert Dumont, one of the people responsible for the biggest international event since the end of the Second World War, ends up laying down his arms in the face of pressure from the royal palace: there will be a "Congolese village" in one of the seven pavilions devoted to the settlements. Among...

Mandie and her friends have a new mystery to investigate when strange sounds come from a seemingly abandoned fishing boat.

"In this revealing and poignant story, Stefan Hertmans uncovers haunting details about the previous owner of his house and the crime he committed as a member of the Nazi police. In 1979 Stefan Hertmans became obsessed with a rundown townhouse in Ghent. The previous owners were mentioned only in passing during the acquisition, and it wasn't until the new millennium, long after he had sold the house, that he came across a memoir by the owner's son Adriaan...

"Malpertuis is a puzzle box of nested narratives wrested from a set of manuscripts stolen from a monastery. A bizarre collection of distrustful relatives has gathered together in the ancient stone mansion of a sea-trading dynasty for the impending death of the occult scientist, Uncle Cassave, and the reading of his will. Forced to dwell together for the remainder of their lives within the stifling walls of Malpertuis for the sake of a cursed inheritance,...

"On May 10, 1940, the Nazi Army invaded Belgium, setting into motion the refugee story of Cary Fagan's father, Maurice. Maurice was only 12 at the time, and he and his family had no idea they would never again return to Brussels, the city of his birth. Instead, they would travel through France, Spain, and Portugal, running from war. Every time they thought they might be safe, Maurice would try to restart his studies--he was determined to become a...

An honest man goes off the deep end when he discovers that his employer has been cooking the books to support a mistress. When he learns his boss is going to escape to Brussels with the money, the man steals the money to prevent his boss from taking it. After a bizarre series of events, he finds himself entangled with the woman who was his boss' mistress!

Traveling the world via aircanoe, siblings Tink and Bee-Lung spread spores of a mysterious empathy-generating fungus to build bonds between people, while Everfair's Princess Mwadi and Prince Ilunga are unwittingly manipulated by their mother who pits Europe's influenza-weakened political powers against each other.

"During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this historical novel with a speculative twist"-- January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie's death in combat, along with his personal...

"From acclaimed short fiction writer Nisi Shawl comes a thought-provoking alternate history set in the Congo, where heroes strive for a Utopia and endeavor to live together despite their differences. In this reimagining of Belgium's disastrous colonization of the Congo, African American missionaries join forces with British socialists to purchase land from the Congo Free State's "owner," King Leopold II. This land, which they name Everfair, is set...