The Flame and the Flower

He was lost and alone. Then he found her. And the future seemed more fragile than ever.

As a child, Landon Lucas Maxfield believed his life was perfect and looked forward to a future filled with promise – until tragedy tore his family apart and made him doubt everything he ever believed.

All he wanted was to leave the past behind. When he met Jacqueline Wallace, his desire to be everything she needed came so easy . . .

As easy as it could be for a man who learned that the soul is breakable and that everything you hoped for could be ripped away in a heartbeat.

The events of FRAGILE ETERNITY have left the faery world off-balance, its key players fighting to maintain control over their world – and its secrets…

Devlin lives in a world where everything is beautiful, ordered… and cruel. As a prominent member of the High Court and half-brother to Sorcha, the High Queen, he’s one of the most powerful faeries of the old guard.

Ani lives in a world where every line is blurred. Half human, half faery, half in the dedadence of the Dark Court and half out of it, her life of dive bars, tattoos and street fights couldn’t be farther from the clean lines of the High Court.

But you can’t choose where your heart will take you, and when Devlin and Ani meet, two extremes of the faery world collide – with passion, violence and heat; for better – and for worse…

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family’s assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.

When two young women meet under extraordinary circumstances in eighteenth century West Indies they are unified in their desire to escape their oppressive lives. The first is a slave, forced to work in a plantation mansion and subjected to terrible cruelty at the hands of the plantation manager. The second is a spirited and rebellious English girl, sent to the West Indies to marry well and combine the wealth of two respectable families. But Fate ensures that one night the two young women have to save each other and run away to a life no less dangerous but certainly a lot more free. As pirates they roam the seas, fight pitched battles against their foes and become embroiled in many a heart-quickening adventure. Written in brilliant and sparkling first-person narrative, this is a wonderful novel in which Celia Rees has brought the past vividly and intimately to life.