Summary:

In mid-19th century England, a small group of religious women called the Household of Hidden Stars follow Muley Moloch, an itinerant prophet, across the world to establish a life for themselves in New South Wales. Catherine, Moloch's wife, gives her account of their story many years later in 1898.

Moloch is an illiterate shoemaker-turned-prophet who claims to perform miracles. His goal is to prepare the way for the Second Coming of Christ. To accomplish this, he and his group of 8 or 9 women set out to lead exemplary lives in the wilderness, yet they do not attempt to make converts.

When Catherine becomes pregnant, she and the others think her pregnancy is a miracle. (In reality, Moloch has had sex with her while she was desperately ill and unaware of what was going on.) They name the child Immanuel and believe that he is the Second Coming of Christ.

Muloch considers the local Aboriginal people to be demons and treats them as such. One day he sees Immanuel talking to a "demon" and shoots the man dead. Immanuel, already fed up with all the craziness, runs away. At this point the women finally seize control of their own lives and tell Moloch that he must leave. As the years progress, the women remain together. One by one they die of consumption, until only Catherine and Louisa are left.

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This is the story of the ill-fated romance of Marguerite Gautier, a beautiful and brazen young courtesan of Paris, and Armand Duval, her passionate aristocratic lover. After becoming his mistress, Marguerite grows emotionally attached, returning Armand’s love and living with him in the country in order to recover her health.

Estranged from his family and deeply in debt, Armand is confronted by his father who demands an end to the illicit relationship. When Armand defies him, Monsieur Duval convinces Marguerite to release her beloved to secure his future and protect his reputation. Marguerite dies alone and in agony from consumption.

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Consider the possibility of a man whose sense of hearing is so enhanced that he can discern the noise of the entire world and also mimic all the sounds made by men and beasts. Imagine a human being who can SEE sounds as well as hear them. It is little wonder that he would have an affinity and talent for music.

Johannes Elias Alder is such a musical genius born in 1803 with a preternatural gift of hearing. The illegitimate son of the village curate, Elias experiences a physical metamorphosis as a child and by the age of ten is already a man. He effortlessly composes magnificent music that he plays on the organ.

Although Elias falls in love with his cousin, Elsbeth, she marries another man. After this loss, he becomes tired of life. Elias commits suicide at the age of 22 by refusing to sleep and succumbing to starvation and an overdose of belladonna.

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Summary:

Charles Bovary is a country physician who, after an unhappy first marriage, marries the daughter of a patient. Emma is eager to leave her father's dirty farm but finds marriage to be less romantic and satisfying than she expected. Charles is not a prince, but a bumbling, aging man. Even when at work he performs more like a veterinarian than a skilled surgeon. Indeed, when he and the local chemist attempt a new procedure on a clubfoot, the patient gets gangrene and loses his leg.

Disgusted, Emma develops a relationship with Leon Dupuis, a young lawyer. She refuses to sleep with him but regrets it after he leaves town. She then meets Rodolphe Boulanger, a wealthy landowner who seduces Emma to pass the time. They have a brief if passionate affair.

When Boulanger abandons her, Emma returns to Leon, this time giving in to their mutual passion. Her affair has an air of desperation. She soon exhausts her limited funds on trips to visit her lover and love gifts. Knowing that her husband will discover her affair when their financial situation is revealed, Emma overdoses on arsenic and dies miserably.

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Summary:

In 371 E. C. (Efican Calendar) a woman named Felicity Smith gives birth to Tristan, a child with such severe congenital defects that the doctors advise her to let him die. Felicity is an actress and the head of a theater troupe in Chemin Rouge, the capital of a small fictional country called Efica. Instead of getting rid of her son, Felicity takes him to live in the tower of her theater.

The boy actually has three fathers (Bill, Wally, and Vincent), each of whom in his own way accepts responsibility for the horribly deformed child. The boy grows up with the ambition to become an actor, even though he is only three and a half feet tall, his speech is almost unintelligible, and he inspires revulsion in almost everyone that he meets for the first time. Nonetheless, he thrives in the close-knit theatrical community.

When Tristan is eleven, agents from Voorstand murder his mother, who has entered politics and become a "persona non grata" in Voorstand. Tristan also fears for his life, but nonetheless avenges his mother's death by writing subversive pamphlets. Many years later, at the ripe old age of 23, Tristan and Wally (one of his fathers) travel illegally to Voorstand where they encounter many adventures before the novel comes to a satisfactory conclusion.

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Summary:

Atheist theologian and ex-priest, Bernard, takes a leave from his college in the grey, industrial town of Rummidge, UK, to escort his unwilling father, Jack, to Hawaii at the request of his elderly aunt, Ursula, who is dying of cancer. Bernard's domineering sister, Tess, is strongly opposed. To save on costs, they join a charter tour.

On the day of arrival, Jack is hit by a car and confined to hospital. Bernard spends many days traveling between his dad's bedside and Ursula's in an inadequate nursing home. The near-but-far separation between the aged siblings gives Bernard time and opportunity to discover their past.

The exotic, touristic "paradise" on earth and an affair with Yolande, driver of the car that struck his father, awaken Bernard to the sensual pleasures of existence. Ursula, always portrayed as the selfish black sheep, had been sexually abused as a child by her oldest brother Sean--venerated as a hero by the family for his death in the war. A lad at the time, Jack knew of the abuse.

With credible evidence and an impressive lack of self-pity, Ursula explains to Bernard that the experience ruined her marriage and her life. She wants Jack's apology. With the help of his sister and his lover, the newly secular Bernard brings about a reconciliation to the greater peace of all involved, including himself.

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Alice Goodwin is the wife of Howard, a midwestern dairy farmer, the mother of two daughters aged five and three, and the nurse at a local elementary school. She and her friend, Theresa Collins, a family therapist who lives in the nearby suburbs, take turns watching each other's children. One morning, while Alice is momentarily distracted, Theresa's two-year-old daughter, Lizzy, falls into the pond on the Goodwin farm. Despite Alice's attempts to resuscitate her, she dies after three days in the hospital.

Not long after, while she is severely depressed, Alice is arrested on (false) charges of sexually abusing some of the schoolchildren in her care. Confused, and thinking only of Lizzy's drowning, Alice says to the police, "I hurt everybody." They take this to be a confession.

She spends three months in prison awaiting trial, until Howard sells the farm to pay her bond. The novel gives us both Alice's experiences in prison--in a world she had hardly imagined--and Howard's struggle to take care of their children. Theresa, who seems never to have blamed Alice for her child's death, helps him and they develop a powerful bond. The novel ends with the trial, in which Alice is exonerated, and their family's tentative beginning of a new, urban life.

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This novel is the fictionalized account of author Thomas Moran's real-life experience as a patient with disseminated chicken pox. During his five months in hospital, much of that time on a ventilator, Moran experienced "coma visions" and near death which he retells here through his alter ego, James Blatchely, a man who struggles to remain emotionally alive in spite of the virus's physical assault. Blatchely does this by observing, befriending, and then fantasizing a life for his two Irish nurses--Brigit who, he discovers, uses drugs to endure the pain she witnesses daily in Intensive Care, and Nuala, with whom he falls in love.

Through the depiction of Blatchely's erratic, inching descent toward death, readers gain visceral insight into a patient's encounter with critical illness--but the real heroes of this book are the nurses. We observe them through Blatchely's eyes, and they are the force that enables him to survive, if not in body, at least in mind. This beautifully written novel creates a world in which both patients and caregivers are fully human, bound together by their shared experience of the patient's illness and by the life the imagination enjoys when the body cannot.

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Summary:

The story takes place in the course of one night during the 1820's in the Australian outback. Carney, an Irish convict-turned-revolutionary, is scheduled for execution in the morning. Two soldiers guard him at the lonely outpost. An officer named Adair arrives to interrogate Carney, in the hope that he might betray his surviving comrades, especially Dolan, the leader of the insurrection.

The officer and the prisoner keep a vigil through the long cold night. Carney tells about his impoverished life in Ireland and his goal of achieving freedom for himself and his countrymen. Adair, too, is Irish. He remembers his own, more privileged life in Dublin.

The uneducated Carney asks, "Why is there so much injustice in the world?" Adair has no answer. At dawn Carney asks permission to wash in the stream before he is executed. The officer allows him to do so, and the convict presumably jumps on a horse and successfully flees. It is clear that Adair has permitted his charge to escape.

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Summary:

In 1898 in rural New South Wales, a brother and two sisters are found bludgeoned to death under very peculiar circumstances. The crime creates a sensation throughout Australia, but the mystery is never solved. Nearly 60 years later, one of the last surviving members of the family (12 brothers and sisters) tells the story and, in the process of doing so, reveals the truth of what really happened to his siblings on that tragic day.

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