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Love in a foreign land. A decaying hacienda full of secrets. And a woman searching for the story of her life. A funeral and some family business--that's what Julia Bentley expects when she travels to the Philippines to bury her grandfather. She hopes for a brief adventure, a distraction from her most recent failed relationship and her loose-ends California life. Maybe even a chance to meet some distant relatives she's never known. Instead, she discovers a place where past and present, Spanish and Asian, primitive and civilized mingle in a melange as spicy and colorful as the paella her relatives dish up for special occasions. A place where some children hitch rides on cattle and others wield loaded guns. Where guerillas lurk in the jungle, and volcanoes and governments are threatened to blow. Where stories haunt her ancestral home--the grand but decaying Hacienda Esperanza, Plantation of Hope--and danger lurks behind every tree. Love and orchids bloom in places she never thought to look. How can a land so foreign, and so troubled, fill her with a strange peace? And would staying mean risking her life . . . or finding it at last?
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal
The Orchid House' is a stunning and unforgettable novel about the relationships of three friends, Ginny, Bella and Leila, and climatic developments in their personal lives that change everything.Ginny and David Sinclair, aware their marriage is now on the rocks, visit the moors of Devon to try to recapture the feelings of their earlier years. Instead of peace and resolution, extraordinary events take place where David rescues a young girl trapped in a fast-flowing river. Meanwhile Bella Boswell, back home in Sandwich in Kent, is trying to escape her tyrannical husband, Steve. Befriended by Ginny and by Ginny's friend Leila Mistry, a legal advocate for women, Bella at last finds the courage to speak out. However, no one could have foreseen the disastrous consequences to follow. Leila herself is faced with an unwanted arranged marriage, and is made to choose between her family and the man she loves.
Home gets hot for CIA Special Agent Holly Barker in this novel in #1 New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods’s thrilling series. After Holly Barker lets an international terrorist slip through her fingers for a second time, the CIA thinks she might want a long vacation. So Holly returns to her hometown of Orchid Beach, Florida, where she had been police chief for many years. But a very unpleasant surprise awaits her. Many years earlier, while she was in the army, Holly and another female officer had brought charges against their commander for sexual harassment. Holly had managed to fight him off, but the other woman, a young lieutenant, had not. The officer in question was acquitted of all charges, and has also left the army—for a job as Orchid Beach’s new police chief. Now Holly must decide whether to return to the CIA—or seek her revenge...
The adventures of a British girl in China, hunting for the orchid that will save her family. Staid, responsible Elodie Buchanan is the eldest of ten sisters growing up in a small English market town in 1861. The girls barely know their father, a plant hunter usually off adventuring through China, more myth than man. Then disaster strikes: Mr. Buchanan reneges on his contract to collect an extremely rare and valuable orchid. He will be thrown into debtors’ prison while his daughters are sent to the orphanage and the workhouse. Elodie can’t stand by and see her family destroyed, so she persuades her father to return to China once more to try to hunt down the flower—only this time, despite everything she knows about her place in society, Elodie goes with him. She has never before left her village, but what starts as fear turns to wonder as she adapts to seafaring life aboard the tea clipper The Osprey, and later to the new sights, dangers, and romance of China. She comes to find that both the world and her place in it are so much bigger than she’d ever dreamed. But now, even if she can find the orchid, how can she ever go back to being the staid, responsible Elodie that everybody needs?
William Gunn wants nothing more than a quiet life. After returning home from the Napoleonic wars, he accepts a position on the Duke of Devonshire’s idyllic estate. Destiny, however, intervenes when his young daughter Sarah falls prey to a mysterious sickness, and Gunn must strike out once more into the unknown and search for an unusual cure—the black orchid, a plant found only in the forbidding Amazon rainforest, where the last man who saw it went insane. Across the Atlantic, American frontiersman Nathanial Yankee has left his country and his past behind to join a new revolution, fought by General Simón Bolívar to free South America from the Spanish. Nate, however, is no hero—he fights for land, and a chance at a fresh start. Pursued by a cruel enemy in a race against time, William and Nate must survive the battlefields of the Spanish Main, cross the snow-covered peaks of the Andes, and finally reckon with the rulers of a dying Amazonian empire. For one man, the goal is a chance to save his daughter’s life; for the other, a priceless treasure beckons. If they cannot learn to work together, one of a thousand enemies will kill them (that is, if they don’t kill each other first). Unbeknownst to them, both men are pawns in a far larger game, and some secrets cannot be hidden forever ...
Stuart Woods brings back small-town police chief Holly Barker—and her extraordinary Doberman, Daisy—for another exhilarating adventure in this New York Times bestseller. When Holly Barker’s wedding festivities are shattered by a brutal robbery, she vows to find the culprits. With nothing to go on but the inexplicable killing of an innocent bystander, Holly discovers evidence that leads her into the midst of a clan whose members are as mysterious as they are zealous. Holly’s father, Ham, a retired army master sergeant, is her ticket into their strange world. What he finds there boggles the mind and sucks them all—Holly, Ham, and Daisy—into a whirlpool of crazed criminality from which even the FBI can’t save them...
The prize-winning history of the orchid: “an engaging and enlightening account of one of the Earth's most mythologized botanical wonders” (Richard Conniff, author of House of Lost Worlds). At once delicate, exotic, and elegant, orchids are beloved for their singular, instantly recognizable beauty. Found in nearly every climate, the many species of orchid have had varying forms of significance in countless cultures over time. Following the orchid’s journey from Ancient Greek medicine to twentieth century detective novels, science historian Jim Endersby explores the flower’s four recurring themes: science, empire, sex, and death. Orchids were a symbol of the exotic riches sought by 19th century Europeans in their plans for colonization. They became subjects of scientific scrutiny for Charles Darwin, who investigated their methods of cross-pollination. As Endersby shows, orchids—perhaps because of their extraordinarily diverse colors, shapes, and sizes—have also bloomed repeatedly in films, novels, plays, and poems, from Shakespeare to science fiction. Featuring many gorgeous illustrations from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Orchid: A Cultural History was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize by the History of Science Society. It is an enchanting tale not only for gardeners and plant collectors, but anyone curious about the flower’s obsessive hold on the imagination in history, cinema, literature, and more.
From a master of the historical novel, Empress Orchid sweeps readers into the heart of the Forbidden City to tell the fascinating story of a young concubine who becomes China's last empress. Min introduces the beautiful Tzu Hsi, known as Orchid, and weaves an epic of a country girl who seized power through seduction, murder, and endless intrigue. When China is threatened by enemies, she alone seems capable of holding the country together. In this "absorbing companion piece to her novel Becoming Madame Mao" (New York Times), readers and reading groups will once again be transported by Min's lavish evocation of the Forbidden City in its last days of imperial glory and by her brilliant portrait of a flawed yet utterly compelling woman who survived, and ultimately dominated, a male world.
INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL'S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERS Is it dangerous to know too much about your neighbors? When Stuart Font throws a housewarming party, he invites all the residents of his new building--among them, three flippant young girls, a lonely spinster, a man with a passion for classical history, and a woman determined to drink herself to death. He definitely does not want his girlfriend, Claudia, in attendance, as he would also have to invite her lawyer husband. But careful planning can only get a person so far. As it turns out, this party will be one everyone remembers. Meanwhile, living in a town house opposite Stuart's building, in reclusive isolation, is a young, beautiful Asian woman known as Tigerlily. As though from some strange urban fairy tale, she emerges infrequently to exert a terrible spell. In Tigerlily's Orchids, Ruth Rendell has written a darkly humorous and psychologically thrilling novel about the eccentric inhabitants of a London terrace--about the secrets they keep, and what they will do to hide them.