Tracy Chevalier

James Goodenough, whose family had originally settled in Connecticut from England brings his family to Ohio to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp in 1838. As swamp fever gradually picks off their children and they wrestle daily with survival. This course will see their family engulfed in tragedy and fifteen years later we pick up with their youngest son, Robert who has been running west since the trying to escape his memories of what...

When Mary Anning finds an unusual fossilized skeleton, she sets the religious fathers on edge, the townspeople to gossip, and the scientific world alight, but in the struggle to be recognized in the wider world, Mary and her friend Elizabeth Philpot discover that friendship is their greatest ally.

1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fiancé, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. After countless meals of boiled eggs and dry toast, she saves enough to move out of her mother's place and into the town of Winchester, home to...

17-year-old Griet must work to support her family, so she becomes a maid in the house of Johannes Vermeer, where she attracts the master painter's attention. He is commissioned to paint Griet, and the result is one of the greatest paintings ever created.