Meg is the eldest and on the brink of love. Then there's tomboy Jo who longs to be a writer. Sweet-natured Beth always puts others first, and finally there's Amy, the youngest and most precocious. Through sisterly squabbles, their happy times and sad ones too, the sisters discover that growing up is sometimes very hard to do.

Miles Roby, a gentle, funny loser, runs the Empire Grill and hopes one day to own it. Meantime, though, his wife has run off with his worst customer, he's anxious about his adored teenage daughter and his one-handed brother, and his incorrigible father sponges off everyone.

Bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals the darker side of the Pilgrim fathers' settlement in the New World, which ultimately erupted in bloody battle some fifty years after they first landed on American soil.

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying.

The worst storm in history seen from the wheelhouse of a doomed fishing trawler; a mesmerisingly vivid account of a natural hell from a perspective that offers no escape.

A misfit at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds kindred spirits in the five eccentric students of his ancient Greek class. But his new friends have a horrific secret. When blackmail and violence threaten to blow their privileged lives apart, they drag Richard into the nightmare that engulfs them.

Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut in 1687, alone and desperate. Her only friendship, with a suspected witch, brings both comfort and sorrow.

Set in New England mainly and London partly, this work concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps, and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high ideals and asks some questions about what life does to love.

An international sensation inspired by 'Moby Dick'. Una Spenser is sent away as a child to live in a lighthouse, but runs away to sea disguised as a cabin boy, going on to encounter disasters, murder, romance and marriage to Ahab, whom we see through Una's eyes before the white whale takes his leg and sends him mad. Naslund has thoroughly imbibed the spirit of Herman Melville, but 'Ahab's Wife' ..

One of a series of top-quality fiction for schools, this is the story of a friendship between two 16-year-old boys in an American boarding school - one a natural athlete and the other a scholar. Their different temperaments cause tensions that lead to tragedy.

Originally published in 1854, Walden or Life in the Woods, is a vivid account of the time that Henry D. Thoreau lived alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. It is one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature.

The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success, in both a former girls' school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna. This is a conventional family saga.

Sam Pulsifer has come to the end of a very long and unusual journey. He spent ten years in prison for accidentally burning down poet Emily Dickinson's house - and unwittingly killing two people in the process. He emerged at age twenty-eight and set about creating a new life for himself. He went to college, found love and got married.

First published in 1978, this is a novel peopled with some of the most extraordinary characters.

Takes us to the New England university town of Elm Harbor, where the murder of a renowned African-American economist opens a door on the racial complications of the town's past, on one family's secrets, and on the hidden and powerful bastions of African-American political influence.

A tale of obsessive love, hidden motivations and the endless resonance of guilt.

* a searing portrait of small-town hypocrisy written in the page-turning style that found PP a permanent place in publishing history * once a banned book, this novel spawned a TV series and a film

This work looks at the question of why women were likely witches in the late 1600s. The author reveals the social construction of witchcraft in 17th-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.