Four young ladies enter London society with one common goal: they must use their feminine wit and wiles to find a husband.So a daring husband-hunting scheme is born.

Annabelle Peyton, determined to save her family from disaster, decides to use her beauty and wit to tempt a suitable nobleman into making an offer of marriage. But Annabelle's most intriguing—and persistent—admirer, wealthy, powerful Simon Hunt, has made it clear that while he will introduce her to irresistible pleasure he will not offer marriage. Annabelle is determined to resist his unthinkable proposition . . . but it is impossible in the face of such skillful seduction.

Her friends, looking to help, conspire to entice a more suitable gentleman to offer for Annabelle, for only then will she be safe from Simon—and her own longings. But on one summer night, Annabelle succumbs to Simon's passionate embrace and tempting kisses . . . and she discovers that love is the most dangerous game of all.

An Unexpected Passion

Lady Jenova of Gunlinghorn feels she should marry, though not for love, for she vows never to entrust her heart to a man again. Then Lord Henry, her charming and devilishly handsome friend, arrives to offer his opinion on the chosen bridegroom. But when they are trapped together by a winter storm, she and Henry wildly succumb to a desire they neither anticipated nor welcomed. And suddenly Jenova must rethink her matrimonial plans.

FINNEGAN'S WAKE
by James Joyce
http://finwake.com/ - site with annotations
More material concerning this book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake
Finnegans Wake, named after a popular Irish street ballad,  published in 1939, is James Joyce's final novel. Following the publication of Ulysses in 1922, Joyce began working on Finnegans Wake and by 1924 installments of the work began to appear in serialized form, first under the title "A New Unnamed Work" and subsequently as "Work in Progress." (The final title of the work remained a secret between Joyce and his wife, Nora Barnacle, until shortly before the book was finally published.)
The seventeen years spent working on Finnegans Wake were often difficult for Joyce. He underwent frequent eye surgeries, lost long-time supporters, and dealt with personal problems in the lives of his children. These problems and the perennial financial difficulties of the Joyce family are described in Richard Ellmann's biography James Joyce. The actual publication of the novel was somewhat overshadowed by Europe's descent into World War II. Joyce died just two years after the novel was published, leaving a work whose interpretation is still very much "in progress."
BALLAD:
youtube video with the Dubliners singing it in a traditional way
lyrics

 

Agatha Christie wrote six non-detective novels under the pen name "Mary Westmacott". These novels are A Daughter's a Daughter, Absent in the Spring, The Burden, The Giant's Bread, The Rose and the Yew Tree and Unfinished Portrait.

Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is a readable book.