"By the comforts of a blazing fireplace on a cold Christmas Eve night, guests at a holiday party share stories of phantoms and ghosts of Christmases past. Yet one guest delivers a tale of sheer fright for which no one listening was prepared. As the story goes, after losing both parents, a young boy and girl move into a large wooded estate to be held under the care of their uncle. Wanting nothing to do with raising the children, the uncle hires a young...

At the beginning of World War II, twelve-year-old Nora Lynch is one of thousands of London children sent away to the safety of the English countryside. Her surrogate family, Reverend and Mrs. Rivers and their daughter, Grace, are like no one she has ever met, offering shelter, affection, and the sister she never had. But Nora is too young and too naive to understand the cracks beneath the surface of her idyllic new life at the rectory or the disappointments...

Hanmouth, situated where the Hand River flows into the Bristol Channel, is usually quiet and undisturbed. But it becomes the center of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth, and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Hanmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade, the extraordinary individual lives of the community...

"Frances Burney's first and most enduringly popular novel is a vivid, satirical, and seductive account of the pleasures and dangers of fashionable life in late eighteenth-century London. As she describes her heroine's entry into society, womanhood and, inevitably, love, Burney exposes the vulnerability of female innocence in an image-conscious and often cruel world where social snobbery and sexual aggression are played out in the public arenas of...

"Bleak House" (1853) is one of Dickens' most ambitious works and established his reputation as a mature novelist capable of writing about the most serious issues while maintaining a talent for the blackest humour and comic farce. Narrated in turns by ward of court, Esther Summerson and an unnamed narrator whose outlook both compliments Esther's and challenges it, the stories of Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually depleted under the...

Three years after his daughter went missing, children's author Stephen Lewis struggles to find purpose in his life without her. His wife Julie has left him, and his best friends Charles and Thelman have retired to the countryside, battling demons of their own. With tenderness and insight, the movie explores a marriage devastated, the loss of childhood, the fluidity of time, grief, hope, and acceptance.

"1941 Britain: Children are vanishing from the village. Is it the powers of an ancient stone circle at work, or a modern predator? In mid-1941, children evacuated to the remote Shropshire village of Noddweir to escape the Blitz begin to vanish. It was not uncommon for city children faced with rural rigors to run away. But when retired American professor Edwin Carpenter, pursuing his study of standing stones, visits the village and discovers bloody...

"Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone. With extraordinary tenderness and insight, Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child. Kate's...