Linda Martin lands in Paris on a cold, gray, and rainy day. She is on her way to her new post as a governess to the young Count Philippe de Valmy. Having lost both his parents in a tragic accident, the nine-year-old boy lives with his aunt and uncle in the vast and ornate Château Valmy in the French countryside. Léon de Valmy, Philippe''s uncle, runs the estate on behalf of his underage nephew until he comes of age and arranged for a proper English governess for his charge. When Linda arrives at the imposing manor, she is at once enchanted by its beauty and history, but is also immediately struck by the sense of menace and doom surrounding the land and its inhabitants. Léon is a charismatic force of nature and quite charming and, when Linda meets his reckless and rakishly handsome son Raoul, she understands a bit more about the de Valmy heritage and what makes this family tick. As she becomes closer to Philippe and Raoul, Linda draws ever nearer to putting her finger on the source of the threat. But the layers of danger and darkness run deeper than any of them guessed and she may not be able to trust those she wants to, no matter how innocent or attractive they may seem. Soon it is up to the shy young governess to beat the clock in order to save Philippe''s life as well as her own.

Nine Coaches Waiting

In a small town in Greece, a group of people witness a boating accident and subsequently become tangled in each other''s lives. Thomas is a Californian university professor escaping from the tense relationship between him and his remarried ex-wife, and their son, who he adores. Elsa, the beautiful German blonde, resigned from her successful television job to escape her ex-boyfriend, who she still loves. Irish Fiona couldn''t stand her family and friends'' resentful attitudes towards her boyfriend, Shane, so they went to peaceful Greece. David, a kind English man, doesn''t want to take over his father''s business like his family wants and expects, and instead decides to travel. These strangers meet in a tavern in peaceful Aghia Anna underneath the stars, and soon they are the closest of friends. Vonni, a native who too escaped her family many years ago, becomes involved in all their lives and together they form bonds and discover things about each other and themselves that they never could have anticipated. *2004, Ireland/UK/Australia, Orion ISBN 0-7528-5166-7, Pub date 25 August 2004, Hardback *2004, USA, Dutton ISBN 0-525-94754-X, Pub date 21 September 2004, Hardback *2005, USA, Dutton ISBN 0-451-21446-3, Pub date 28 June 2005, Paperback *2005, Ireland/UK/Australia, Orion ISBN 978-0-7528-6536-2, Pub date 29 June 2005, Paperback

Nights of Rain and Stars

A Fan''s Notes is a sardonic account of mental illness, alcoholism, insulin shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy, and the black hole of sports fandom. Its central preoccupation with a failure to measure up to the American dream has earned the novel comparisons to Fitzgerald''s The Great Gatsby. Beginning with his childhood in Watertown, New York, growing up under a sports-obsessed father and following his college years at the USC, where he first came to know of his hero Frank Gifford, Exley recounts years of intermittent stints at psychiatric institutions, his failed marriage to a woman named Patience, successive unfulfilling jobs teaching English literature to high school students, and working for a Manhattan public relations firm under contract to a weapons company, and, by way of Gifford, his obsession with the New York Giants. Exley''s introspective "fictional memoir", a tragicomic indictment of 1950s American culture, examines in lucid prose themes of celebrity, masculinity, self-absorption, and addiction, morbidly charting his failures in life against the electrifying successes of his football hero and former classmate. The title comes from Exley''s fear that he is doomed to be a spectator in life as well as in sports.

A Fan''s Notes

A severely wounded courier working for George Kosinski turns up at the flat in London where Bernard and Fiona are now living, since Tessa Kosinski left it to Fiona. George, who is now a tax exile living in Zurich, arrives to take the courier to a doctor and asks Bernard to keep it quiet because he doesn''t want Inland Revenue to know he was in the country. Suspecting that a Stasi agent travelled to Zurich to meet with George, Bernard and Dicky Cruyer travel to Zurich to question George. George has put Tessa''s engagement ring, given to him by the Stasi, in to be cleaned and then disappeared. Bernard and Dicky track him to his old family estate in Poland where his brother Stefan resides. Stefan says the George was murdered by Russian Army defectors and all that was recovered was a leg mauled by wild dogs, and he has a death certificate to prove it. A hand with George''s signet ring is later shown to the British Embassy as further proof and sent to Dicky in London. The Stasi try to steal the hand back before it can be forensically analysed but Dicky chases and shoots the agent and recovers the hand. Bret Rensselaer and Gloria are implementing harsh budget cuts across the SIS. With the backing of Fiona and Dicky Bernard gets a permanent job as Frank Harrington''s deputy in Berlin. There he must deal with one of Fiona''s networks in East Germany being captured because the head man was a Stasi plant. A young agent Bernard has worked with is killed and delivered to Gloria''s hotel room as retaliation for Bernard killing a Stasi agent in Faith. Bernard also learns that Fiona was in love with her KGB minder, a double agent called Kennedy, whom Bernard shot while rescuing Fiona. Fiona and children decide to spend Christmas in the Caribbean with her father. Bernard is sent back in to Poland to extract George. He discovers that George and Stefan have been working for Polish intelligence all the time they have been travelling in the West. George fled to Zurich to try to get out but the Stasi tracked him down. They told George that Timmerman had brokered a deal and if George returns to Poland and renounces his British Citizenship they will reunite him with Tessa, who is pregnant, and they can live happily ever after in Poland. Bernard convinces George that this is nonsense and Tessa is dead and that London will treat him well if he comes clean. George agrees to be smuggled to Sweden in light plane and after shooting George''s tail they escape. Bernard hands George over to be shipped off to London for interrogation. Bernard and Gloria fly back to London for Christmas in the lear-jet Bret chartered as an air ambulance in case anyone was injured.

Hope

Natil is a gardener at Kingsley College, a private university in Denver. She has found a small group of people who have started transforming into Elves and need guidance, though she has not revealed many details of the early portions of her existence, nor has she revealed the divine vision she once had but now cannot even describe to them. In one narrative thread, Sandy Joy comes to Denver at the invitation of a man named Terry Angel. Exploiting the weak emotional condition of the Dean of Kingsley College, Maxwell Delmari, he has been given free rein to set up a sham program, named Hands of Grace, that purportedly uses music to heal people. Referring to obscure or bogus publications and fake references, Terry has hidden the fact that there is no program and no factual basis for his work. Thoroughly insane and plagued by fleeting partial visions of a hidden higher power, Terry tortures himself with self-mutilation in an effort to finally see this higher power. When Sandy states that she has had a vision of a higher power, he comes to envy and loathe her. After she realizes the falsity of his convictions and tries to distance herself from him, he attacks her, slashing her hands with a knife. Fighting for her life, she sprays him in the face with oven cleaner, blinding him. In another narrative thread, T.K. has just recently returned from Desert Storm missing a leg. A Vietnam veteran and a black man, he has been marginalized his entire life and is now working at the same security firm that once employed George Morrison, who is now the elf Hadden. Living in Denver''s projects, he sees a crack house operating every day just down the street from him, and he is powerless to do anything about it. Finding employment at Treestar Surveying, he finds his barriers eroding as he comes to realize that he is becoming an Elf too and is no longer subject to the same hopeless future he once had. After Heather, one of the Elves, is shot by drug dealers for TK''s efforts at evicting the crack house from his neighborhood, he steals military ordnance and demolishes the crack house with two pounds of C4 after a desperate gun battle that destroys his artificial leg. Concluding his transformation into an Elf while he sleeps a few nights later, he wakes up the following day whole, his leg intact, having finally discharged his last tie to his old life. When the police come to question him about the pieces of his artificial leg, which he left at the ruins of the crack house when Sandy drove him to safety, the presence of both of his legs deflects their attention away from him. As both narrative threads come together, Sandy is held by the police for assault after Terry lies and says that Sandy attacked him first. Out on bail, Sandy''s overwhelming grief at her predicament serves as the final catalyst for helping all of the Elves finally learn how to draw strength from the patterns and use all of the powers at their disposal. Natil, seeing no choice, strikes a deal with Terry and uses her regained powers to heal Terry''s eyes so that he will tell the truth of what happened to Sandy. Consumed with shame and grief at the banality of bargaining her healing powers for the truth from Terry and knowing that he will soon commit suicide because of what she has done for him, Natil finally gives up her immortal existence of four and a half billion years and fades from the earth. The others search for her and finally find her grieving in the land of sunlight with the Lady.

Strands of Sunlight

Alan Grant, Scotland Yard Inspector (a character who also appears in five other novels by the same author) is confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Bored and of restless mind, he becomes intrigued by a reproduction of a portrait of King Richard III brought to him by a friend. He prides himself on being able to read a person''s character from his appearance, and King Richard seems to him a gentle and kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer? With the help of friends and acquaintances, Alan Grant investigates the case of the Princes in the Tower. Grant spends weeks pondering historical information and documents with the help of an American researcher for the British Museum. Using his detective''s logic, he comes to the conclusion that the claim of Richard being a murderer is a fabrication of Tudor propaganda, as is the popular image of the King as a monstrous hunchback. The book points out the fact that there never was a Bill of Attainder, Coroner''s inquest, or any other legal proceeding that accused - much less convicted - Richard III of any foul play against the Princes in the Tower. Further, the book explores how history is constructed, and how certain versions of events come to be widely accepted as the truth, despite a lack of evidence. "The Daughter of Time" of the title is from a quote by Sir Francis Bacon: "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority." Grant comes to understand the ways that great myths are constructed, and how in this case, the victorious Tudors saw to it that their version of history prevailed. Other alleged historical myths touched upon by the author, are the commonly believed (but false) story that troops fired on the public at the 1910 Tonypandy Riot, the traditional depiction of the Boston Massacre, the martyrdom of Margaret Wilson and the life and death of Mary, Queen of Scots. Grant adopts the term "Tonypandy" to describe widely believed historical myths, such as the Tonypandy Riot, or deliberately falsified history, such as the life of Richard III.

The Daughter of Time

Charles Raymond is a smuggler and he is very content and mildly successful with what he does for a living. Based in Mexico, Charles uses his exceptional skill as a snake handler to his advantage by "exporting" snakes out of Mexico under the guise of medical research—their venom is used by drug companies and universities for research. But the snakes are simply a ruse to hide the identity of the real cargo—rare Mexican artifacts. Charles is good at what he does and his skills don''t stop at smuggling. Upon a suspicious chance reunion with Richard Pierce—a long-lost acquaintance of Charles'' from his school days—Raymond is enlisted to use his other talents as a bodyguard to help Richard stay alive until such time as he can acquire the rest of his deceased father''s fortune, which has been held in trust by Richard''s promiscuous widowed stepmother. Charles isn''t a fan of Richard''s brash womanizing ways, but agrees to help because the money is good. Only he finds out that Richards isn''t the easiest guy to protect, and often he is his own enemy when it comes to self-preservation. After a series of thwarted sketchy attempts at Richard''s life, Charles begins to smell a rat. The further he probes into the situation, the more confused he gets. Things aren''t what they seem. The bad guys aren''t really the bad guys, or so it seems and the good guys are no better. Who wants whom killed? Who is protecting whom? In the end it may be Charles who is the target.

The Venom Business

The narrative follows the age-old pattern of separate stories embedded within a primary story, as in the Panchatantra, the Arabian Nights and the Canterbury Tales. Each of the stories is linked to a different piece of furniture in an antique shop, and the question arises as to whether the stories are pure invention ("a pack of lies") or could perhaps be true - and what their being "true" would mean about the narrator. A young man with the unlikely name of MCC Berkshire ("from Reading") follows Ailsa home from the library and talks himself into an unpaid job in her mother''s run-down antique shop - all he asks is somewhere to sleep and books to read. He has a wonderful way of assessing the customers and suiting the provenance he gives the furniture to their interests. Moreover, he seems to adapt himself - his accent, his manner, his personal history - to the story being told, which also seems to be inspired by the book he has just been reading. When chided by Mrs Povey for telling lies, he responds: "''Not lies, madam.... Fiction. That''s the thing to give ''em. That''s the thing everyone wants. Fiction, madam! " Ailsa and Mrs Povey, while grateful to MCC for his help and enjoying his company, often have doubts about him, while Uncle Clive, on a brief visit, is positively hostile. After the Poveys'' financial problems are suddenly solved, literally from the pages of a book, the scene is set for MCC''s departure. In the final chapter Ailsa realizes the shocking truth, while the reader realizes that Ailsa''s reality is another of MCC''s tales.

A Pack of Lies

Miss Jane Hathaway is an astute pillar of a quaint coastal community, where her house sets atop a hill. She has long overcome the scandal created by her elder sister’s elopement, though the sister died without her forgiveness. She’s also aware of a child, although she’s never met her niece. When she receives a letter from Ruth Thorne, her 34-year-old niece, suggesting an invitation to visit, she accepts, but leaves before Ruth arrives. At Miss Hathaway’s house, Ruth is given a mysterious letter. The letter, from Aunt Jane, does not explain her sudden trip abroad, but insists that Ruth light an oil lamp in the attic each night. In the attic, Ruth stumbles upon some mementos and keepsakes in an old trunk. Among the items is her aunt’s wedding dress, made long ago and never worn. There’s also some newspaper clippings; an announcement of marriage between Mr. Charles G. Winfield, Capt. of the Schooner Mary, and Miss Abigail Weatherby. Ruth imagines that perhaps he was the man to whom her aunt’s wedding dress was intended. Later, she finds a death notice of Mrs. Abigail Winfield, aged 22. Ruth feels ashamed and puts everything back, forcing it from her mind. In the village, Ruth notices a young man, but does not make his acquaintance. Instead, she visits her aunt’s childhood friend, Mary Ainslie, whom the locals call “peculiar,” because she never leaves her house. Ruth is immediately taken with Miss Ainslie’s saintly demeanor and quickly forms a friendship with her. Ruth, who has resisted the urge to pillage her aunt’s love letters, unwittingly stumbles onto a partial letter, which states, “At Gibraltar for some time, keeping a shop, but will probably be found now in some small town on the coast of Italy. Very truly yours.” The signature has been torn. Ruth''s solitude is broken by Carl Winfield, a fellow journalist, who is staying in town at the suggestion of their mutual boss. She recognizes him as the young man she noticed earlier and finds him roguishly young and handsome; a great match for her. Mr. Winfield suffers from an ocular ailment and taking a reprieve from reading and writing. He''s lodging at the Pendletons, and confides to Ruth that Joseph Pendleton and Hepsey, her aunt’s maid, are courting. He asks Ruth to read the newspapers to him, and she agrees. Their time is well spent and on one of their many walks, they fall in love. Mr. Winfield is also curious about Miss Ainslie, though Ruth is uncertain to introduce them. She inquires first and, out of curiosity for his surname, Miss Ainslie agrees to meet him. Carl Winfield is transformed by Miss Ainslie and confides that his own mother died when he was young. Although he does not remember her, he’s been told awful stories about her vices, mainly alcoholism. Despite that Miss Ainslie is unmarried and has no children, he believes she’s the vision of a perfect mother. Mr. Winfield proposes to Ruth, and she accepts, although no date is set, then Joseph Pendleton proposes to Hepsey, and she accepts. With this much excitement, it''s difficult to imagine the surprise when Aunt Jane returns, a married woman! Not trusting the “heathen laws" with which she was married, Aunt Jane rushes to put forth a Christian union with one priest and two witnesses, Ruth and Carl. The bridegroom, James Ball, is all but thrilled. He has lived a long sailor’s life and enjoyed his bachelor days up to no end. He also fancies younger women… like Ruth and Hepsey! To his credit, he is there upon his word, having proposed to Miss Hathaway 30 years ago! It turns out that he was the purpose of her trip to Italy. When Aunt Jane, now Mrs. Ball, discovers her husband’s roving eye, she fires Hepsey and sends Ruth away, using her honeymoon as an excuse. Hepsey and Joe’s wedding is immediately put forth. Ruth, on the other hand, isn’t ready to rush into marriage. She heads for Miss Ainslie’s house instead. There, she knows, she will be comfortable for the duration of her holiday. Linens, china, and furniture make up the wedding gifts. While Ruth is staying with Miss Ainslie, the woman makes changes to her will, leaving everything to Ruth and Carl. Both insist they would rather have her, Carl especially. Strangely, Miss Ainslie and Carl share a dream about Carl’s father. They confide it to Ruth, but she is unwilling to believe it is anything more than a coincidence. Nonetheless, it has changed Miss Ainslie and she has lost her will to live. In the end, Ruth and Carl discover the truth: that Mary Ainslie was engaged to Charles G. Winfield, Capt. of the Schooner Mary, but that he married Carl’s mother, Abigail Weatherby instead. After his wife died, he was too proud to come forward with his son, so he stayed away all those years. And all those years, Miss Ainslie was waiting for him. Her friend, Jane, knew this, but hadn''t the heart to tell her. Instead, she lit the lamp in her attic for hers and Miss Ainslie''s sailors to make their way back to them.

Lavender and Old Lace

Paper Towns takes place in Orlando, Florida. The novel begins in a subdivision called Jefferson Park. The protagonist and narrator, Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, and his neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman, both nine years old, go to the park and discover the corpse of Robert Joyner, a divorced man who has committed suicide. The novel flashes forward to Quentin and Margo as high schoolers who have grown apart. One night Margo shows up at Quentin’s bedroom window wearing all black and black face paint. She convinces him to sneak out and help her get revenge on people she feels have hurt her. The first characters they visit are Margo’s ex boyfriend Jase and the girl with whom he was cheating on Margo, Becca. Margo has Quentin call Becca’s father and inform him that Becca is having sex with Jase in the basement of their home. Then Quentin and Margo break into their home, graffiti a blue ‘M’ on their wall, and leave a fish for Becca. The second person they visit is a character mentioned only once throughout the story. They leave her a bouquet of flowers, as she is the character who informed Margo that her boyfriend was cheating on her. After that they go to Jase’s house, break in and leave him a fish and a blue ‘M’. They then visit a character named Lacey, who becomes a more prominent character in the last half of the book. Margo felt that Lacey had never been a good friend to her, and that she had ridiculed her too often and made backhand comments that were truly meant as insults. They leave a fish for her in her car and graffiti a blue ‘M’ on the roof of her car. At 3:15 in the morning, they enter the SunTrust bank building and they relax on one of the higher floors for a short while. This is the first time Margo calls their town a "paper town", describing it as “fake” and “not even hard enough to be made of plastic”. Once they leave the SunTrust building, Margo asks Q who he would like to get revenge on, and he chooses the high school bully Chuck Parson. Margo and Q sneak into his house, remove one of Chuck’s eyebrows with hair removal cream, and slather Vaseline on all of the door handles in his house. After getting revenge on Chuck they break into SeaWorld, but leave disappointed because none of the animals are in their showcases. Margo and Q return to their homes close to the time they are supposed to be getting up in the morning to go to school. The next day at school all Q thinks about is how things have changed. He wonders if Margo will start hanging out with him and his friends and sitting with them at lunch, but Margo doesn’t show up to school that day. After Margo has been missing for three days her parents file a report. Margo had run away five times in the past so her parents were more frustrated than worried. After learning that Margo has run away, Q notices a poster of Woody Guthrie taped to the back of her shades. The poster leads him to a song called Walt Whitman''s Niece, which, in turn, leads him to a book of poems, Walt Whitman''s Leaves of Grass. The poem has highlighted sections that Q believes to be clues left by Margo to lead him to where she is. Q continues to search for clues and finds an address scrawled on a small piece of paper. Hoping it will lead them to where she is hiding, Q and his friends Radar and Ben skip school the following day and go to the place on the piece of paper. They find an old abandoned mini-mall which contains evidence that Margo was recently there. Eventually the clues lead Q to believe that Margo may be hiding out in one of the many abandoned subdivision projects around Orlando; what Q’s mother likes to call "pseudodivisions". He drives to all of the pseudodivisions where he feels she may be hiding, but has no luck locating her. While getting ready for graduation, Q makes a connection which leads him to discover that Margo has been hiding in a fictional town in New York called Agloe. Q, Radar, Ben, and Lacey all opt to skip graduation to drive to New York to search for her. They make the drive from Orlando, Florida to Agloe, New York in just shy of twenty-four hours. They find Margo living in an old dilapidated barn. But instead of being grateful for them finding her, she reacts negatively. Angry that Margo is not grateful for all their efforts to find her, Radar, Ben, and Lacey leave and spend the night at a hotel. Q stays behind and talks things over with Margo. She decides to stay in New York. Q wants to stay with her, but returns home with his friends in the end.

Paper Towns

Twenty years in the past, merchanter ships Sprite and Corinthian were docked at Mariner Station. What started out as a friendly sleepover between the inexperienced Marie Hawkins of Sprite and Austin Bowe of Corinthian turned into rape, with Marie becoming pregnant. She elected to raise the child, Thomas Bowe-Hawkins, on Sprite, but was consumed with rage. Tom grew up with an ambivalent mother and was never fully accepted by his family. When Austin later became senior captain of Corinthian, Marie started tracking Corinthian''s movements in order to expose what she suspected was smuggling. When the two ships cross paths again, this time at Viking, Marie is ready for her revenge. She and Tom scour the docks for information about Corinthian''s cargo, but Tom is caught snooping and is imprisoned aboard Corinthian, forcing the ship to depart prematurely for Pell Station via Tripoint. At Marie''s insistence, Sprite pursues Corinthian. On Corinthian, Tom meets Austin, his domineering father, and Capella, second chief navigator and night-walker. When Corinthian docks at Pell Station, Tom''s younger half-brother, Christian Bowe-Perrault tries to solve the problem by shipping him off to Sol Station, but Tom escapes and hides on the docks. Christian and Capella search frantically for him, unaware that Sabrina Perrault-Cadiz, Christian''s cousin, has already found and befriended him. When Capella contacts old acquaintances for assistance, it attracts the unwanted attention of a dissident faction within the outlawed Mazianni Fleet. Capella is an ex-Fleet navigator with knowledge of Fleet routes and drop-points, which the dissidents want. When Corinthian prepares to depart for Tripoint, Tom returns voluntarily to the ship and is no longer treated as a prisoner. He learns the ship''s secret: they are illegally trading with the renegade Fleet. Austin justifies this by maintaining that supplying the Fleet means it won''t have to raid merchanter ships. Sprite arrives at Pell Station shortly after Corinthian''s departure and takes off again in pursuit. During Corinthian''s jump to Tripoint, Capella is aware of Sprite and a Mazianni spotter following and performs a premature system-drop near an abandoned freighter, causing the other ships to overshoot. Corinthian immediately starts frantically offloading to the freighter, a Fleet drop-point. As the spotter and Sprite approach, Tom and Christian activate the freighter''s weapons and destroy the spotter. Tom tells his mother he is staying with Corinthian because he is more at home on his father''s ship than his mother''s. Marie, having taken the captaincy of Sprite from her weak brother, does not expose Corinthian''s illegal trade because of Tom and because Corinthian outguns Sprite. Austin realizes too many people know about his connection with the Fleet and decides to leave Alliance-Union space for good. As amends for the past, Austin offers Marie the access codes to the hulk at Tripoint and the opportunity to take over Corinthians profitable trade, but she declines and the ships part company. During Corinthians next jump, Capella tells Tom about a new drop-point she discovered that leads to a habitable planet with forests. The Mazianni are building a new secret colony there and Corinthian is now part of that future.

Tripoint

The play is set in Lombardy, and bases its characters on actual historical figures of the early seventh century A.D. As the play opens, Lombard soldiers are fleeing the battlefield, after defeat by the forces of Ravenna. The Swiss mercenary Andrucho, the title character, observes and comments upon the action. The King of the Lombards enters with his courtiers, including his cowardly and defeated general Timentes. (Andrucho, an unsubtle soldier, functions as something like the King''s jester; the King calls him his "bandog," and allows the Swiss to criticize the courtiers with little restraint.) The King demands that Timentes rally the troops and lead a counterattack. Andrucho and the old courtier Clephis speak up critically; Clephis in particular advises the King to replace Timentes with the banished nobleman Arioldus. The Lombard troops themselves cry out and demand Arioldus for their commander. The second scene shows Arioldus at his country estate; he lives in retirement with his books, glad to be away from the royal court. Andrucho comes to visit him; their conversation reveals that the Swiss mercenary is actually Aribert, another banished Lombard nobleman. Suddenly, courtiers begin arriving at Arioldus''s house, assuring him of their (previously invisible) support and affection. Clearly, a change is in the wind. The King arrives, reverses Arioldus''s banishment, and appoints him general of the army. The common troops are revitalized, and Arioldus wins a quick (offstage) victory over the army of Ravenna. Arioldus comes away from his victory with a young female captive called Eurinia. An honorable man, Arioldus protects the virtue of his captive; but she quickly becomes a focus of courtly gossip. When the King meets her, he is strongly taken with her beauty; Arioldus wants to shield Eurinia, but the King commands both of them to attend at his court. The early scenes in the play delineate two factions: the virtuous courtiers, Arioldus, Clephis, and Andrucho/Aribert, are opposed to the more amoral, cynical and self-interested courtiers, Antharis, Asprandus, and Iseas. Antharis and Clephis are old rivals; but their children, respectively son Alcidonus and daughter Selina, are in love and secretly married &mdash; though parental opposition forces them to conceal the fact and live apart. Timentes comes to be the play''s clown substitute, its focus for broad humor. Andrucho and other courtiers convince Timentes that he is being pursued by an angry mob. To hide, Timentes climbs into an empty coffin, and faints from fear. He is thought dead, until he recovers consciousness and climbs back out of the coffin. Later, Timentes gains a false courage through drunkenness. At court, the King attempts to seduce Eurinia; she resists and stand upon her honor, but the hot-blooded King rapes her. Arioldus learns of the crime, and faces a conflict between his personal honor and his oath of loyalty to the King. The two men confront each other over the issue &mdash; but the King is penitent, in his own limited way; he tries to repair matters by arranging a marriage between Arioldus and his sister, the princess Panopia. Arioldus rejects this; and the King offers to fight him, even providing Arioldus a pardon in advance, in case Arioldus kills him. The two are about to fight, when the eavesdropping Andrucho interrupts and prevents them. The young lovers Alcidonus and Selina are surprised in a clandestine meeting, and separated by their fathers. Antharis, ignorant of their marriage, tries to squelch their affair by telling his son a giant lie &mdash; that Alcidonus is a bastard, and Selina''s half-brother. The two lovers meet over this distressing news; believing themselves guilty of incest, they decide on suicide. They share a vial of poison. Their bodies are found, and Antharis is driven mad by the consequences of his deception. But the prudent Clephis, anticipating trouble, made sure that what the lovers thought was poison was only a sleeping potion. The lovers recover, though Antharis does not. The drama concludes in a large revelation scene, in which Arioldus, Andrucho, and Panopia manipulate the King into a positive resolution. A faked assassination attempt reminds the King that he is not invulnerable. Andrucho is revealed as Aribert, and redeemed from banishment; Eurinia is revealed as Aribert''s daughter Eugenia. Years before, the King had loved Eugenia; now, he marries her as a way of repairing the damage he has done to her. Arioldus and Panopia also marry, yielding the requisite happy ending of the tragicomic form.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Nine Coaches Waiting

By Mary Stewart

Nights of Rain and Stars

By Maeve Binchy

A Fan's Notes

By Frederick Exley

Hope

No Author Listed

Strands of Sunlight

By Gael Baudino

The Daughter of Time

By Josephine Tey

The Venom Business

By Michael Crichton

A Pack of Lies

By Geraldine McCaughrean

Lavender and Old Lace

By Myrtle Reed

Paper Towns

By John Green

Tripoint

By C. J. Cherryh

The Swisser

By Arthur Wilson