Flappers & Fiction

Miss Susan Van Antwerp allows her life to be dictated by exactly one feature: her formidable, aristocratic nose. It is the reason she selects her millinery with such fuss, and perhaps the reason she disowned her beloved nephew for marrying a “snub-nosed nobody.” But when she purchases a particular brown bonnet, she unknowingly walks away with a desperate secret stitched into the crown. It seems a twenty-dollar bill and a serendipitous mistake are about to force a confrontation that pride alone cannot resolve.

With her grandmother too ill to make lace and the cupboard frightfully bare, young Dorel fears the wolf is finally at the door. Her only possession is a single beehive left by the old schoolmaster, but a neighbor has already dismissed the colony as worthless and the honey as unsellable. Desperate, she confides her troubles to the buzzing garden—unaware that a knowledgeable English stranger is listening from beyond the hedge. A charming tale of how a misunderstood legacy and a bit of kindness can change a life.

Young Jim is ready to sacrifice his hard-won collection of snowy owls for a Christmas stew—the only meat left in their snow-buried cottage on the Little Salmon River. But before the pot boils, a stranger wrapped in heavy buffalo furs knocks at the door, having battled a blizzard solely to find the local “owl-trapper.” What begins as a desperate holiday meal transforms into an unexpected encounter with a wealthy patron, proving that even in the harshest winters, fortune can find its way to the determined.

Decades before settling in a quiet Breton village, Abbé Maurin was a young priest traveling to China. On the deck of the Minerve, he encounters Marie, a woman of haunting beauty carrying a scandalous secret about a cruel husband and a forced exile. But just as their spiritual connection deepens, the treacherous winds off Cape Guardafui turn their voyage into a nightmare. This is a melancholic tale of a priest’s singular brush with romantic love and the shipwreck that left him the sole witness to a woman’s final sacrifice.

The Prince’s army sweeps through the gates of Su Chow, bringing the cruel merchant Wu Deah to his knees, yet the victory feels hollow without the woman he loves. Believing Li Tan dead because of a suitor’s wicked lie, Sho Kai sacrifices herself in a marriage she cannot endure, seeking final escape in the moonlit currents of the Yang Tze Kiang. But fate intervenes with a rescue that carries new peril, for the noblewoman who saves her has just discovered the lost royal seal hidden beneath the bride’s wet robes.