Peter Mayle and his wife had been to Provence as tourists. They had dreamed of one day trading the long, gray winters and damp summers of England for the blue skies and sunshine of the coast of southern France. And then they made it happen. They moved into an old farmhouse at the foot of the Luberon mountains and embarked on a wonderful, if at times bewildering, new life. Among their experiences that first year: being inundated with builders and visitors,...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.
 
Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.
Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Taking up where his beloved A Year in Provence leaves off, Peter Mayle offers us another funny, beautifully (and deliciously) evocative book about life in Provence. With tales only one who lives there could know-of finding gold coins while digging in the garden, of indulging in sumptuous feasts at truck stops-and with characters introduced with great affection and wit-the gendarme fallen from grace, the summer visitors ever trying...

"Ellen DeGeneres has bought and renovated nearly a dozen homes over the last twenty-five years, and describes her real-estate and decorating adventures as "an education." She has long cared deeply about design: "I think I wanted to be an interior designer when I was thirteen." This deluxe edition of Home is printed on extremely high quality paper, printed on a sheet-fed press, and bound in a real cloth covered case with a tipped in photo of Ellen...

A little girl visits the home and garden of Claude Monet at Giverny, France, and learns about the artist's paintings and his life. The illustrations include photographs of the painter and his family as well as examples of his work.

"She Sheds provides inspiration, tips, and tricks to help create the hideaway of your dreams"--

From the award-winning author of Annie John comes a brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua. 'If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the prime minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a prime minister would want an airport named after him-why not a school, why not a hospital,...

In The Vanderbilts, the family's astounding story is told in full: from the farmstead beginnings of the Commodore on Staten Island to the pinnacle of wealth, fame, and social standing achieved by the legendary Vanderbilt ladies-Consuelo, Alva, Grace, Gertrude, and Gloria. The text traces the commercial machinations that established their fortune and the Vanderbilt mania for house building that engaged some of America's finest designers and architects....

Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach. Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond, on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed,...