Books with category đź’¬ Retellings
Displaying 4 books

Never Met a Duke Like You

2023

by Amalie Howard

Never Met a Duke Like You is a tale of opposites attracting in a dazzling Regency romance that's been compared to Clueless meeting Bridgerton. We meet Lady Vesper Lyndhurst, a beautiful and clever duke's daughter who revels in luxury and has a special talent for matchmaking. Although she's taken a vow against love for herself, she excels at arranging it for others.

Enter the Duke of Greydon, who, burdened by an insolvent estate, reluctantly returns to England to save his family's dwindling fortunes. He's been away for years, content to be free from his mother's grasp and the trivialities of high society. But upon his return, he finds that little has changed, including his feelings for the infuriatingly attractive heiress who lives next door.

An unforeseen incident lands the pair, who have evolved from friends to adversaries, trapped in an attic. In the close quarters, their undeniable chemistry sparks into a fiery connection that they find increasingly difficult to deny. Despite being complete opposites with seemingly incompatible lives, destiny, the ever-persistent matchmaker, seems to have a different plan in store for them.

Julia

2023

by Sandra Newman

Julia: A Novel is an imaginative, feminist, and brilliantly relevant-to-today retelling of Orwell's 1984, from the point of view of Winston Smith's lover, Julia, by critically acclaimed novelist Sandra Newman. Julia Worthing is a mechanic, working in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. It's 1984, and Britain (now called Airstrip One) has long been absorbed into the larger trans-Atlantic nation of Oceania.

Oceania has been at war for as long as anyone can remember, and is ruled by an ultra-totalitarian Party, whose leader is a quasi-mythical figure called Big Brother. In short, everything about this world is as it is in Orwell's 1984. All her life, Julia has known only Oceania, and, until she meets Winston Smith, she has never imagined anything else.

She is an ideal citizen: cheerfully cynical, always ready with a bribe, piously repeating every political slogan while believing in nothing. She routinely breaks the rules, but also collaborates with the regime when necessary. Everyone likes Julia. Then one day she finds herself walking toward Winston Smith in a corridor and impulsively slips him a note, setting in motion the devastating, unforgettable events of the classic story.

Julia takes us on a surprising journey through Orwell's now-iconic dystopia, with twists that reveal unexpected sides not only to Julia, but to other familiar figures in the 1984 universe. This unique perspective lays bare our own world in haunting and provocative ways, just as the original did almost seventy-five years ago.

Much Ado about Nada

2023

by Uzma Jalaluddin

A sparkling second-chance romance inspired by Jane Austen's Persuasion...

Nada Syed is stuck. On the cusp of thirty, she's still living at home with her brothers and parents in the Golden Crescent neighbourhood of Toronto, resolutely ignoring her mother's unsubtle pleas to get married already. While Nada has a good job as an engineer, it's a far cry from realizing her start-up dreams for her tech baby, Ask Apa, the app that launched with a whimper instead of a bang because of a double-crossing business partner. Nothing in her life has turned out the way it was supposed to, and Nada feels like a failure. Something needs to change, but the past is holding on too tightly to let her move forward.

Nada's best friend Haleema is determined to pry her from her shell...and what better place than at the giant annual Muslim conference held downtown, where Nada can finally meet Haleema's fiancé, Zayn. And did Haleema mention Zayn's brother Baz will be there?

What Haleema doesn't know is that Nada and Baz have a past—some of it good, some of it bad and all of it secret. At the conference, that past all comes hurtling at Nada, bringing new complications and a moment of reckoning. Can Nada truly say goodbye to once was or should she hold tight to her dreams and find their new beginnings?

White Cat, Black Dog

2023

by Kelly Link

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers—characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers—or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable—these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.

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