By detailing everyday life in the myriad of small towns and villages during the 19th and early twentieth centuries, this captivating book paints a quirky and often hilarious portrait of France quite different from most history books. Especially amusing are quotations from actual guidebooks from the period, whose authors, obliged to travel by carriage, offered helpful tidbits to future tourists on the way to speak to the coachman: "Listen, postilion, your carriage is heavy and over-loaded. This horse is worthless. I am decidedly loath to take it. Please give me a different one. Also, I believe the wheels are on fire. Look and see."

Brooding widower Max de Winter, wealthy, handsome and aristocratic, marries a young, innocent nobody who feels inferior to her husband's glamorous first wife, Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances...I am surprised no one in Hollywood has thought to remake this gothic thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which originally starred Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Daphne du Maurier's rich, atmospheric prose is not to be missed.

This one is a stitch. The premise of the novel is that the Greek gods are living among us in a rundown flat in present day London. Artemis, the goddess of hunting and chastity, walks dogs for a living. Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, does phone sex. Apollo plays a clairvoyant on a sleazy television show. The author has an easy style and a deadpan wit. I laughed all the way to the very last page.