Valerie Martin

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

South Carolina

From Simon & Schuster, Alexandra is Valerie Martin's "strange and artful novel" (Margaret Manning, Boston Sunday Globe). In Alexandra, Valerie Martin creates a slowly shocking erotic odyssey, a bittersweet love story, a chilling tale of a man destroyed by a desperate and tragic experiment in passion. It's an unforgettable novel for any lover of fiction.

Alexandra

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

From the bestselling author of Mary Reilly and the internationally acclaimed Property, a brilliant collection featuring Valerie Martin's finest short stories to date.

     For four decades Valerie Martin has been publishing novels and stories that demonstrate her incredible range as a writer, moving between realism and fantasy while employing a voice that is at once whimsical and tragic. The twelve stories in this collection showcase Martin's enviable control, precision, and grace and are organized around her three fictional obsessions--the natural world, the artistic sphere, and stunning transformations. In "The Change," a journalist watches his menopausal wife, an engraver, create some of her eeriest and most affecting works even as she seems to be willfully destroying their marriage. In "The Open Door," an American poet in Rome finds herself forced to choose between her lover and a world so alien it takes her voice away. "Sea Lovers" conjures up a hideous mermaid whose fatal seduction of a fisherman provides better reason than Jaws for staying out of the water. In "The Incident at Villedeau" a respected gentleman confesses to killing his wife's former lover, an event that could be construed as an accident, an impulsive act, or a premeditated crime. Exploring themes of obsession, justice, passion, and duplicity, these drolly macabre stories buzz with tension.

Sea Lovers: Selected Stories (1st Edition, 2012)

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Set in Motion

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New York

A Novel

From the prize-winning and beloved author Valerie Martin (Mary Reilly, Property, Italian Fever) comes an "utterly brilliant" (Daily Mail) tale of female subversion and agency in a patriarchal world, with two brilliantly crafted protagonists at its center. It’s 1954 on far-flung Verona Island, a tropical paradise with a fragile economy and a rising crime rate. Prostitution is legal and Lila Gulliver is proud of her business, a high-end brothel where her clients are guaranteed privacy and discretion. When Carità Bercy, a young, destitute, and beautiful blind woman arrives at her door seeking employment, Lila decides to give her a chance. Carità proves a valuable asset to the house, as well as a psychological puzzle to her employer. One hot night, Ian Drohan, a handsome youth and the scion of the wealthiest family on the island, visits Lila’s house and falls madly in love with Carità. Lila doubts his sincerity and fears for Carità ‘s future. Carità has no such fears. In fact, Carità is a reckless force of nature, determined to succeed in ways Lila hasn’t even contemplated. Spirits of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, as well as the devilish denizens of the magical island in The Tempest haunt this steamy tale of passionate love, found, lost, and found again.

Mrs. Gulliver

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New Mexico

Texas

Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress.
Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.

Property

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Kentucky

Alabama

New and Selected Stories

Sea Lovers

Brand new never read. Slight wear on spine from shipping see photos. 

New Jersey

A secluded Tuscan villa, a mysterious death, a missing manuscript, a whiff of a ghost, and a smart young American woman tumbling helplessly into an unexpected affair--these are the ingredients of this beguiling and acutely observed new novel by the author ofMary Reilly. Lucy Stark--clever, pragmatic, capable--is the assistant to a best-selling but remarkably untalented writer named DV, who has spent the last several months in Tuscany searching for inspiration. One morning in Brooklyn, as Lucy sits at her desk reluctantly reading the first half of DV's latest novel, she receives a startling phone call: DV is dead, and the circumstances are suspicious. Soon Lucy finds herself in Italy, where her search for the rest of DV's manuscript leads her into the thick of various mysteries. Was DV murdered, or just the victim of his own stupidity? Was the ghost story he was writing pure fantasy, or did it hint at a darker reality? Is the devastating, married Massimo, who cares for Lucy in ways no one has before, as dangerously in love with her as she is with him? Part mystery, part romance, part meditation on the maddening but redemptive power of art,Italian Feveris a supremely satisfying novel: a funny, insightful portrait of the American abroad, and an irresistible exploration of our perpetual love affair with Italy.

Italian Fever

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Illinois

California

West Virginia

"Acutely observed...charmingly old-fashioned."--Los Angeles Times

In Italian Fever, Valerie Martin redefines the Gothic novel in a compelling tale of one woman's headlong tumble into a mystery, art, and eros.

Part romance, part gothic suspense story and wholly entertaining, Italian Fever is the story of the awakening of Lucy Stark, an American pragmatist. Lucy leads a quiet, solitary life working for a best-selling (but remarkably untalented) writer. When he dies at his villa in Tuscany, Lucy flies to Tuscany to settle his affairs. What begins as a grim chore soon threatens Stark's Emersonian self-reliance--and her very sense of what is real. The villa harbors secrets: a missing manuscript, neighbors whose Byzantine arrogance veils their dark past, a phantom whose nocturnal visits tear a gaping hole in Lucy's well-honed skepticism. And to complicate matters: Massimo, a married man whose tender attentions render Lucy breathless.

Smart, sophisticated, achingly beautiful, Italian Fever is one of the most original and compelling novels of the year.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

From the acclaimed author of the bestselling Italian Fever and award winning Property, comes a fresh twist on the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, a novel told from the perspective of Mary Reilly, Dr. Jekyll's dutiful and intelligent housemaid. Faithfully weaving in details from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Martin introduces an original and captivating character: Mary is a survivor–scarred but still strong–familiar with evil, yet brimming with devotion and love. As a bond grows between Mary and her tortured employer, she is sent on errands to unsavory districts of London and entrusted with secrets she would rather not know. Unable to confront her hideous suspicions about Dr. Jekyll, Mary ultimately proves the lengths to which she'll go to protect him. Through her astute reflections, we hear the rest of the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, and this familiar tale is made more terrifying than we remember it, more complex than we imagined possible.

Mary Reilly

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Indiana

A timeless story of family, war, art, and betrayal set around an ancient, ancestral home in the Tuscan countryside from bestselling novelist Valerie Martin.

When Jan Vidor, an American writer and academic, rents an apartment in a Tuscan villa for the summer, she plans to spend her break working on a novel about Mussolini. Instead, she finds herself captivated by her aristocratic landlady, the elegant, acerbic Beatrice Salviati Bartolo Doyle, whose family has owned Villa Chiara for generations. Jan is intrigued by Beatrice's stories of World War II, particularly by the tragic fate of her uncle Sandro, who was mysteriously murdered in the driveway of the villa at the conclusion of the war. Day by day, Beatrice makes Jan privy to her family history. 
 
As years go by and the friendship is sustained by infrequent meetings, Jan finds she can't resist writing Beatrice's story. But as she works on the novel, it becomes clear that the villa itself is at risk and that Beatrice is incapable of saving it. Jan understands that she is telling the story of a catastrophe her friend might prefer to conceal. She presses on.

I Give It to You

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1872: the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste is discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo is intact and there is no sign of struggle, but her crew has disappeared, never to be found. As news of the derelict ghost ship spreads, the Mary Celeste captures imaginations around the world—from a Philadelphia spiritualist medium named Violet Petra to an unknown young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle. In a haunted, death-obsessed age, the Mary Celeste is by turns a provocative mystery, an inspiration to creativity, and the tragic story of a family doomed by the sea. Based on actual events, spanning seas and continents, life and death, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste is a spellbinding exploration of love, nature, and the fictions that pass as truth.

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

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Washington

When aspiring actor Edward Day is saved from drowning by Guy Margate, he becomes torn between his indebtness to his rescuer and his attraction to Madeleine, who is also desired by Guy.

Confessions of Edward Day

7910d293-0691-48ec-b98c-acfe56eb0468-1

Florida

Two women, Chloe Dale, an artist comfortably ensconced in bucolic suburbia, and Salome Drago, a wily, seductive refugee from a country that no longer exists, confront each other in a Manhattan restaurant, and the battle lines are drawn. Toby Dale, son of the artist and ardent suitor of the refugee, is in no position to choose sides. Outside, the drumbeats for the impending invasion of Iraq drown out all argument, and those who object will soon be reduced to standing in the street. The story of two families--suspicious, territorial, naïve in their confidence that they are free of the past--Trespass unfolds with commanding force. It is a bracing, tender novel for the 21st century.

Trespass

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There is writing on the inside cover, other than that this book appears unread.

Missouri

A captivating, atmospheric return to historical fiction that is every bit as convincing and engrossing as Martin's landmark Mary Reilly.

In 1872 the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo was intact and there was no sign of struggle, but the crew was gone. They were never found.

This maritime mystery lies at the center of an intricate narrative branching through the highest levels of late-nineteenth-century literary society. While on a voyage to Africa, a rather hard-up and unproven young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle hears of the Mary Celeste and decides to write an outlandish short story about what took place. This story causes quite a sensation back in the United States, particularly between sought-after Philadelphia spiritualist medium Violet Petra and a rational-minded journalist named Phoebe Grant, who is seeking to expose Petra as a fraud. Then there is the family of the Mary Celeste's captain, a family linked to the sea for generations and marked repeatedly by tragedy. Each member of this ensemble cast holds a critical piece to the puzzle of the Mary Celeste.

These three elements--a ship found sailing without a crew, a famous writer on the verge of enormous success, and the rise of an unorthodox and heretical religious fervor--converge in unexpected ways, in diaries, in letters, in safe harbors and rough seas. In a haunted, death-obsessed age, a ghost ship appearing in the mist is by turns a provocative mystery, an inspiration to creativity, and a tragic story of the disappearance of a family and of a bond between husband and wife that, for one moment, transcends the impenetrable barrier of death.

"It's 1954 on far-flung Verona Island, a tropical paradise with a fragile economy and a rising crime rate. Prostitution is legal and Lila Gulliver is proud of her business, a high-end brothel where her clients are guaranteed privacy and discretion. When Carità Bercy, a young, destitute, and beautiful blind woman arrives at her door seeking employment, Lila decides to give her a chance. Carità proves a valuable asset to the house, as well as a psychological puzzle to her employer. One hot night, Ian Drohan, a handsome youth and the scion of the wealthiest family on the island, visits Lila's house and falls madly in love with Carità. Lila doubts his sincerity and fears for Carità 's future. Carità has no such fears. In fact, Carità is a reckless force of nature, determined to succeed in ways Lila hasn't even contemplated. Spirits of the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, as well as the devilish denizens of the magical island in The Tempest, haunt this steamy tale of passionate love, found and lost, and found again"--

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Valerie Martin

Alexandra

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Sea Lovers: Selected Stories (1st Edition, 2012)

Valerie Martin

Set in Motion

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Mrs. Gulliver

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Property

Valerie Martin

Property

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Sea Lovers

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Mrs. Gulliver

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Mrs. Gulliver

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I Give It to You

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I Give It to You

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Confessions of Edward Day

Valerie Martin

Mrs. Gulliver

Valerie Martin

Trespass

Valerie Martin

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

Valerie Martin

Property

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The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

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Mrs. Gulliver