NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This heartwarming tale is full of lessons about taking risks in life and love.”—Cosmopolitan
 
“Funny, visual, and moving . . . A vibrant, loving, wistful portrait of a lost time and place.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch
 
It is 1950 in glittering, vibrant New York City, and Lucia Sartori is the beautiful twenty-five-year-old...

"Spencer Brooke always knew she was destined to be CEO of her grandfather's business--the most respected and luxurious department store in New York City. Brooke's has been at the center of every happy memory she has, but it hasn't been an easy journey. Seven years after her father's death, her life is very different from the days when she walked through the store with her grandfather as a young girl. She may be the owner of Brooke's, but she's also...

Émile Zola was one of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century, and founder of the Realist movement. In 1871 Zola began to write his most notable series of novels, the "Rougon-Macquart Novels", that relate the history of a fictional family under the Second Empire. As a strict naturalist, Zola was greatly concerned with science, especially the problems of evolution and heredity vs. environment. However,...

Recounts the development of the modern department store in late nineteenth-century Paris. The store is a symbol of capitalism, of the modern city, and of the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of consumer culture and the changes in sexual attitudes and class relations taking place at the end of the century. Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business...

When struggling young single mother Christine Eisley saves the life of an elderly woman working in Wilson's department store, she sets into motion a series of events that will test her strength, loyalty, and determination, all the while setting her on the path to finding true love.

When someone's passion for designer purses leads to murder, Haley goes shopping for a killer to clear her name.

"Two weeks before Christmas and all through Manhattan, shop windows are decorated in red and green satin. I'm standing alone in front of the famous Vivant department store, when a charming man named Aiden asks my opinion of the décor. It's a tragedy in tinsel, I say, unable to lie. He asks for a better idea with a twinkle in his eye. Did I know he owned the place? No. He put me on the spot. Now I'm working for that man, trying to ignore that he's...

Welcome to the Bottom Dollar Emporium of Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, where everything from coconut mallow cookies to Clabber Girl Baking Powder costs only a dollar, and coffee and gossip are free. For Elizabeth, Mavis, and Attalee, the Bottom Dollar Girls, logging nine to five at the Bottom Dollar is not just work time, it's family time. So when news gets out that the Super Saver Dollar Store chain plans to run the Bottom Dollar out of town, things...

L.A. fashionista Haley Randolph just spent two weeks in Europe with her boyfriend Ty Cameron, owner of Holt's Department Store. Life would be perfect if she could just get her hands on the new Sinful handbag, and if she could discover how her nemesis Tiffany Markham ended up dead in her trunk.

When Haley arrives at Holt's employee luncheon and fashion show, she spots a sick server and helps out by putting on a uniform and waiting tables. The luncheon is a hit, with catered food from Edible Elegance--her mother's latest business--until top fashion model Claudia Gray is found dead in the ladies room. Too bad for Haley that Claudia, ex-girlfriend of Haley's current sort-of boyfriend, was poisoned and the police are looking for a missing server....