Never ending love, sex, violence, abuse, intrique in the underworld of sexual investigations and politics. A love story spun through separations and union of those fighting the abuse found in everyday relationships.

As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni BoccaccioÕs Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, BoccaccioÕs collection of novelle was, in Guido RuggieroÕs words, a Òsymphony of life.Ó Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to BoccaccioÕs world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the DecameronÕs cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il PopoloÑthe people, fractious and enterprising. BoccaccioÕs stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.

Lover's in the Time of Plague The Answers, is my final book in the trilogy of the incredibly accepted Lover's in the Time of Plague series concerning both a love story, a professional search for answers and the difficult and dangerous world of treating and advocating young persons who have been abused especially those abused by political or power structures. When readers read my book they often feel, unfortunately close to incidents in their lives they have kept secret for decades o9ut of fear and threats by perpetrators. They have also kept silent by a lack of education and knowledge of what actually defines abuse and especially sexual abuse leading the perpetrators to continue abusing and worse teaching others to abuse. The writing comes from my educational and profession background as an educator and clinician who has been working along side some of America's best clinicians. It is gutsy, valid and insightful and its purpose is to energize others to rid America of this plague. It is also a love story. The codes of professional standards do not allow patient confidences to be disclosed and do not condone staff relationships. The clinicians in the books are outside of their research, often in different paths, lovers who have created for themselves and as a model for others a relationship of spiritual and human love that transcends the usual prescribed guidelines of relationships. Thus, the love story is deep and gives human beings a possibility of what is possible when we are thoroughly educated not for the purposes of power structures to use our reproduction for their means but for love, for peace, for God given happiness. Theirs is not a perfect life. The slings and arrows thrown by life's foibles threatened and harm even them. However, it is the strength of their love that allows them the strength to health others and prevent others from continuing to be abused.

Author's Statement Lovers After the Time of Plague is long awaited the sequel by Donna White-Davis to her second novel Lovers in the Time of Plague. It follows the lovers into later life after years of self-sacrificing research in intensely dangerous and risky situation into a world they spent their lives and loves trying to shape into a world of loving peace. As with Hemingway and Fitzgerald White-Davis records her time, life with all the flaws and enthusiasms of youth allowing her characters to pass into a loving graceful, yet still intense aging denied the characters of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Donna herself says "My characters are not 'role models of perfect behavior'. They are what they are. They lived as they lived, during a time that is what it is. Miraculously they challenge her lovers give to convention actually succeed, if not for themselves for others into a future that defeated the 'plague' of unknown diseases and irresponsible procreating into on of educated loving responsible choice all while delighting and savoring the God given blessing of loving each other completely". Did it actually happen? Could any lovers love so deeply dedicated to each other and their research into the established institutions and religions of their time to find universal truth about responsible loving that includes passion for life. to change the relationships of generations? She writes the book to say life is what it is. She is also asking what will the next generation of lovers face and will they be willing to risk life and love to save the world?

A beautifully packaged edition of one of García Márquez's most beloved novels, with never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author's son, Gonzalo García Barcha. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS, SCOTSMAN and SPECTATOR Three journeys. One road. England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers' past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires. A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek's extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire - set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.

A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.