The Gilded Cage

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Pierre Jean Jouve

Set amid the glamour of the intellectual, worldly, artistic and feminist circles of 1920s Europe, this is the first half of the Adventure of Catherine Crachat. Catherine is a film star—an inconstant wanderer, she is compared to Hecate, the lunar goddess--in search of her destiny. Having returned to Paris after a sojourn in Vienna that has been fraught with emotional entanglements and the taint of death, Catherine seeks new relationships that will give her life meaning, but she finds that no one is who he or she appears to be. In an emotional tumult, events--both real and imagined--spiral out of her control, and Catherine turns to psychoanalysis to reconcile a past in which love and death, debasement and the search for divinity merge and divide in haunting, kaleidoscopic ways.

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(by) Patricia Robins

When Mandy's boyfriend dies in a motorbike accident, she is left alone with a young child and little money. It seems a perfect solution to Mandy's twin problems of finance and loneliness when her son's uncle Jon offers her a job as his receptionist - as well as a home with himself and his beautiful but spoilt wife, Gillian - she gratefully accepts. But instead of of the rosy future she expects, Mandy finds she has entered a scene of marital discord and soon becomes aware of Jon's unhappiness, as well as her own growing love for him. Perhaps if she welcomes the attentions of Mike Sinclair, an attractive Irish bachelor, it will help her to strain of keeping her true feelings hidden....

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Barbara Cartland

ADVENTURE IN ROME Dacia Vancroft was young and pretty. And now she was in fabulous Rome, private nurse to Sir Marcus Cunningham. It would have been a thrilling week, if Sir Marcus hadn't been so hateful. He was rude, arrogant, and quarrelsome, and his dark eyes compelled her with their autocratic gaze. Was it any wonder she escaped one evening, dressed like a fairy-tale princess? Or that she let a handsome Italian Count kiss her in the enchanted moonlight. She didn't know what that kiss meant until it was too late for love!

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(by) Denise Robins

When Sonia Gayle travels by sea to meet Harry, her fiance, in the Belgian Congo, she turns her back on Revel Dacre, the most fascinating man on board. She soon discovers that Dacre is Harry's employer and one of the most influential men in the country. It is Revel's turn to take revenge, but in doing so he realises that Sonia is the only woman in the world for him.