Books with author Josephine Ho

In 1990, The Daughter of Time was selected by the British Crime Writers' Association as the greatest mystery novel of all time.Alan Grant, Scotland Yard Inspector (a character who also appears in five other novels by the same author) is feeling bored while confined to bed in hospital with a broken leg. Marta Hallard, an actress friend of his, suggests that he should amuse himself by researching a historical mystery. She brings him some pictures of historical characters, aware of Grant's interest in human faces. He becomes intrigued by a portrait of King Richard III. He prides himself on being able to read a person's character from his appearance, and King Richard seems to him a gentle and kind and wise man. Why is everyone so sure that he was a cruel murderer?

Brat Farrar is a 1949 crime novel by Josephine Tey, based in part on The Tichborne Claimant. In this tale of mystery and suspense, a stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family's sizable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick's mannerism's, appearance, and every significant detail of Patrick's early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that jeopardize the imposter's plan and his life.

What begins as a ploy to claim an inheritance ends with the impostor’s life hanging in the balance. In this tale of mystery and suspense, a stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s mannerism’s, appearance, and every significant detail of Patrick’s early life, up to his thirteenth year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that jeopardize the imposter’s plan and his life, culminating in a final terrible moment when all is revealed. Brat Farrar is a precarious adventure that grips the reader early and firmly and then holds on until the explosive climax.Length: 338 pages, with a reading time of approx 5.25 hours (84,681 words).

"Her best book.... Blazingly alive with all the passion, nostalgia for the old Midwest and the contrariness in general that made Herbst a favorite among the many writers who were her friends.... Her lyric radiance is all here. Every word of it is in contrast to the commercial swamp and academic frivolity of American writing today. It is a startling personal document."—Alfred Kazin, The New York Times Book Review“She gets under the skin to the permanent news. This is a classic memoir—part of our heritage.”—Hortense Calisher“Herbst’s prose in these essays is so luminous and biting and poignant that it chills to the bone and sticks with one always.”—Paula Rabinowitz“These memoirs have much of what must have been her personality—intense, sincere, intelligent, demanding…. She was a friend of the famous writers of her day—of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Maxwell Anderson, Katherine Ann Porter. Maxwell Perkins was her editor…. We are given a vivid sense of how her commitment to literature shaped her life…. Hers was a remarkable perspective, honed in remarkable times…. We still live in a time that needs someone like Josephine Herbst to remind us of the uses of art and the meaning of a literary life.”—Diane Johnson"A radical document, not just well-wrought reminiscence."—The Nation"Herbst, whose novels (the Trexler trilogy) and nonfiction were praised in the 1930s, was virtually ignored as a writer in her later years and after her death at age 77 in 1969.... But during that period she prevailed over poverty and loneliness to write the four incomparable essays reprinted here. The title piece evokes the internecine Spanish war and Herbst's experiences among fellow correspondents Hemingway and Dos Passos and with the country's suffering people. Insight and unstudied elegance are displayed in memoirs of the Midwest and of Germany as the Nazi threat loomed during the 1920s. Her recollections of a 1930 writers' conference in Russia leaves an indelible impression of the era that saw a worldwide revolution in politics and art. Courageous as she was, Herbst never revealed her lesbian affairs although the first one ended her marriage to John Herrmann, whom she truly loved and always regretted losing."—Publishers Weekly"In four engaging essays written in her sixties about her life between ages six and 51, Herbst easily re-creates the artistic climate of the Twenties and Thirties, as well as the passion for art, conversation, and travel that drew many talented Midwesterners to New York and Europe. Her simple yet sensual prose evokes past moments and milieus, but she is equally effective when articulating the sociopolitical concerns that motivated many writers then--concerns that sent her to the USSR in 1930 and to Spain in 1936. Though her essay on the Soviet Union is perhaps more pertinent today than her Spanish Civil War reminiscences, overall she offers a compelling portrait of a woman writer living boldly. Herbst was persecuted in the Fifties for her political sentiments, and until recently she has been neglected. Her new work provides ballast from the woman's perspective when considered with books like Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and...illuminates a past era."—Library Journal"These posthumous memoirs of novelist and journalist Herbst alternate between dreamy recollection and thoughtful questioning of literary and political fashions…. In New York, Paris, and other centers of the cutting edge she is part of a literary circle that includes Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Nathanael West, and others, living an enviable life of conversation and reading…. Herbst convinces us that she was in the eye of the storm of the era that ‘opened the world to its literary young on a scale never before ventured and not equaled since.’"—Kirkus Reviews

No one ever listens to 11 year old Marina Bella. Frustrated with her teenage siblings, Marina finds herself alone a lot until she is unexpectedly visited by a majestic flying unicorn. The beautiful creature whisks Marina to the magical Kingdom of Zaratan.There, the menacing Wolf Wizard has put the king and queen under a deep freeze spell and has control over the kingdom. He is on a relentless sinister mission and Marina is in his way. She will need the help of her new friends - farmers, fairies, and wizards - to help the kingdom and find her way home. Not succeeding could leave Marina stranded in Zaratan forever. What secrets of the past will Marina discover, and will she ever be able to go home?"Shadows in the Kingdom of Zaratan" is a middle grade fantasy adventure chapter book. (ages 9 and up)

While in hospital, Inspector Grant’s professional curiosity is soon aroused. In a portrait of Richard III, the hunchbacked monster of nursery stories and history books, he finds a face that refuses to fit its reputation. But how, after four hundred years, can a bedridden policeman uncover the truth about the murder of the Princes in the Tower?From the Paperback edition.

In the 1930s, journalist and novelist Josephine Herbst (1892-1969) was widely regarded as one of the most important women writers in America. Yet the conservative climate of World War II and the ensuing Cold War relegated Herbst - like other radical writers of the interwar period - to almost total obscurity. By the 1960s, when Herbst composed the autobiographical essays in this collection, the insight of radical writers was being re-evaluated and appreciated once again. Herbst's reminiscences provide brilliant and evocative portraits of intellectual, artistic, and political life in the early twentieth century. Here we are witness to Herbst's childhood and young womanhood in the Midwest, her bohemian life in the East, and her extensive travels as a journalist. Along the way, she offers sketches of many of her contemporaries, including Allen Tate, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Dos Passos.

The story is about the Ashbys, an English country-squire family. Their centuries-old family estate is Latchetts, in the fictional village of Clare, near the south coast of England. It takes place in the late 1940s, after World War II.The Ashby family consists of Beatrice Ashby ("Aunt Bee"), a 50-ish spinster and the four children of her late brother Bill: Simon, 20; Eleanor, 18–19 and twins Jane and Ruth, 9. Bill and his wife Nora died eight years before. Since then, the Ashbys have been short of money. Bee has kept the estate going by turning the family stable into a profitable business, combining breeding, selling and training horses with riding lessons. When Simon turns twenty-one, he will inherit Latchetts and a large trust fund left by his mother. Simon had a twin brother, Patrick, older than he by a few minutes but soon after Bill and Nora died, Patrick disappeared, leaving what was taken as a suicide note.