Charles Lambert, an orphan of the warf, hires on as a deckhand to "The Valiant Lady", captained by Darcell Covington. Charles experiences adventures he never dreamed possible, and when a terrible storm tosses the ship around, Charles is caught up in the ropes.Abra, an intellectually gifted woman from a family with mentally retarded parents and siblings, is the family caretaker until she goes away to college severing all family ties. Her high school teacher helps her find a small college far from home where she begins to weave a fictitous life as an orphan. She becomes a successful psychologist and creates an independent life that she likes. Sixteen years after leaving home, she learns that her sister died. She decides to share her family secrets with her friends and colleagues as the starting point on her quest to understand why she abandoned her family. She falls is love with Adam, her high school teacher's nephew, who helps her cope with her view that she has "dirty genes" which should never be passed on.

Young Prince Fallon is murdered the night of his inaugural ball . Many young women are invited to the palace to attend a celebration for Fallon's younger brother and to try to bring a semblance of happiness to the royal family. Rachelle's encounter with the dead prince starts a romance of a ghostly nature.'Democratic Wealth: Building a Citizens' Economy'' is a collection of essays that challenges the poverty of thinking around economic policy, particularly after the 2007 financial crash. It explores the renewed interest in republicanism and suggests this as a framework to shape an economy that serves the common good. It is a selection of articles from a series published by openDemocracy and Politics in Spires, a blog run by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.The book is split into three parts. The first, Taking Back the Economy, features contributions from Philip Pettit, Thad Williamson, Joe Guinan, Jessica Kimpell and others on republican thinking and the market. The second, Republican Economy in Practice, looks at application around the globe, including contributions on cooperatives, sovereign wealth funds, basic income, tax fairness and green solutions and discusses how to develop these models at scale. In the third, Republican Politics, contributors including Quentin Skinner, Alex Gourevitch and Karma Nabulsi discuss the politics of republicanism, from challenging  the surveillance state to democratising the workplace and harnessing the demands of new social movements for freedom from domination by the one per cent. ‘...as regards wealth, ... no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none so poor that he has to sell himself...’ -  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract