Preparing for the arrival of an important visitor, a wacky housekeeper follows her employer's instructions with humorous results.

"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous tale,...

A novel whose principal characters are the servants in Jane Austen's Pride and prejudice. "If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them. In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber...

In the wake of her tile-maker father's untimely blindness, 16-year-old Griet becomes a maid in the house of painter Johannes Vermeer, where she glimpses a world very different from her own. Griet's nuanced sense of color soon attracts the attention of the artist, who teaches her how to mix pigments as she cleans his studio. But Griet's growing bond with Vermeer does not go unnoticed by the rest of the household, and when the painter chooses her to...

Downton Abbey - a sprawling, lavish Edwardian mansion and park nestled in the lush North Yorkshire landscape - needs an heir. Dame Maggie Smith turns in a show-stopping performance as Violet, the charmingly stubborn Dowager Countess of Grantham, matriarch of Downton and the irrefutable authority on everything. Hugh Bonneville stars as her son, the stoic, unflappable Earl of Grantham; Elizabeth McGovern plays his far-sighted America wife, Cora; and...

Amelia Bedelia, who knows very little about baseball, stands in for a sick player during a game.

"Mother of two Liv Green barely scrapes by as a maid to make ends meet, often finding escape in a good book while daydreaming of becoming a writer herself. So she can't believe her luck when she lands a job housekeeping for her personal hero, megabestselling author Essie Starling, a mysterious and intimidating recluse. The last thing Liv expected was to be the only person Essie talks to, which leads to a tenuous friendship. But when Essie dies suddenly,...

Distraught by a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, a young man leaves New York to take an unusual job in the strange desert metropolis of Dubai at the height of its self-invention as a futuristic Shangri-la where he struggles with his new position as the "family officer" of the capricious and very rich Batros family.

Season two returns as the Great War rages across Europe, and not even the serene Yorkshire countryside is free from its effects. The men and women of Downton are doing their part both on the front lines and the home front, but the intensity of war only serves to inflame the more familiar passions of love, loss, blackmail, and betrayal.

In Right Ho, Jeeves Bertie's old friend Gussie Fink-Nottle has fallen in love and, as usual, makes a hash of the affair until Jeeves comes to his rescue.