oxford

In 1901, the word 'Bondmaid' was discovered missing from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it. Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the 'Scriptorium', a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme's place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word 'bondmaid' flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world. Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women's experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words"--Provided by publisher.

"Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, grew up on a houseboat with her mother. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on. When her mother phones, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals. A runaway boy had found community and shelter with them, and all three were haunted by their past and stalked by an ominous creature lurking in the canal that she called the bonak. And now that she's searching for her mother, she'll have to face it"--OCLC.

Archie Greene has lived with his grandmother since he was a baby, but when a mysterious package arrives on his twelfth birthday with instructions to take it to a strange bookshop in Oxford, he finds himself involved with a secret society of people who protect the world's magical books, and discovers that he has family he never knew about.

Presents black-and-white photographs of residents from the small Iowa community of Oxford, taken in 1984 and again two decades later, with accompanying first-person narratives.

Will Baker takes a year off after a disappointment in a political campaign where he was working and explores the heady social world of Oxford, where he is soon caught up in a whirlwind of unexpected friendships and romantic entanglements that threaten his safe plans for the future.

Harriet Vane's Oxford reunion is shadowed by a rash of bizarre pranks and malicious mischief that include beautifully worded death threats, burnt effigies and vicious poison-pen letters, and Harriet finds herself and Lord Peter Wimsey challenged by an elusive set of clues.

Robert Grove, a fellow at New College, Oxford in the turbulent 1660s, is found dead in mysterious circumstances, prompting the speculations of four witnesses who each offer a different version of events surrounding the murder.

Chronicles the events behind a white uprising that occurred when Air Force veteran James Meredith tried to become the first African-American student to register at the University of Mississippi in 1962.