Anne of the Island

Eighteen-year-old Anne has left Green Gables for university in nearby Nova Scotia, where she will finally fulfill her dream of earning a degree. She sets up home in a cozy cottage in bustling Kingsport with Avonlea's Priscilla Grant and a new friend, the beautiful Philippa Gordon. But it's not all fun and games. Anne's childhood friend, Ruby Gillis, dies of tuberculosis back in Avonlea, shattering Anne's carefree attitude to life, and Gilbert finally declares his feelings and proposes. But Anne still has a naïve, overly romantic view of love and rejects him, driving a wedge between them. A two-year relationship with a fellow Redmond College student, Roy Gardner, follows, but when he also proposes, Anne realizes that he's not the one for her after all. When she returns to Avonlea and learns that Gilbert is deathly ill with typhoid, she is distraught. Will she recognize the depth of her feelings at last? Or is it already too late for Anne and her one true love?

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was born in what is now New London, Prince Edward Island, and raised by her grandparents after the death of her mother when she was just two. She worked for a time as a teacher and a journalist, then wrote her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, in the evenings while caring for her grandmother. When the book appeared in 1908, it was an instant success; it would go on to sell millions of copies in dozens of languages the world over, making Anne one of literature's most beloved characters of all time.