One of the most widely praised and rapturously entertaining first novels in recent years begins with a little girl falling down an abandoned mineshaft in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her name is Ursula Maki, she’s part Chinese, part Finnish, only two years old, and soon the dangerous effort to rescue her has an entire country glued to the TV. As it follows that effort, Ursula, Under re-creates the chain of ancestors, across two thousand years, whose lives culminate in the fragile miracle of a little girl underground: a Chinese alchemist in the third century BC, the orphaned playmate to a seventeenth-century Swedish queen,
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In the early 1960s, Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sell ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.
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In Alice Greenway’s exquisite gem of a novel, two girls tumble into their teenage years against the extraordinary backdrop of a Hong Kong dealing with the threat of communist China bubbling at its borders and the carnage in Vietnam that calls their father back time and again, like a moth to a flame. This astonishing literary debut is a tale of sacrifice and solidarity that gleams with the kind of intense, complicated love that only exists between sisters. In this novel based on historical fact, Jim Fergus takes readers on a journey of magnificent sweep and heartbreaking consequence peopled with unforgettable characters.
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When Ned Giles is orphaned as a teenager, he heads West hoping to leave his troubles behind. He joins the 1932 Great Apache Expedition on their search for a young boy, the son of a wealthy Mexican landowner, who was kidnapped by wild Apaches. But the expedition’s goal is complicated when they encounter a wild Apache girl in a Mexican jail cell, victim of a Mexican massacre of her tribe that has left her orphaned and unwilling to eat or speak. As he and the expedition make their way through the rugged Sierra Madre mountains, Ned’s growing feelings for the troubled girl soon force him to choose allegiances and make a decision that will haunt him forever.
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Following Queenmaker, “her majestic debut” (People magazine), India Edghill’s Wisdom’s Daughter is a vivid and assiduously researched rendition of the Biblical tale of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. As the Queen’s search for a true heir to her throne takes her to the court of the wisest man in the world, both she and the king learn how to value truth, love, and duty . . . and the king’s daughter learns to be a forceful woman in a man’s world. Told in a tapestry of voices that ring with authenticity, Wisdom’s Daughter profoundly reveals the deep ties among women in a patriarchal world.
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In Tobsha Learner’s The Witch of Cologne, 17th century heroine Ruth bas Elazer Saul is first introduced to the Zohar by her mother, and then by her nurse, Rosa, after her mother’s passing. Ruth employs this sacred knowledge in her career as a midwife, using revolutionary methods of childbirth and healing that lead to accusations of witchcraft, imprisonment, and a forbidden love affair with Detlef Von Tennen: a Catholic vice-bishop of the Dome.
Set in the medieval cities of Cologne and Amsterdam during the time of the Inquisition, The Witch of Cologne is the story of the complex relationship between German Jewry and their Christian neighbors.
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