Set during the harrowing, final moments of World War II, Polish resistance fighter Jakób Kowalski is planting a bomb on the tracks intending to destroy a German troop transport, but six-year-old Gretl Schmidt’s unscheduled train bound for Auschwitz reaches the bomb first. Gretl is the only survivor.
Though spared from the concentration camp, the orphaned German Jew finds herself now lost in a hostile country. When Jakób discovers her, guilt and compassion prompt him to hide and protect Gretl in his home concealed from his Catholic family. For years, the young man and little girl form a bond over the secrets they must hide from the world.
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Seventeen-year-old Belle Boyd, an avowed rebel with a dangerous temper, shot a Union soldier in her home, and became a courier and spy for the Confederate army, using her considerable charms to seduce men on both sides. Emma Edmonds disguised herself as a man to enlist as a Union private named Frank Thompson, witnessing the bloodiest battles of the war and infiltrating enemy lines. The beautiful widow Rose O’Neal Greenhow engaged in affairs with powerful Northern politicians, and used her young daughter to send information to Southern generals. Elizabeth Van Lew, a wealthy Richmond abolitionist, hid behind her proper Southern manners as she orchestrated a far-reaching espionage ring—even placing a former slave inside the Confederate White House—right under the noses of increasingly suspicious rebel detectives.
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Man Booker Prize Winner
A Best Books of the Year: The New York Times,
NPR, The Washington Post, The Minneapolis
Star-Tribune, The Economist, The Seattle Times,
Financial Times
August, 1943: Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans
is haunted by his affair with his uncle’s young
wife two years earlier. His life, in a brutal Japanese POW camp on the
Thai-Burma Death Railway,
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Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz brings her sharp wit and keen eye to early twentieth-century America in a comedic tour de force destined to become a modern classic.
Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs yearns for real life and true love—like the heroines in her beloved novels experience. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself—because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl could only dream of—a woman with a future.
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Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackåsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow.
One day, Frederika happens upon the mutilated body of one of their neighbors. The death is dismissed as a wolf attack, but Maija feels certain that the wounds could only have been inflicted by another man.
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National Book Award Nominee
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, BookPage
1920, Denby, Iowa: Rosanna and Walter Langdon have just welcomed their firstborn son, Frank, into their family farm. He will be the oldest of five. Each chapter in this extraordinary novel covers a single year, encompassing the sweep of history as the Langdons abide by time-honored values and pass them on to their children. With the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change through the early 1950s,
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