In this vibrant new historical novel, the acclaimed
author of The Plum Tree and What She Left Behind
explores one young woman’s determination to put
an end to child labor in a Pennsylvania mining
town…
As a child, Emma Malloy left isolated Coal River,
Pennsylvania, vowing never to return. Now,
orphaned and penniless at nineteen, she accepts a
train ticket from her aunt and uncle and travels back to the rough-hewn
community. Treated like a servant by her relatives,
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone
survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks
solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of
Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri,
the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner
and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former
gardener of the emperor of Japan. Despite her
hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage
Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her
sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun
Ling as his apprentice “until the monsoon comes.”
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Drunken Botanist comes an enthralling novel based on the forgotten true story of one of the nation’s first female crime fighters.
Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters from city to country fifteen years ago. When a powerful, ruthless factory owner runs down their buggy, a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks,
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.
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.
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,
