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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Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman devastated by his tragic love affair with a married Frenchwoman, joins the army when World War I breaks out. In 1916, now an officer, he commands a brigade of soldiers in a bizarre campaign waged beneath German lines. On this nightmarish battlefield, Stephen will become both death’s agent and its dispassionate witness. And he will be reunited with the woman whose memory he tried so desperately to erase. Birdsong is at once an erotic love story and a powerful evocation of the carnage of war.
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At age 21, Gilberta meets and, a year and a half later, marries a dashing young Air Force fighter pilot. She leaps into the unique challenges of raising a family with lives framed by worldwide travel, military aviation, and the constant specter of combat. She learns to cope with seeing young pilots lose their lives in plane crashes, joining other wives in comforting the widows, and helping them pack up their children and leave the familial embrace of the military. Meanwhile, Gilberta strives to protect her own children from that looming unspoken fear—that their father could perish while in service as a jet pilot.
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Twenty years later, a woman writes of the man she loves and the defining moment he experiences in Mississippi in the late l960s, leading to a possible reunion of the long-separated pair.
When Caleb Montiel and Susan Masters meet in a Harvard writing class in l969, they make a pact: if either lives a story they know they emotionally cannot handle, they will gift it to the other to write. Twenty years later, Susan, now a successful novelist, receives a box of journals from Caleb, whom she has not seen since l970. Susan will finally be allowed to love Caleb as she has always wished through the story she writes.
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As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history by the author of the international bestseller Year of Wonders.
From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father,
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