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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Seamlessly moving back and forth in time between the Soviet Union in the 1940s and contemporary America, The Madonnas of Leningrad is a searing portrait of war and remembrance, of the power of love, memory, and art to offer hope in the face of overwhelming despair. It is the story of Marina, an aging Russian woman caught in the grips of Alzheimer’s. While she cannot retain fresh memories, vivid images of her youth in Leningrad and the toturous German siege are preserved. To hold on to sanity when the Luftwaffe’s bombing began, she burned to memory the exquisite artworks of the Hermitage where she worked as a guide using them to furnish a “memory palace”
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Good-bye to the Mermaids conveys the horrors of war as seen through the innocent eyes of a child. It is the story of World War II as it affected three generations of middle-class German women: Karin, six years old when the war began, who was taken in by Hitler’s lies; her mother, Astrid, a rebellious artist who occasionally spoke out against the Nazis; and her grandmother Oma, a generous and strong-willed woman who, having spent her own childhood in America, brought a different perspective to the events of the time. Finell depicts the lives of people tainted by Hitler’s influence: her half-Jewish relatives who gave in to the strain of trying to remain unnoticed;
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