James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back.
But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war,
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Growing up in hardscrabble Kentucky in the 1920s, with their mother dead and their stepfather an ever-present threat, Bertie Fischer and her older sister Mabel have no one but each other—with perhaps a sweetheart for Bertie waiting in the wings. But on the day that Bertie receives her eighth-grade diploma, good intentions go terribly wrong. A choice made in desperate haste sets off a chain of misunderstandings that will divide the sisters and reverberate through three generations of women.
What happens when nothing turns out as you planned? From the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, and smaller events both tragic and joyful,
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Usnavy has always been a true believer.
When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, he was just a young man
and eagerly signed on for all of its promises. But as the years have
passed, the sacrifices have outweighed the glories and he’s become
increasingly isolated in his revolutionary zeal. His friends openly mock
him, his wife dreams of owning a car totally outside their reach, and
his beloved fourteen-year-old daughter haunts the coast of Havana,
staring north.
In the summer of 1994, a few years after the collapse of
the Soviet Union,
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Julienne Ashby, 24, must change her pampered ways after her father, a prominent businessman in Natchez, Mississippi, loses their fortune and family home to a bad gambling habit in 1850. Like a fish out of water, she aims to refit their one remaining possession, an old riverboat, in hopes of making a profit and restoring the Cuvier name along the mighty Mississippi.
Desperate for help in doing the restoration work, prideful Julienne hires Dallas Bronte, a humiliated captain whose drinking problem stopped his water ways many years ago. Despite initial success, the struggles they will face with other ship owners are almost as challenging as the fiery feelings –
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The year is 1968 and the Vietnam War is at its height. William
Carson, a World War II veteran teaching in a small New England Prep
School, has for more than two decades been haunted by nightmares whose
content he has never shared with his wife, Anne, or their two sons,
Joshua, a Marine on active duty in Vietnam, and Andrew, an ROTC college
senior bound for active duty following graduation. When Joshua is
reported missing in combat, the web of secrets and denial that has kept
the family together for more than twenty years begins to unravel as
Anne and William face the possible loss of their sons,
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A stunning debut novel of a young American woman who becomes a spy in Paris during World War II.
May 1940. Fleeing a glamorous Manhattan life built on lies, Claire Harris arrives in Paris with a romantic vision of starting anew. But she didn’t anticipate the sight of Nazi soldiers marching under the Arc de Triomphe. Her plans smashed by the German occupation, the once- privileged socialite’s only option is to take a job in a flower shop under the tutelage of a sophisticated Parisian florist.
In exchange for false identity papers, Claire agrees to aid the French Resistance.
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