Anthony Burns

by Virginia Hamilton

Anthony Burns is a runaway slave who has just started to build a life for himself in Boston. Then his former owner comes to town to collect him. Anthony won’t go willingly, though, and people across the city step forward to make sure he’s not taken. Based on the true story of a man who stood up against the Fugitive Slave Law, Hamilton’s gripping account follows the battle in the streets and in the courts to keep Burns a citizen of Boston—a battle that is the prelude to the nation’s bloody Civil War.

The Confessions of Nat Turner

by William Styron

Nat Turner is a galvanizing portrayal of the crushing institution of slavery, and Styron’s deeply layered characterization is a stunning rendering of one man’s violent struggle against oppression.

Judy's Journey

by Lois Lenski

Ten-year-old Judy and her family are migrants, moving from farm to farm with each new season. Starting in Alabama, they travel to Florida and up the East Coast all the way to New Jersey, always looking for steady work. Every time Judy feels as if they’re beginning to put down roots, they have to move on. It’s hard for her to catch up in school; it’s hard to make and keep friends. Judy likes the people she meets along the way, but she longs for a real home. Will her family ever have a farm of their own?

The Jerusalem Diamond

by Noah Gordon

A fascinating book that travels effortlessly from biblical times to tomorrow, with stops in Israel, Europe, Africa, and the Diamond Dealers’ Club on New York City’s 47th Street. This novel is the story of how three of the world’s great religions compete to gain the diamond as desperately as they have struggled over the tiny land, which the stone represents. It is also the story of Harry Hopeman, a diamond man from a diamond family; of his love for a remarkable Yemenite woman; and of his painstaking search for the valuable ancient diamond whose history is interwoven with the past of the Jewish people.

The Bastard

by John Jakes

Meet Phillipe Charboneau: the illegitimate son and unrecognized heir of the Duke of Kentland. Upon the Duke’s death, Phillipe is denied his birthright and left to build a life of his own. Seeking all that the New World promises, he leaves London for America, shedding his past and preparing for the future by changing his name to Philip Kent. He arrives at the brink of the American Revolution, which tests his allegiances in ways he never imagined.

The Pistoleer

by James Carlos Blake

For his forty-two years on this earth, John Wesley Hardin’s name was synonymous with outlaw. A killer at fifteen, in the next few years he became skilled enough with his pistols to back down Wild Bill Hickok in the street. By the time the law caught up with Hardin when he was twenty-five, he had killed as many as forty men and been shot so many times that, it was said, he carried a pound of lead in his flesh. In jail he became a scholar, studying law books until he won himself freedom, and afterwards he tried to lead an upright life. It was not to be.

Sorcery & Cecelia

by Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

Since they were children, cousins Kate and Cecelia have been inseparable. But in 1817, as they approach adulthood, their families force them to spend a summer apart. As Cecelia fights boredom in her small country town, Kate visits London to mingle with the brightest lights of English society.

At the initiation of a powerful magician into the Royal College of Wizards, Kate finds herself alone with a mysterious witch who offers her a sip from a chocolate pot. When Kate refuses the drink, the chocolate burns through her dress and the witch disappears. It seems that strange forces are convening to destroy a beloved wizard, and only Kate and Cecelia can stop the plot. But for two girls who have to contend with the pressures of choosing dresses and beaux for their debuts, deadly magic is only one of their concerns.

The Cater Street Hangman

by Anne Perry

Panic and fear striek the Ellison household when one of their own falls prey to the Cater Street murderer.  While Mrs. Ellison and her three daughters are out, their maid becomes the third victim of a killer who strangles young women with cheese wire, leaving their swollen-faced bodies on the dark streets of this genteel neighborhood. Inspector Pitt, assigned to the case, must break through the walls of upper-class society to get at the truth.

Outlaw in Paradise

by Patricia Gaffney

When Jesse Gault saunters into Paradise, Oregon, with a gun on each hip, the town is instantly abuzz. What could a legendary gunslinger want in Paradise? And what will the townsfolk have to do to keep his trouble from becoming their own? Cady McGill, proprietor of the Rogue Tavern, thinks she may know what Gault has come for, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

Every Man Will Do His Duty

by Dean King

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the British Navy was the mightiest instrument of war the world had ever known. The Royal Navy patrolled the seas from India to the Caribbean, connecting an empire with footholds in every corner of the earth. Such a massive Navy required the service of more than 100,000 men—from officers to deckhands to surgeons. These are their stories.

Justine

by Lawrence Durrell

Set in Alexandria, Egypt, in the years between World Wars I and II, Justine is the first installment in the distinguished Alexandria Quartet. Here Lawrence Durrell crafts an exquisite and challenging modern novel that explores tragic love and the fluidity of recollection. Employing a fluctuating narrative and poetic prose, Durrell recounts his unnamed narrator’s all-encompassing romance with the intoxicating Justine. The result is a matchless work that confronts all we understand and believe about sexual desire, identity, place, and the certainty of time.

Bride of the Rat God

by Barbara Hambly

It is 1923, and silent film reigns in Hollywood. Of all the starlets, none is more beloved than Chrysanda Flamande, a diva as brilliant as she is difficult to manage. Handling her falls to Norah, widow of Chrysanda’s dead brother. She has always done her job well, but she was never equipped to deal with murder.

Antarctica

by Peter Lerangis

It is May 1909, and the race to the South Pole is on. For years, Jack Winslow has dreamed of conquering the frozen wasteland, but just before he sets sail, his wife dies suddenly. Rather than cancel the voyage, he brings his two grief-stricken sons, Colin and Andrew, on the adventure of a lifetime.

High, Wide, and Lonesome

by Hal Borland

In this memoir of a lost America, Hal Borland tells the story of his family’s migration to eastern Colorado as homesteaders at the turn of the twentieth century. On an unsettled and unwelcoming prairie landscape, the Borlands build a house, plant crops, and eke out a meager existence. While life is difficult—and self-reliance is necessary with no neighbors for miles—the experience brings the family close and binds them closer to the terrible and beautiful natural patterns that govern their lives. Borland would grow up to study journalism and become an acclaimed nature writer, and it was these childhood years on the prairie that shaped the author’s heart and mind.

The Haj

by Leon Uris

In the early 1920s, young Ibrahim al Soukori has achieved his dreams of heading his small Palestinian town, becoming a proud father, and making the pilgrimage to Mecca. But his family’s journey has just begun, and soon global war and Israel’s formation force them on a path to possible dissolution. Ibrahim’s sons and daughters squabble and find peace with the nearby kibbutz, suffer betrayals, and hold together even when displaced to distant refugee camps.

The Red and the Green

by Iris Murdoch

In the dark days of the First World War, tensions between Catholic Pat Dumay and his Protestant cousin Andrew Chase-White threaten to tear their family apart along political and religious lines. As Ireland moves ever closer to the deadly Easter rebellion, the family is engulfed in an epic drama of love, loyalty, and loss that will change their lives forever.

Nevermore

by William Hjortsberg

A psychopath is haunting New York City, imitating the murders that made Poe’s stories so famous. To Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the killing spree is of purely academic interest. But when Poe’s ghost appears in Doyle’s hotel room, the writer and the magician begin to suspect that the murders may hold a clue to understanding death itself.

God's Little Acre

by Erskine Caldwell

Single father and poor Southern farmer Ty Ty Walden has a plan to save his farm and his family: He will tear his fields apart until he finds gold. While Ty Ty obsesses over his fool’s quest, his sons and daughters search in vain for their own dreams of instant happiness—whether from money, violence, or sex.

God’s Little Acre is a classic dark comedy, a satire that lampoons a broken South while holding a light to the toll that poverty takes on the hopes and dreams of the poor themselves.

Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

Grau’s remarkable story of a black mother and daughter struggling to find their own paths through the tumult of the Great Depression and the civil rights movement. Told from the perspective of both mother and daughter, Roadwalkers is the story of a special bond forged by savage history, and a tale of extraordinary loyalty and sacrifice.

Texas Summer

by Terry Southern

An evocative, poignant coming-of-age novel set in rural Texas in the 1930s. This insideview of Southern’s roots in Alvarado, Texas, where pastoral innocence belied an undercurrent of racism and violence, brings this novel of a boy’s transition to maturity vividly alive.

The War Against the Jews

by Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Lucy Dawidowicz’s groundbreaking The War Against the Jews inspired waves of both acclaim and controversy upon its release in 1975. Dawidowicz argues that genocide was, to the Nazis, as central a war goal as conquering Europe, and was made possible by a combination of political, social, and technological factors. She explores the full history of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” from the rise of anti-Semitism to the creation of Jewish ghettos to the brutal tactics of mass murder employed by the Nazis.

Haven

by Ruth Gruber

In 1943, nearly one thousand European refugees from eighteen different countries set out on a journey for asylum in the United States. Accompanying them was Ruth Gruber, who with the backing of the United States government, was made a simulated General to escort the refugees on their secret mission across the Atlantic from a port in Italy to a camp in Oswego, New York—a dangerous endeavor that carried the threat of Nazi capture with each passing day.

The Winston Affair

by Howard Fast

In the midst of World War II, Captain Barney Adams’s superiors call on him with a very unusual request. A troubled US army lieutenant has confessed to murdering a British officer, and Captain Adams has been assigned as his defense attorney. Military court officials want the cleanest possible trial for the lieutenant, and they believe that Captain Adams, a war hero and distinguished lawyer, is the best man for the job. But when Adams begins to investigate the murder, he finds that this seemingly open-and-shut case is actually much more complicated. Before long he is absorbed in a dramatic struggle for a fair trial against the most overwhelming odds.

Trinity Fields

by Bradford Morrow

In many ways, Los Alamos is an ideal place for best friends Brice McCarthy and Kip Calder to grow up. There’s wilderness to explore; brilliant and fascinating people, including their own parents and neighbors; and a booming wartime economy. Still, the town was built for one purpose: to manufacture a weapon capable of total annihilation. As the two boys grow and the United States enters the Vietnam War, the psychic fallout of their parents’ deeds pushes Brice and Kip toward opposite sides in the conflict—one, a soldier; the other, an antiwar activist—even as they come to love the same woman.

Summer of My German Soldier

by Bette Greene

When the Army delivers a batch of Nazi prisoners of war to an internment camp in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, Patty Bergen is as anxious as any of her neighbors to get a glimpse of the monsters. The eldest child in the town’s sole Jewish family, Patty is lonely and isolated, spending most of her time in the company of Ruth, her parents’ black housekeeper.

Then she meets Anton Reiker, an inmate in the camp. Even though he fought against the Allies, Anton seems to understand Patty in a way even her parents never have. When Anton escapes from the camp, Patty risks everything to keep him safe—but following her heart may come at a terrible price.

Roosevelt

by James MacGregor Burns

The second entry in James Macgregor Burns’s definitive two-volume biography of Roosevelt begins with the president’s precedent-breaking third term election in 1940, just as Americans were beginning to face the likelihood of war. Here, Burns examines Roosevelt’s skillful wartime leadership as well as his vision for post-war peace. Hailed by William Shirer as “the definitive book on Roosevelt in the war years,” and by bestselling author Barbara Tuchman as “engrossing, informative, endlessly readable,” The Soldier of Freedom is a moving profile of a leader gifted with rare political talent in an era of extraordinary challenges, sacrifices, heroism, and hardship.

Anything Your Little Heart Desires

by Patricia Bosworth

The FBI kept a secret dossier on him. He was a confidante to stars; adviser to politicians; and lawyer to the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Rita Hayworth, and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, whom he defended during the House Un-American Activities Committee trials of 1947. Bartley C. Crum was also Patricia Bosworth’s father—a frequently absent, unrelentingly principled, and stubbornly self-destructive one. Anything Your Little Heart Desires is Bosworth’s memoir of life with him, and of the momentous events that shaped his lifetime, from the New Deal to the Cold War and the anti-Communist fervor that jolted American life.

I Am Spartacus

by Kirk Douglas

From Kirk Douglas, Hollywood royalty and bestselling author of The Ragman’s Son and My Stroke of Luck, comes the candid story of the making of Spartacus, the blockbuster film that broke the blacklist. A master storyteller, Douglas paints a vivid and often humorous portrait in I Am Spartacus! The book is enhanced by newly discovered period photography of the stars and filmmakers both on and off the set.

The Kid from Tomkinsville

by John R. Tunis

Roy Tucker—a small-town kid from Tomkinsville, Connecticut—has quit his job at the drugstore and packed up for Dodgers training camp in Clearwater, Florida, hoping to make the team as a rookie pitcher. He expects the field to be competitive and realizes he might not pass muster, but after just one practice, he discovers just how difficult a goal he has set.

The Kid Comes Back

by John R. Tunis

Roy Tucker was one of the best prospects the Dodgers had—first as a pitcher, then as an outfielder when he injured the elbow of his throwing arm. Then he went off to serve in World War II, where a plane crash over France left him with pain in his hips and back.

The war is nearly over, and players are starting to return from the front to play ball again. If the Dodgers aim to have any chance at the pennant, the kid from Tomkinsville will have to fight his way back into the game once more.

The Thin Red Line

by James Jones

In August of 1942 the first American marines charged Guadalcanal, igniting a six-month battle for two thousand square miles of jungle and sand. In that gruesome stretch sixty thousand Americans made the jump from boat to beach, and one in nine did not return. James Jones fought in that battle, and The Thin Red Line is his haunting portrait of men and war.

Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

Five childhood friends with big plans face the changing realities of life in Tennessee in the 1960s. In this sweeping novel, Alther brings to life characters both tragic and comic as they live through the changing American socio-economic landscape of the 1950s and ’60s.

The Singapore Wink

by Ross Thomas

Two pirates do battle on an old junk ship in Singapore Harbor. They leap nimbly from deck to rigging, crossing swords like fencing masters. And then one surprises the other, slicing a rope and sending the unfortunate pirate tumbling into the bay. This is how stuntman Angelo Sacchetti dies.

Edward Cauthorne was his opponent, a fellow stuntman whose career died along with Sacchetti. He’s selling used cars when two thugs approach him. They’re emissaries from Sacchetti’s godfather, a Mafia don. Sacchetti is alive after all—alive enough to be blackmailing the don—and they firmly request that Cauthorne find him. The search takes Cauthorne back to Singapore, to risk his own life for the sake of the man he thought he’d killed.

Six Days of the Condor

by James Grady

Sandwiches save Ronald Malcolm’s life. On the day that gunmen pay a visit to the American Literary Historical Society, he’s out at lunch. The Society is actually a backwater of the Central Intelligence Agency, where Malcolm and a few other bookworms comb mystery novels for clues that might unlock real life diplomatic questions. One of his colleagues has learned something he wasn’t meant to know. A sinister conspiracy has penetrated the CIA, and the gunmen are its representatives. They massacre the office, and only learn later of Malcolm—a loose end that needs to be dealt with.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

Stephen Rebello brings to life the creation of one of Hollywood’s most iconic films, from the story of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein, the real-life inspiration for the character of Norman Bates, to Hitchcock’s groundbreaking achievements in cinematography, sound, editing, and promotion. Packed with captivating insights from the film’s stars, writers, and crewmembers, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is a riveting and definitive history of a signature Hitchcock cinematic masterpiece.

Boy's Life

by Robert McCammon

Small town boys see weird sights, and Zephyr has provided Cory Jay Mackenson with his fair share of oddities. He knows the bootleggers who lurk in the dark places outside of town. On moonless nights, he’s heard spirits congregate in the churchyard to reminisce about the good old days. He’s seen rain that flooded Main Street and left it crawling with snakes. Cory knows magic, and relishes it as only a young boy can.

One frosty winter morning, he and his father watch a car jump the curb and sail into the fathomless town lake. His father dives into the icy water to rescue the driver, and finds a naked corpse handcuffed to the wheel. This chilling sight is only the start of the strangest period of Cory’s life, when the magic of his town will transform him into a man.

The Lord's of Discipline

by Pat Conroy

As Will McLean begins his studies at the Carolina Military Institute, antimilitary sentiment is raging and the American South is in turmoil over desegregation. An outsider to the harsh authoritarianism of the military, McLean survives his freshman year despite the school’s notorious hazing, and avoids attention from its fabled and menacing secret society, the Ten. But when he becomes the mentor of the school’s first black student, Will is drawn into the intense racial politics—and the simmering threat of violence—that lie just beneath the surface at the Institute.

The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin

The comic story of a man’s obsessive quest to build a fast food empire across America For the better part of the 1970s, entrepreneur Ben Flesh could expand his business kingdom with the snap of his fingers. His fast food restaurants and electronics stores were all a part of his rapidly growing domain, remaking America one enterprise at a time. But when a series of personal and professional catastrophes strike unexpectedly, Ben finds himself on the verge of losing it all. Hailed as one of Stanley Elkin’s greatest works, The Franchiser is a biting satire of American consumerism and the story of one man’s all-consuming determination to create his lasting legacy, one business at a time. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis.

Marlon Brando

by Patricia Bosworth

In 1948 Marlon Brando stunned audiences and critics alike with his revolutionary, raw, and improvisational approach to acting. He became a symbol of a new, rebellious generation that was sick of conventions and committed to genuine emotion and unvarnished truth. From his breakout role as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire to his mesmerizing portrayal of Don Corleone in The Godfather, Brando created some of the most memorable characters in American cinematic history. The man himself was a paradox—intensely private but using his fame to promote worthy causes, a womanizer who clung to his childhood friends and animals. He was one of the most fiercely independent stars ever.

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?

by Jimmy Breslin

Five years after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California, the city’s National League fans were offered salvation in the shape of the New York Mets: an expansion team who, in the spring of 1962, attempted to play something resembling the sport of baseball.

Helmed by the sagacious Casey Stengel and staffed by the league’s detritus, the new Mets played 162 games and lost 120 of them, making them statistically the worst team in the sport’s modern history. It’s possible they were even worse than that. Starring such legends as Marvin Throneberry—a first baseman so inept that his nickname had to be “Marvelous”—the Mets lost with swashbuckling panache. In an era when the fun seemed to have gone out of sports, the Mets came to life in a blaze of delightful, awe-inspiring ineptitude. They may have been losers, but a team this awful deserves to be remembered as legends.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Kates Shulman

Sasha Davis, smart and pretty, was once an all-American teenage beauty queen. Full of potential, she was the only student at her midwestern high school to attend college on the East Coast. But soon her promise begins to falter. After starting graduate school in New York, Sasha gets married and drops out of school to take a clerical job. Consigned to the role of trophy wife, and already feeling old at twenty-four, she lives in fear of turning thirty—the year, in her mind, when her beauty will fade and life as she knows it will end. While she still has time, she embarks on an adventure of self-discovery and sexual exploration. Only after entering a second marriage and finding herself trapped by her responsibilities as a mother, does she finally begin to figure out what’s gone wrong.

Fear of the Dark

by Gar Anthony Haywood

Aaron Gunner made a lousy private detective. After a year’s carnage in Vietnam and a quick exit from the police academy, private work was the only avenue he saw to be a hero. But the seediness, tedium, and lack of real power crushed his hopes, and he quit the job after inadvertently setting a pregnant woman up for a violent death. But after a savage racial murder, it may be time to come out of retirement.

Leap Year

by Peter Cameron

As the curtain falls on the vibrant, gritty New York of the 1980s, just-divorced David and Loren Parish watch their lives come apart—but not before one last year of self-absorbed fun. Even with their daughter Kate mistakenly kidnapped, an absurd murder in a SoHo gallery, and friends suffering from the full spectrum of yuppie maladies, David and Loren are determined to make some sense of their messy and complicated lives. Loren moves in with TV producer Gregory while David begins dating a passionate young artist Heath; meanwhile, the two find themselves spending more time with each other than they ever did before their separation.

The Rackets

by Thomas Kelly

Jimmy Dolan should have known better than to shove Frankie Keefe. Keefe may be scum—a corrupt teamster president who’s looking forward to crushing Jimmy’s father in the next union election—but Jimmy is the mayor’s right hand man, and kowtowing to scum is his job. After hearing one too many cracks about his father, Jimmy shoves the union boss onto the floor, in full view of some of the city’s most powerful people. In a flash, Jimmy’s career is finished.

He returns to Inwood, in the wilds of north Manhattan, to pick up the pieces. But when his father is murdered, Jimmy takes up the old man’s campaign against Frankie Keefe. It may be suicide, but he’s got nothing else to lose. After years in City Hall, Jimmy Dolan is about to learn how ugly New York politics can get.

The Rain

by Andrew Klavan

Mayforth Kendrick III is an unlikely name for a small-time drug dealer. As the grandson of a millionaire and the son of a Broadway mogul, Kendrick was minted for success from birth. But a fondness for controlled substances cut his education short, forcing him to make a living pushing drugs on the theater glitterati with whom he once mingled. New York Star reporter John Wells, who occasionally uses Kendrick as a source, may be his only friend. He is also one of the last to see him alive.

Hot Properties

by Rafael Yglesias

An irreverent satire of New York’s media world—and its influence and allure. Rafael Yglesias’s most sharp-tongued satire, Hot Properties exposes the greed, envy, and backbiting in a media world bloated with money and power.

Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

The drug is called Lingo, and it’s the most powerful narcotic Lenore has ever seen. This cheaply manufactured pill races straight for the brain’s language center, supercharging it so that even a dimwitted person can speak and read at 1,500 words per minute. It induces giddiness, confidence, and sexual euphoria—with a side effect of murderous rage. The drug has come to Quinsigamond, a fading industrial center in the heart of Massachusetts, and it’s going to tear this town apart.

Madboy

by Richard Kirshenbaum

A thrilling and irreverent memoir about the transformation of the advertising business from the 1980s to today. Packed with business insight, marketing wisdom, and a cast of characters ranging from Princess Diana to Ed McMahon, this memoir is as bold, as breathtaking, and as delightful as Richard himself.

The Change Maker

by Al Checchi

The Change Maker catapults readers into a world few will ever experience. Entertaining, fast-paced, and episodic, this memoir of an unconventional agent of change provides a lesson in the values of strategic thinking and responsible leadership found so wanting today.

Born Under Punches

by Martyn Waites

Today Coldwell is desolate, a crumbling town whose streets are lined with empty shops and populated by ghosts. Two decades ago, the city thrived on the back of a coal industry so powerful that in 1984, the union staged a strike intended to bring Britain to its knees. Instead the government broke the strike—breaking Coldwell along with it.

The effect is seen in five citizens of the town: a heroic footballer, a Dean Martin–obsessed thug, an increasingly desperate striking miner, a crusading journalist, and the reporter’s troubled sister. As the story shifts between 1984 and 2001, it becomes clear that what was a political action in the mid-1980s caused permanent changes in the foundation of British life. The bodies buried in 1984 will not stay underground forever.

Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

by Gloria Steinem

A bestselling first collection of humorous and insightful essays by a luminary of the women’s liberation movement. This is Steinem at her most provocative—and most compassionate.