List

Category
Audience
Book Lists

The Sisters' War

Suzanne Feldman

Inspired by real women, this powerful novel tells the story of two unconventional American sisters who volunteer at the front during World War I

August 1914. While Europe enters a brutal conflict unlike any waged before, the Duncan household in Baltimore, Maryland, is the setting for a different struggle. Ruth and Elise Duncan long to escape the roles that society, and their controlling father, demand they play. Together, the sisters volunteer for the war effort--Ruth as a nurse, Elise as a driver.

Stationed at a makeshift hospital in Ypres, Belgium, Ruth soon confronts war's harshest lesson: not everyone can be saved. Rising above the appalling conditions, she seizes an opportunity to realize her dream to practice medicine as a doctor. Elise, an accomplished mechanic, finds purpose and an unexpected kinship within the all-female Ambulance Corps. Through bombings, heartache and loss, Ruth and Elise cherish an independence rarely granted to women, unaware that their greatest challenges are still to come.

Illuminating the critical role women played in the Great War, this is a remarkable story of resilience, sacrifice and the bonds that can never be vanquished.
 

View Details >>

American Fire

Monica Hesse

The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate--there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.

The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie's confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn't lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other's inspiration and escape...until they weren't.

Though it's hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it's been drained of its industry--agriculture--as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America--a land half gutted before the fires even began.

View Details >>

Love Walked In

Marisa De Los Santos

When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. But little does she know that her newfound love is only the harbinger of greater changes to come. Meanwhile, across town, Clare Hobbs—eleven years old and abandoned by her erratic mother—goes looking for her lost father. She crosses paths with Cornelia while meeting with him at the café, and the two women form an improbable friendship that carries them through the unpredictable currents of love and life.

 

 

View Details >>

A Fatal Collection

Mary Ellen Hughes

Callie Reed pays a long overdue visit to her aunt, Melodie, at her fairy-tale cottage in quaint Keepsake Cove, which is home to a bevy of collectible shops on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Just as they're beginning to reconnect, Callie discovers her aunt's body on the floor of the music box shop she owns. Grief-stricken, Callie finds she can't accept Melodie's death being ruled accidental. How could her strong and healthy aunt take such a fatal fall? And why was she in the shop in the middle of the night?

As Callie searches for the truth, signs seem to come from her late aunt through a favorite music box, urging Callie on. Or are they warnings? If Callie isn't careful, she could meet a similar deadly fate amid Melodie's collection.

 

View Details >>

This Way Home

Wes Moore

Elijah Thomas knows one thing better than anyone around him: basketball. But when a sinister street gang, Blood Street Nation, wants him and his team members to wear the Nation's colors in the next big tournament, Elijah's love of the game is soon thrown into jeopardy.

The boys gather their courage and take a stand against the gang, but at a terrible cost. Now Elijah must struggle to balance hope and fear, revenge and forgiveness, to save his neighborhood. For help, he turns to the most unlikely of friends: Banks, a gruff ex-military man, and his beautiful and ambitious daughter. Together, the three work on a plan to destroy Blood Street and rebuild the community they all call home.

This Way Home is a story about reclamation. It's about taking a stand for what matters most, and the discovery that, in the end, hope, love, and courage are our most powerful weapons.

View Details >>

Beach Bodies

David Healey

Ex-cop Nick Logan lives on a farm in the Maryland mountains and spends his days splitting cords of firewood by hand. When his college-age niece goes missing from her summer job in Rehoboth Beach, Nick is called in to find her. Just as he predicted, it turns out that his niece has run into nothing more sinister than a hot young lifeguard. Nick is ready to get back to splitting firewood, but his old friend and partner is now the Rehoboth Beach police chief, and he needs help. A deadly gang is stalking the boardwalk and beach trails of the nation's summer capital, leaving bodies behind with their organs removed. Fear grips the beach resort, but the bad guys haven't counted on Nick sticking around to work on his tan and turn the tide. He teams up with Detective Sarah Monahan to catch the killers, and soon finds that a beach romance can be as tricky to navigate as a murder investigation.

View Details >>

Last of the Annamese

Tom Glenn

No one escaped whole from the fall of Saigon. We Americans were all damaged. The Last of the Annamese is about the Vietnamese and Americans who escaped from Vietnam in April 1975, those who decided to stay, and those who chose death rather than life under the Communists. The protagonist, Chuck Griffin, has never come to terms with the death of his son, Ben, killed in action in Vietnam. To do all he can to assure that Ben has not died in vain, Chuck, a retired Marine officer, returns to Vietnam after the 1973 withdrawal of U.S. troops. He works as a civilian intelligence analyst to give his utmost to win the war. He renews his friendship with a South Vietnamese Marine colonel, Thanh, at whose side he fought while on active duty. Chuck falls in love with a Vietnamese woman, Tuyet, who knows the country will fall and hopes Chuck will save her and her young son, Thu. But even as the fall of Saigon looms, Chuck is shocked to find himself in a moral dilemma—he has been sleeping with another Marine’s wife: Tuyet is married to Thanh. The story begins at the Marine Ball in Saigon in November 1974 and ends with the escape of Americans and a few Vietnamese at the end of April 1975. It narrates the final months of the Republic of Vietnam—South Vietnam—and the vain struggle of intelligence professionals to persuade the U.S. Ambassador, the State Department, and the president of the coming disaster. The blindness of American officials as the attack on Saigon drew closer leads one character to observe that we Americans believe our propaganda, not our intelligence. Although The Last of the Annamese and its characters are fiction, the events chronicled in the book are historical fact. Until 2015, many of those facts were classified. At the author’s behest, they were declassified and are published here for the first time. The book presents unique history heretofore untold. The author, Tom Glenn, shuttled under cover between Vietnam and Washington for thirteen years during the war and was evacuated under fire from Saigon after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city. For his work during the fall of Vietnam, he was awarded the U.S. Civilian Meritorious Medal.

View Details >>

Night of the Clipper

Vincent J. Walcek

"Night of the Clipper" is a ghostly story of mystery, action, suspense, and even budding romance centered in the small town of Elkton, Maryland. The date is December, 2013, and young Douglas Pledger and his family are newcomers to the neighborhood, after having moved to escape the bustle of the big city, and for his father, Rick Pledger, to begin a new law practice. For Douglas, confused and frustrated over having to leave his former home and friends, what should be a new beginning for this now-lonely ninth grader is just the beginning of strange and mysterious events that, initially, only he experiences. Douglas' sister Marcy, his father Rick and his mother Rachel become gravely concerned with his sudden change in behavior. It isn't until Douglas enlists the help of former firefighter, Dave Holt, Dave's dog Gretchen and Dr. Celeste Creeley from Villanova University that the truth surrounding Douglas' ghostly encounters becomes clear, after which the only question is, "What now?" Marcy, Rick and Rachel also become deeply involved as answers become known. For Dave Holt, a former fire fighter's haunted past is awakened as he and Douglas become close friends. For Dave's faithful dog, Gretchen, her uncanny instincts will help move the action in the most chilling ways as she helps guide the others to important clues. Celeste Creeley will be met with a realization she would never have anticipated before leaving her home in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, to travel to Elkton at Dave Holt's invitation as the dynamic background story requires her presence there. Douglas' sister Marcy, father, Rick, and mother, Rachel, will make a shocking transition from disbelievers to unwilling participants in a bizarre series of events as the action unfolds. Elkton CID detective Ed Neevers is initially on the outside looking in as the actions of the other characters present an entirely different picture, where his law enforcement responsibilities require that he begin to investigate the strange goings on in the community. Will his investigation derail the efforts of the others? "Night of the Clipper" is a story that combines action, suspense, the supernatural, and the deeply compassionate, to provide the reader with many exciting facets, real places and true historical events that set the stage for this compelling story. So, strap yourselves in and follow Douglas and his family, Dave Holt, Gretchen the dog, Dr. Creeley and Detective Neevers as they all join together in a wild ride to resolve a 50-year old ghostly mystery. Enjoy "Night of the Clipper!"

View Details >>

Mary Jane

Jessica Anya Blau

In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family's subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she's glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane's mother says. In a respectable house.

The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it's a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, Impeachment: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane's mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job--helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.

Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she's always known and the future she's only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she's going to be.

View Details >>

Band of Sisters

Cathy Gohlke

Maureen O'Reilly and her younger sister flee Ireland in hope of claiming the life promised to their father over twenty years before. After surviving the rigors of Ellis Island, Maureen learns that their benefactor, Colonel Wakefield, has died. His family, refusing to own his Civil War debt, casts her out. Alone, impoverished, and in danger of deportation, Maureen connives to obtain employment in a prominent department store. But she soon discovers that the elegant facade hides a secret that threatens every vulnerable woman in the city.

Despite her family's disapproval, Olivia Wakefield determines to honor her father's debt but can't find Maureen. Unexpected help comes from a local businessman, whom Olivia begins to see as more than an ally, even as she fears the secrets he's hiding. As women begin disappearing from the store, Olivia rallies influential ladies in her circle to help Maureen take a stand against injustice and fight for the lives of their growing band of sisters. But can either woman open her heart to divine leading or the love it might bring?

View Details >>

A Brave and Cunning Prince

James Horn

"In the mid-sixteenth century, Spanish explorers in the Chesapeake region kidnapped an Indian teenager and took him back to Spain, a common occurrence at the time. What was uncommon in this case was that the young man eventually came back. During his time abroad, the boy lived in Madrid, Seville, Havana, and Mexico City, becoming a favorite of King Philip II and converting to Catholicism in the process. In fact, his faith grew so strong, he said, that he felt compelled to help establish a Jesuit mission to save the souls of his people back in Virginia-but shortly after the group arrived in the New World, he abandoned his fellow missionaries, rejoined his family, and soon returned with a small band of warriors to slaughter the Europeans. In the years that followed, he became the warrior chief known as Opechancanough, and alongside his brother Wahunsonacock (father of Pocahontas), he solidified their people's control of coastal Virginia, making the Powhatans the most powerful Indian chiefdom on the mid-Atlantic seaboard. Under their reign, the region remained free of European settlers until 1607, when English colonists arrived in Jamestown. But this was not so unbalanced an encounter as many have supposed. Because of his time among the Europeans, Opechancanough was acutely aware not only of the English settlers' technological capabilities, but also of the fierce determination with which they would pursue their invasion of his homeland. As time passed, the two chiefs sought to drive the invaders out, and mounted a series of attacks that nearly destroyed the colony at Jamestown. But the English settlers proved more resilient than the Spanish missionaries had been forty years earlier. Additional soldiers, weapons, and provisions arrived from England, forcing Opechancanough to drag his offensive on for decades. He survived to be nearly a hundred years old and died as he lived, fighting the invaders. A Brave and Cunning Prince is the first book to chronicle the life of Opechancanough, exploring his early exposure to European society and his lifelong fight to protect the integrity of his homeland. With engrossing storytelling, deep research, and surprising insights, A Brave and Cunning Prince will be vital reading for anyone seeking to understand the charged early encounters between the indigenous peoples of North America and the settlers who would bring death and destruction"--

View Details >>

Cork Dork

Bianca Bosker

 
Professional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn’t know much about wine—until she discovered an alternate universe where taste reigns supreme, a world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavor. Astounded by their fervor and seemingly superhuman sensory powers, she set out to uncover what drove their obsession, and whether she, too, could become a “cork dork.”

With boundless curiosity, humor, and a healthy dose of skepticism, Bosker takes the reader inside underground tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, California mass-market wine factories, and even a neuroscientist’s fMRI machine as she attempts to answer the most nagging question of all: what’s the big deal about wine? What she learns will change the way you drink wine—and, perhaps, the way you live—forever.
 

View Details >>

Macrame for Home Decor

Samantha Grenier

Macramé for Home Decor shows how easy it is to make upscale, modern home décor using natural macramé craft cords. Readers will discover the 12 essential knots they need to create gorgeous macramé. 40 stylish projects range in skill levels from easy to advanced, so there's something here for everyone. This book is filled with cool, contemporary ideas for rugs, throws, coverlets, room dividers, boho plant hangers, and much more. Mixed-media projects are also included that incorporate fun and interesting materials like beads and rings. Step-by-step illustrations, clear instructions, and beautiful color photographs make macramé simple and fun.

View Details >>

Casual Cosplay

Krystal Everdeen

Add a little magic to your every day with this spot-on guide to casual cosplay.

Have you ever wanted to dress up as your favorite character for a movie premiere, party, school dance, or work event, but couldn’t wear a costume? Or been Disney-bound and wanted to get into the spirit without violating the park rules? Never fear! True superfans show their love through the art of casual cosplay—styling regular street clothes to resemble a character or share the vibe of a favorite franchise.

Join style maven Krystal Everdeen and friends as they channel not only classic Disney characters, but also Pixar, Marvel, Harry Potter, and Star Wars too. Packed with beautiful four-color photos, shopping lists, and styling tips, this step-by-step guide helps you create your own looks at home by pulling pieces from your closet, scouring vintage and resale stores, and adding inexpensive basics. So whether you’re headed to Dapper Day, a comic book convention, or just the corner store, Casual Cosplay has everything you need to wear your fandom on your sleeve.

View Details >>

In Search of Mycotopia

Doug Bierend

From ecology to fermentation, in pop culture and in medicine—mushrooms are everywhere. With an explorer’s eye, author Doug Bierend guides readers through the weird, wonderful world of fungi and the amazing mycological movement.

In Search of Mycotopia introduces us to an incredible, essential, and oft-overlooked kingdom of life—fungi—and all the potential it holds for our future, through the work and research being done by an unforgettable community of mushroom-mad citizen scientists and microbe devotees. This entertaining and mind-expanding book will captivate readers who are curious about the hidden worlds and networks that make up our planet.

Bierend uncovers a vanguard of mycologists: growers, independent researchers, ecologists, entrepreneurs, and amateur enthusiasts exploring and advocating for fungi’s capacity to improve and heal. From decontaminating landscapes and waterways to achieving food security, In Search of Mycotopia demonstrates how humans can work with fungi to better live with nature—and with one another.

 

View Details >>

The Everyday Blacksmith

Nicholas Wicks

With The Everyday Blacksmith, learn to make hooks, spoons, and tools of all sorts. This essential blacksmith's reference includes many projects contributed by leading blacksmiths from around the world, each featuring plenty of opportunity for variation.

For centuries, blacksmiths were the craftsmen and artists that worked society's most important material—iron. Blacksmiths were not only a fixture in their community, they helped shape that community through their particular method of making the hinges, hooks, brackets, and tools their neighbors used every day. Blacksmithing today is enjoying a resurgence. Our modern society has discovered that no amount of technical perfection replaces the feeling of picking up a hand-forged object, knowing that it was shaped by an individual's creativity and physical effort.

Modern smiths can use the first section of The Everyday Blacksmith as a reference for shop basics: safety, equipment, and techniques. These basic techniques are illustrated through a series of projects. It also covers methods for finishing pieces.

In the second section of the book, you'll find a step-by-step guide to a diverse range of essential blacksmith projects. Projects are structured by category and difficulty. The emphasis is on the accessibility of techniques, functionality of projects, and diversity of design.

The Everyday Blacksmith is sure to become every shop's go-to reference.

View Details >>

The Orvis Guide to the Essential American Flies

Tom Rosenbauer

The definitive guide to tying the most successful and productive freshwater and saltwater flies of all time. While there are thousands of flies available to anglers, many of the most popular are those that, by virtue of their fish-catching ability and unique construction methods, have stood the test of time. This indispensable resource features twenty quintessential fly patterns, including the Parachute Adams, Clouser Minnow, and Woolly Bugger. With detailed chapters exploring the history of and variations on each fly, interviews with fly originators, and step-by-step tying "recipes" and instructions, this is the perfect reference book for fly tiers of all abilities. Published in association with The Orvis Company.

View Details >>

Keeping a Nature Journal, 3rd Edition

Clare Walker Leslie

Originally published in 2000 with endorsements from E.O. Wilson and Jane Goodall, Clare Walker Leslie’s Keeping a Nature Journal was at the forefront of the nature observation and journaling movement. Leslie’s approach has long been acclaimed for its accessible style of teaching people to see, witness, and appreciate the wonders of nature, and her classic guide is still used by individuals, groups, and educators ranging from elementary school teachers to college-level instructors. The third edition features more of Leslie’s step-by-step drawing techniques, a new selection of pages from her own journals (which she’s kept for 40 years), and an expanded range of prompts for observing particular aspects of the natural world in any location. With an emphasis on learning to see and observe, Leslie shows how drawing nature doesn’t require special skills, artistic ability, or even nature knowledge, and it is a tool everyone can use to record observations and experience the benefits of a stronger connection to the natural world.

View Details >>

Home Brew Beer

Greg Hughes

Perfect for beginner home-brewers as well as more accomplished brewers who want to take their interest to the next level, Home Brew Beer is the bible on how to make great beer at home.

Featuring detailed step-by-step instructions, full-page photographs, comprehensive timelines explaining what to do to the beer at each stage of its fermentation, and more than 100 home-brew beer recipes -- from traditional pilsners and lagers to "hybrids" such as fruit beer and cream ale -- Home Brew Beer is ideal for anyone looking for a wealth of delicious and satisfying beer recipes for any style.

View Details >>

Hand Lettering for Beginners

Sarah Ensign

Create beautiful lettering projects, quotes, birthday cards, and more once you've learned the basics of hand lettering from artist Sarah Ensign.
Have you always wanted to learn the secrets to create stunning letter art? Now you can! This book takes you through different hand lettering styles such as faux calligraphy, brush pen lettering, and creating basic font styles such as monoline, elegant, and brush pen scripts.

 

Sarah Ensign, author and influencer shares this fascinating craft with you through pages of colorful examples and worksheets that allow you to practice what you've learned. She also shares practical tips on supplies such as pen and paper, creating beautiful fonts, and master tricky connections, and planning layouts for quotes.

Simple Techniques and Endless Possibilities

In this colorful, hardcover book, you'll find hands-on lettering worksheets and step-by-step guides that will quickly build your confidence. Explore your creativity with this fun, creative craft.

Hand lettering for Beginners has a fun, non-intimidating approach to guiding readers through hand lettering techniques and possibilities. This book will start a fascinating hobby that will allow you to grow your hand lettering skills and create your own unique projects.

View Details >>

Do-It-Yourself Garden Projects and Crafts

Wolfe Debbie

Improve and decorate your garden and home with easy projects and beautiful crafts. Make a Bird and Bee bath, a Flower Press, a Foraged Garland, Herb Napkins Rings, and much much more! With step-by-step instructions illustrated in full color.

Create your dream garden with simple bird baths, herb drying racks, and unique planters. And bring the outdoors indoors with natural fabric dyes, pressed flower paper, and herbal bouquets. DIY Garden Projects and Crafts book relies on home grown and foraged materials that will inspire creativity and capture the bounty of the seasons. The sixty practical and decorative projects for use in the garden and home include:

 

  • Gardener's Tool Apron
  • Metal garden charms
  • Veggie Market Tote
  • Macrame produce bag
  • Gourd bird feeder
  • Kirigami leather hanging planter
  • Tomato cage plant stand
  • Shibori Dyed Fabric
  • Herbal lotion bars
  • Gardener hand scrub
  • All-purpose thyme cleaner
  • And more!


Do-It-Yourself Garden Projects and Crafts features detailed, step-by-step instructions as well as simple crafting and gardening tips that will make your projects successful.

 

View Details >>

Build Stuff with Wood

Asa Christiana

Build Stuff with Wood is a true beginner's guide to woodworking, aimed at anyone who is interested in the craft but has little to no tools and no real idea where to start. The idea behind the book is to begin with a few portable power tools (cordless drill, jigsaw, etc.), build a bunch of cool projects with that basic kit, and then add skills and tools as you go. For example, adding a small router to your arsenal allows you to gracefully round edges on tables and shelves; buying a simple doweling jig opens up the world of joinery. In all, 14 fun projects will be presented, all built with just a few woodworking tools and off-the-shelf lumber.

View Details >>

The Colorwork Bible

Jesie Ostermiller

Master beginner and advanced colorwork knitting techniques in Interweave's most comprehensive colorwork guide to-date!  

With chapters outlining more than a half dozen colorwork knitting techniques, The Colorwork Bible is your updated exploration of both beginner- and advanced-level skills with a vibrant, modern palette and inspired projects. Join knitwear designer Jesie Ostermiller as you learn:

   • A variety of small-scale swatch lessons that help you master a technique before diving into a full size project.
   • Stripes, stranding, Fair Isle, brioche, slip-stitch, mosaic, intarsia, and more! Each technique is featured must-make projects you'll want to cast-on today.
   • Valuable tips and tricks, plus essential information on successfully combining colors for the best possible results.
Dig deep into the most colorful techniques in knitting with The Colorwork Bible!

View Details >>

Wildcrafted Fermentation

Pascal Baudar

Fermentation has been used for thousands of years by people all around the world. It is the easiest and safest way to preserve fresh food, and nature provides all that's required: salt, plants, sometimes water, and the beneficial lactic acid bacteria found everywhere. When we ferment a food we transform it, making it more delicious and nutritious and creating new and wonderful flavors that bring it to a whole new level. Today fermented foods have become a hot topic among chefs at high-end restaurants and health-conscious consumers alike. The creative possibilities are endless, especially when we gather and use plants from our local environment. Every landscape, every ecosystem is unique, yet many common edible plants are widely distributed throughout North America and in other regions of the world. In fact, some non-native plants have become so successful that they are considered invasives, or even "noxious weeds." Wouldn't it be better to harvest the seasonal bounty and ferment these plants rather than trying to control them with herbicides? In Wildcrafted Fermentation, Pascal Baudar provides all the basic information one needs to make creative ferments at home. From simple wild sauerkrauts and kimchis, to hot sauces, savory pastes, plant-based cheeses, dehydrated spice blends, and much more, Baudar includes over 100 easy recipes that will inspire even the most jaded palate. Wild-gathering greens, stems, roots, berries, fruits, and seeds, each in their season, is a great way to work with your local environment and reconnect with nature in a deeply rewarding and positive way. The recipes are adaptable for people who purchase seasonal and local produce, or harvest from the garden. Knowing the basic methods of fermentation, as well as specific techniques like how to cut and prepare different kinds of plants, provides the confidence to succeed like a pro, the first time and every time. And step-by-step photos of processes and finished dishes will inspire the adventurous home cook to experiment with both wild and cultivated plants. As the author writes, "Fermentation is an incredible tool if your quest is to create a cuisine unique to you and your environment.

View Details >>

Cake Decorating for Beginners

Rose Atwater

Master the art of cake decorating with easy steps for sweet success

Do you dream of picture-perfect cakes that are insta-post worthy? From glazing fresh fruit for a sleek naked cake to rolling fondant accents for an unforgettable multi-tiered wedding cake, Cake Decorating for Beginners shows the novice decorator how to transform deliciously simple cakes into dazzling feasts for the eyes and taste buds.

Super easy step-by-steps will guide you through cake decorating techniques, like smoothing or texturing frosting, handling a pastry bag, piping rosettes, creating a drip effect, hand lettering, and much more. Then, put your skills to the test with 10 amazing cakes you'd be proud to share with your loved ones--not to mention your social media feed.

Cake Decorating for Beginners includes:

  • Cake walkthrough--Get advice on cake prep, the cake decorating supplies you'll need, mixing custom colors, and troubleshooting for collapsed cakes, lumpy fondant, broken ganache, and more.
  • Frosted tips--Frost like a pro with recipes for buttercream, chocolate ganache, fondant, and easy-to-follow directions on how to apply them.
  • Cherry on top--Show off your cake decorating skills with 10 scrumptious, stunning cakes--each with easy-to-follow instructions and colorful photos.

Turn every occasion into an over-the-top celebration with showstopping cakes--Cake Decorating for Beginners gives you the confidence.

View Details >>

Bread on the Table

David Norman

In this highly anticipated cookbook, culinary instructor and baker David Norman explores the European breadmaking traditions that inspire him most--from the rye breads of France to the saltless ciabattas of Italy to the traditional Christmas loaves of Scandinavia. Norman also offers recipes for traditional foods to accompany these regional specialties, so home bakers can showcase their freshly made breads alongside a traditional Swedish breakfast spread, oysters with mignonette, or country pâté, to name a few examples. With rigorous, detailed instructions plus showstopping photography, this book will surprise and delight bakers of all stripes.

View Details >>

Best in Snow

April Pulley Sayre

Discover the wonderful world of snow!

With gorgeous photo illustrations, this book sheds sparkly new light on the wonders of snow. From the beauty of snow blanketing the forest and falling on animals’ fur and feathers to the fascinating winter water cycle, this nonfiction picture book celebrates snowfall and the amazing science behind it.

View Details >>

The Snow Dancer

Addie Boswell

Young dancer Sofia wakes up to a quiet, white world--it's a snow day! She makes her way outside to the neighborhood park, where a field awaits her, white and shining and open. It isn't long before the rest of the neighborhood wakes its sleepy head--and the other kids make their way to the park, scattering all of Sofia's beautiful silence. But with the help of a new young friend, Sofia is ready to show everyone what a snow dancer can do on a perfect day like this. With lyrical language and gorgeous art, this book sparkles with all the joy and beauty of a snow day.

View Details >>

It's Snowing!

What is snow and just how does it form? Included in this introduction to one of winter's wonders is information about different types of snowstorms, regions where snow falls most, and how to prepare when a snowstorm is approaching.

View Details >>

Sizing Up Winter

Lizann Flatt

As young readers journey into the natural world, they will discover that numbers, patterns, shapes — and much more! — can be found in everyday plants and animals. 

View Details >>

The Very, Very Far North

Dan Bar-el

In the Very, Very Far North, past the Cold, Cold Ocean and just below the hill that looks like a baby whale, you’ll find Duane and his friends.

Duane is a sweet and curious young bear who makes friends with everyone he meets—whether they’re bossy, like Major Puff the puffin, or a bit vain, like Handsome the musk ox, or very, very shy, like Boo the caribou. For these arctic friends, every day is a new adventure!

View Details >>

Pug's Snow Day

Kyla May

The second book in a sweet and funny series.

It's a snow day, and Bella is thrilled. There's no school, so she and Bub can play outside all day. Trouble is, Bub does not like the snow - it's slippery, freezing cold, and wet What's even worse, there's a new kid next door, and he has a scary, monster-sized pet. Can Bub get past his fear of the snow and make a new friend at the same time?

View Details >>

Dog Driven

Terry Lynn Johnson

A riveting adventure about a musher who sets out to prove her impaired vision won't hold her back from competing in a rigorous sled race through the Canadian wilderness.

McKenna Barney is trying to hide her worsening eyesight and has been isolating herself for the last year. But at the request of her little sister, she signs up for a commemorative mail run race in the Canadian wilderness--a race she doesn't know if she can even see to run.

Winning would mean getting her disease--and her sister's--national media coverage, but it would also pit McKenna and her team of eight sled dogs against racers from across the globe for three days of shifting lake ice, sudden owl attacks, snow squalls, and bitterly cold nights.

A page-turning adventure about living with disability and surviving the wilderness, Dog Driven is the story of one girl's self-determination and the courage it takes to trust in others.

View Details >>

A Polar Bear in the Snow

Mac Barnett

Follow a magnificent polar bear through a fantastic world of snow and shockingly blue sea. Over the ice, through the water, past Arctic animals and even a human . . . where is he going? What does he want?  Simple and thought-provoking, illuminating and intriguing, this engaging picture book will have readers pondering the answer to its final question long after the polar bear has continued on his way.

View Details >>

Pete the Cat: Snow Daze

James Dean

In Pete the Cat: Snow Daze, school is canceled, and Pete cannot wait to play in the snow with all his friends. Imagine a day filled with snowball fights, hot chocolate, snowcats, and more. But when the next day and the day after that are all snow days, Pete comes to a sudden realization—it is possible to have too many snow days.

View Details >>

Bears in the Snow

Shirley Parenteau

The little bears are ready to play in the snow. But -- oh, no! Their sled is too small! It's not as much fun to go sledding only two at a time, but what can they use to carry them all? Luckily, Big Brown Bear has an idea -- and it starts with a belly flop!

View Details >>

Dream Snow

Eric Carle

Clever lift-the-flaps reveal the animals hidden under the snow in the farmer's dream, making this board book edition a treat for all ages.

View Details >>

Snow Friends

Margery Cuyler

A charming winter picture book about friendship and dogs set against the perfect snowy day!

It’s the perfect day to play in the newly fallen snow. Oscar can’t contain his excitement—and before his boy Matt knows it, Oscar is off on a wintry adventure. Dashing through the woods, Oscar finds another dog playing in the snow—Daisy! Together they find all sorts of adventures—ice skating making dog angels in the snow, and they even build an igloo!
 

View Details >>

Snow

Cynthia Rylant

Enjoy the lyrical descriptions of the sights and feelings evoked by falling snow blend gorgeously with the rich and beautiful world created by Lauren Stringer's illustrations, in which a young girl, her friend, and her grandmother enjoy the many things a snowy day has to offer.

View Details >>

Damascus Station

David McCloskey


A CIA officer and his recruit arrive in war-ravaged Damascus to hunt for a killer in this page-turner that offers the "most authentic depiction of modern-day tradecraft in print." (Navy SEAL sniper and New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr).

CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad’s recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy.

But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad’s spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared Republican Guard. Set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion, Damascus Station is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet.

View Details >>

Looker

Laura Sims

Though the two women live just a few doors apart, a chasm lies between them. The actress, a celebrity with a charmed career, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and three adorable children, while the recently separated narrator, unhappily childless and stuck in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.

As her fascination with her famous neighbor grows, the narrator’s hold on reality begins to slip. Before long, she’s collecting cast-off items from the actress’s stoop and fantasizing about sleeping with the actress’s husband. After a disastrous interaction with the actress at the annual block party, what began as an innocent preoccupation turns into a stunning—and irrevocable—unraveling.

 

View Details >>

A Most Clever Girl

Stephanie Marie Thornton

1963: Reeling from the death of her mother and President Kennedy’s assassination, Catherine Gray shows up on Elizabeth Bentley’s doorstep demanding answers to the shocking mystery she just uncovered about her family. What she doesn’t expect is for Bentley to ensnare her in her own story of becoming a controversial World War II spy and Cold War informer… 

Recruited by the American Communist Party to spy on fascists at the outbreak of World War II, a young Bentley—code name Clever Girl—finds she has an unexpected gift for espionage. But after falling desperately in love with her handler, Elizabeth makes another surprise discovery when she learns he is actually a Russian spy. Together, they will build the largest Soviet spy network in America and Elizabeth will become its uncrowned Red Spy Queen. However, once the war ends and the U.S. and U.S.S.R. become embroiled in the Cold War, it is Elizabeth who will dangerously clash with the NKVD, the brutal Soviet espionage agency. 

As Catherine listens to Elizabeth's harrowing tale, she discovers that the women's lives are linked in shocking ways. Faced with the idea that her entire existence is based on a lie, Catherine realizes that only Elizabeth Bentley can tell her what the truth really is.

View Details >>

American Spy

Lauren Wilkinson

What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love? 

It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes. Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Sankara is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place. Yes, even though a furious part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent.

In the year that follows, Marie will observe Sankara, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American.

Inspired by true events—Thomas Sankara is known as “Africa’s Che Guevara”—American Spy knits together a gripping spy thriller, a heartbreaking family drama, and a passionate romance. This is a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, and it introduces a powerful new literary voice.
 

View Details >>

Code Girls

Liza Mundy

Recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy from small towns and elite colleges, more than ten thousand women served as codebreakers during World War II. While their brothers and boyfriends took up arms, these women moved to Washington and learned the meticulous work of code-breaking. Their efforts shortened the war, saved countless lives, and gave them access to careers previously denied to them. A strict vow of secrecy nearly erased their efforts from history; now, through dazzling research and interviews with surviving code girls, bestselling author Liza Mundy brings to life this riveting and vital story of American courage, service, and scientific accomplishment.

View Details >>

The Eighth Sister

Robert Dugoni

A pulse-pounding thriller of espionage, spy games, and treachery by the New York Times bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite Series.

Former CIA case officer Charles Jenkins is a man at a crossroads: in his early sixties, he has a family, a new baby on the way, and a security consulting business on the brink of bankruptcy. Then his former bureau chief shows up at his house with a risky new assignment: travel undercover to Moscow and locate a Russian agent believed to be killing members of a clandestine US spy cell known as the seven sisters.

Desperate for money, Jenkins agrees to the mission and heads to the Russian capital. But when he finds the mastermind agent behind the assassinations--the so-called eighth sister--she is not who or what he was led to believe. Then again, neither is anyone else in this deadly game of cat and mouse.

Pursued by a dogged Russian intelligence officer, Jenkins executes a daring escape across the Black Sea, only to find himself abandoned by the agency he serves. With his family and freedom at risk, Jenkins is in the fight of his life--against his own country.

View Details >>

The Woman in the Window

A. J Finn

It isn’t paranoia if it’s really happening . . .

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

View Details >>

The Nearest Exit

Olen Steinhauer

Faced with the potential dissolution of his marriage and the end of his quiet, settled life, reluctant spy Milo Weaver has no choice but to return to his old job as a "tourist" for the CIA. But before he can get back to the dirty work of espionage, he has to prove his worth to his new bosses. Armed with a stack of false identities, Milo heads back to Europe, and for nearly three months every assignment is executed perfectly. Then he's instructed to kill the fifteen-year-old daughter of Moldovan immigrants, and make the body disappear. No questions. For Milo, it's an impossible task, but ignoring his handlers is equally untenable. Suddenly he's in a dangerous position, caught between right and wrong, between powerful self-interested foes, between patriots and traitors—especially now that he has nothing left to lose...

View Details >>

Washington's Spies

Alexander Rose

Based on remarkable new research, acclaimed historian Alexander Rose brings to life the true story of the spy ring that helped America win the Revolutionary War. For the first time, Rose takes us beyond the battlefront and deep into the shadowy underworld of double agents and triple crosses, covert operations and code breaking, and unmasks the courageous, flawed men who inhabited this wilderness of mirrors--including the spymaster at the heart of it all.

In the summer of 1778, with the war poised to turn in his favor, General George Washington desperately needed to know where the British would strike next. To that end, he unleashed his secret weapon: an unlikely ring of spies in New York charged with discovering the enemy's battle plans and military strategy.

Washington's small band included a young Quaker torn between political principle and family loyalty, a swashbuckling sailor addicted to the perils of espionage, a hard-drinking barkeep, a Yale-educated cavalryman and friend of the doomed Nathan Hale, and a peaceful, sickly farmer who begged Washington to let him retire but who always came through in the end. Personally guiding these imperfect everyday heroes was Washington himself. In an era when officers were gentlemen, and gentlemen didn' t spy, he possessed an extraordinary talent for deception--and proved an adept spymaster.

The men he mentored were dubbed the Culper Ring. The British secret service tried to hunt them down, but they escaped by the closest of shaves thanks to their ciphers, dead drops, and invisible ink. Rose's thrilling narrative tells the unknown story of the Revolution-the murderous intelligence war, gunrunning and kidnapping, defectors and executioners--that has never appeared in the history books. But Washington's Spies is also a spirited, touching account of friendship and trust, fear and betrayal, amid the dark and silent world of the spy.
 

 

View Details >>

The Invisible Woman

Erika Robuck

France, March 1944. Virginia Hall wasn't like the other young society women back home in Baltimore--she never wanted the debutante ball or silk gloves. Instead, she traded a safe life for adventure in Europe, and when her beloved second home is thrust into the dark days of war, she leaps in headfirst.

Once she's recruited as an Allied spy, subverting the Nazis becomes her calling. But even the most cunning agent can be bested, and in wartime trusting the wrong person can prove fatal. Virginia is haunted every day by the betrayal that ravaged her first operation, and will do everything in her power to avenge the brave people she lost.

While her future is anything but certain, this time more than ever Virginia knows that failure is not an option. Especially when she discovers what--and whom--she's truly protecting.

View Details >>

Black Sun

Owen Matthews

A thrilling debut set at the height--and in the heart--of Soviet power, with intricately plotted machinations, secrets and surveillance, corrupt politicos and puppet masters in the Politburo, and one devastating weapon.

It is the dawn of the 1960s. In order to investigate the gruesome death of a brilliant young physicist, KGB officer Major Alexander Vasin must leave Moscow for Arzamas-16, a top secret research city that does not appear on any map.


There he comes up against the brightest, most cutthroat brain trust in Russia who, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev himself, are building a nuclear weapon with 3,800 times the destructive potential of the Hiroshima bomb. RDS-220 is a project of such vital national importance that, unlike everyone else in the Soviet Union, the scientists of Arzamas-16 are free to think and act, live and love as they wish, so long as they complete the project and prove to their capitalist enemies that the USSR now commands the heights of nuclear supremacy.

View Details >>

The Spy and the Traitor

Ben Macintyre

“The best true spy story I have ever read.”—JOHN LE CARRÉ

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist • Shortlisted for the Bailie Giffords Prize in Nonfiction


If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation's communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union's top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States's nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky's name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain's obviously top-level source. Their obsession ultimately doomed Gordievsky: the CIA officer assigned to identify him was none other than Aldrich Ames, the man who would become infamous for secretly spying for the Soviets. 

Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky's nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre's latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man's hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

 

View Details >>

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, a startling debut novel from a powerful new voice featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent fiction: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.

The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

View Details >>

The Wrong Family

Tarryn Fisher

Have you ever been wrong about someone?

Juno was wrong about Winnie Crouch.

Before moving in with the Crouch family, Juno thought Winnie and her husband, Nigel, had the perfect marriage, the perfect son—the perfect life. Only now that she’s living in their beautiful house, she sees the cracks in the crumbling facade are too deep to ignore.

Still, she isn’t one to judge. After her grim diagnosis, the retired therapist simply wants a place to live out the rest of her days in peace. But that peace is shattered the day Juno overhears a chilling conversation between Winnie and Nigel…

She shouldn’t get involved.

She really shouldn’t.

But this could be her chance to make a few things right.

Because if you thought Juno didn’t have a secret of her own, then you were wrong about her, too.

 

View Details >>

The Travelers

Chris Pavone

It’s 3:00am. Do you know where your husband is?
 
Meet Will Rhodes: travel writer, recently married, barely solvent, his idealism rapidly giving way to disillusionment and the worry that he’s living the wrong life. Then one night, on assignment for the award-winning Travelers magazine in the wine region of Argentina, a beautiful woman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Soon Will’s bad choices—and dark secrets—take him across Europe, from a chateau in Bordeaux to a midnight raid on a Paris mansion, from a dive bar in Dublin to a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean and an isolated cabin perched on the rugged cliffs of Iceland. As he’s drawn further into a tangled web of international intrigue, it becomes clear that nothing about Will Rhodes was ever ordinary, that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy with terrifying global implications—and that the people closest to him may pose the greatest threat of all.
 
It’s 3:00am. Your husband has just become a spy.

View Details >>

Mr. Churchill's Secretary

Susan Elia MacNeal

London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds in British intelligence, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typist at No. 10 Downing Street. Her indefatigable spirit and remarkable gifts for codebreaking, though, rival those of even the highest men in government, and Maggie finds that working for the prime minister affords her a level of clearance she could never have imagined—and opportunities she will not let pass. In troubled, deadly times, with air-raid sirens sending multitudes underground, access to the War Rooms also exposes Maggie to the machinations of a menacing faction determined to do whatever it takes to change the course of history.

Ensnared in a web of spies, murder, and intrigue, Maggie must work quickly to balance her duty to King and Country with her chances for survival. And when she unravels a mystery that points toward her own family's hidden secrets, she'll discover that her quick wits are all that stand between an assassin's murderous plan and Churchill himself.

In this daring debut, Susan Elia MacNeal blends meticulous research on the era, psychological insight into Winston Churchill, and the creation of a riveting main character, Maggie Hope, into a spectacularly crafted novel.

View Details >>

The Eagle Has Landed

Jack Higgins

In 1943, sixteen German paratroopers landed in England. In three days, they nearly won the war . . .

Discover The Eagle Has Landed, by international bestselling author Jack Higgins, the ultimate WWII pageturner and one of the bestselling thrillers of all time.

In the early morning hours of 6 November 1943, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler receives the coded message he has been waiting for:

'The Eagle has landed'.

Operation Eagle: Himmler's audacious plan to kidnap Winston Churchill on British soil is underway in a remote corner of Norfolk. There, an elite unit is gathered. Ready to do battle for a nation against the most ruthless task force ever assembled . . .

First published in 1975, The Eagle Has Landed is a classic tale of the ultimate act of wartime treachery. This 45th anniversary edition celebrates Jack Higgins' novel as one of the bestselling thrillers of all time.

 

View Details >>

A Woman of No Importance

Sonia Purnell

'A METICULOUS HISTORY THAT READS LIKE A THRILLER' BEN MACINTYRE, TEN BEST BOOKS TO READ ABOUT WORLD WAR II

An astounding story of heroism, spycraft, resistance and personal triumph over shocking adversity.

In September 1941, a young American woman strides up the steps of a hotel in Lyon, Vichy France. Her papers say she is a journalist. Her wooden leg is disguised by a determined gait and a distracting beauty. She is there to spark the resistance.

By 1942 Virginia Hall was the Gestapo's most urgent target, having infiltrated Vichy command, trained civilians in guerrilla warfare and sprung soldiers from Nazi prison camps. The first woman to go undercover for British SOE, her intelligence changed the course of the war - but her fight was still not over.

This is a spy history like no other, telling the story of the hunting accident that disabled her, the discrimination she fought and the secret life that helped her triumph over shocking adversity.

 

View Details >>

The Alice Network

Kate Quinn

In an enthralling new historical novel from national bestselling author Kate Quinn, two women—a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947—are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.

1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.

View Details >>

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

John le Carre

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants.

On its publication in 1964, John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forever changed the landscape of spy fiction. Le Carre combined the inside knowledge of his years in British intelligence with the skills of the best novelists to produce a story as taut as it is twisting, unlike any previously experienced, which transports anyone who reads it back to the shadowy years in the early 1960s, when the Berlin Wall went up and the Cold War came to life.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was hailed as a classic as soon as it was published, and it remains one today.

View Details >>

D-Day Girls

Sarah Rose

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The dramatic, untold history of the heroic women recruited by Britain’s elite spy agency to help pave the way for Allied victory in World War II

In 1942, the Allies were losing, Germany seemed unstoppable, and every able man in England was on the front lines. To “set Europe ablaze,” in the words of Winston Churchill, the Special Operations Executive  (SOE), whose spies were trained in everything from demolition to sharpshooting, was forced to do something unprecedented: recruit women. Thirty-nine answered the call, leaving their lives and families to become saboteurs in France.

In D-Day Girls, Sarah Rose draws on recently de­classified files, diaries, and oral histories to tell the thrilling story of three of these remarkable women. There’s Andrée Borrel, a scrappy and streetwise Parisian who blew up power lines with the Gestapo hot on her heels; Odette Sansom, an unhappily married suburban mother who saw the SOE as her ticket out of domestic life and into a meaningful adventure; and Lise de Baissac, a fiercely independent member of French colonial high society and the SOE’s unflap­pable “queen.” Together, they destroyed train lines, ambushed Nazis, plotted prison breaks, and gathered crucial intelligence—laying the groundwork for the D-Day invasion that proved to be the turning point in the war.

Rigorously researched and written with razor-sharp wit, D-Day Girls is an inspiring story for our own moment of resistance: a reminder of what courage—and the energy of politically animated women—can accomplish when the stakes seem incalculably high.

 

View Details >>

The Unlikely Spy

Daniel Silva

“In wartime,” Winston Churchill wrote, “truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

For Britain’s counterintelligence operations, this meant finding the unlikeliest agent imaginable—a history professor named Alfred Vicary, handpicked by Churchill himself to expose a highly dangerous, but unknown, traitor. The Nazis, however, have also chosen an unlikely agent. Catherine Blake is the beautiful widow of a war hero, a hospital volunteer—and a Nazi spy under direct orders from Hitler: uncover the Allied plans for D-Day...

View Details >>

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

Rebecca Donner

A New York Times Notable Book of 2021
New York Times BookReview Editors’ Choice
Wall Street Journal 10 Best Books of 2021
Time Magazine 100 Must-Read Books of 2021
Publishers Weekly Top Ten Books of 2021
An Economist Best Book of the Year
Oprah Daily Best New Books of August
A New York Public Library Book of the Week
 
In this “stunning literary achievement,” Donner chronicles the extraordinary life and brutal death of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during WWII—“a page-turner story of espionage, love and betrayal” (Kai Bird, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography)

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.

Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.

View Details >>

Death in Focus

Anne Perry

 

In the start of an all-new mystery series set in pre-World War II Europe, an intrepid young photographer carries her dead lover's final, world-shattering message into the heart of Berlin as Hitler ascends to power.

On vacation from London on the beautiful Italian coast, twenty-eight-year-old Elena Standish and her older sister, Margot, have finally been able to move on from the lasting trauma of the Great War, in which the newly married Margot lost her husband and the sisters their beloved brother. Touring with her camera in hand, Elena has found new inspiration in the striking Italian landscape, and she's met an equally striking man named Ian. When Ian has to leave unexpectedly, Elena--usually the more practical of the sisters--finds she's not ready to part from him, and the two share a spontaneous train trip home to England. But a shocking sequence of events disrupts their itinerary, forcing Elena to personally deliver a message to Berlin on Ian's behalf, one that could change the fate of Europe.

Back home, Elena's diplomat father and her secretive grandfather--once head of MI6, unbeknownst to his family--are involved in their own international machinations. Worried when Elena still hasn't returned from Italy, her grandfather starts to connect the dots between her change in plans and an incident in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich are on the rise. It seems the message Elena delivered has forced her into a dangerous predicament, and her grandfather's old contacts from MI6 may be the only people who can get her out alive--if Elena can tell the difference between her allies and her enemies.

New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry merges family secrets with suspense on the world stage, as darkness bubbles under the surface of a Europe on the brink of change. In these complicated times, Elena emerges as a strong new heroine who learns quickly that when nothing is certain, she can rely only on herself.
 

 

View Details >>

Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

Giles Milton

Six gentlemen, one goal: the destruction of Hitler's war machine.

In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage.

The guerrilla campaign that followed was every bit as extraordinary as the six men who directed it. One of them, Cecil Clarke, was a maverick engineer who had spent the 1930s inventing futuristic caravans. Now, his talents were put to more devious use: he built the dirty bomb used to assassinate Hitler's favorite, Reinhard Heydrich. Another, William Fairbairn, was a portly pensioner with an unusual passion: he was the world's leading expert in silent killing, hired to train the guerrillas being parachuted behind enemy lines. Led by dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins, these men—along with three others—formed a secret inner circle that, aided by a group of formidable ladies, single-handedly changed the course Second World War: a cohort hand-picked by Winston Churchill, whom he called his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

Giles Milton's Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a gripping and vivid narrative of adventure and derring-do that is also, perhaps, the last great untold story of the Second World War.

View Details >>

Darling Rose Gold

Stephanie Wrobel

A dark, shocking, bestselling thriller debut about a mother and daughter—and the lengths to which a daughter will go to find independence.

Nobody wants to hear the truth from a liar.”

For the first eighteen years of her life, Rose Gold Watts believed she was seriously ill. She was allergic to everything, used a wheelchair, and practically lived at the hospital. Neighbors did all they could, holding fundraisers and offering shoulders to cry on, but no matter how many doctors, tests, or surgeries, no one could figure out what was wrong with her.

Turns out her mom, Patty Watts, was just a really good liar.

After serving five years in prison, Patty gets out with nowhere to go and begs her daughter to take her in. The entire community is shocked when Rose Gold says yes.

Patty insists all she wants is to reconcile their differences. She says she’s forgiven Rose Gold for turning her in and testifying against her. But Rose Gold knows her mother. Patty Watts always settles a score.

Unfortunately for Patty, Rose Gold is no longer her weak little darling…

And she’s waited such a long time for her mother to come home.

View Details >>

The Other Black Girl

Zakiya Dalila Harris

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.

Then the notes begin to appear on Nella’s desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW.

It’s hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there’s a lot more at stake than just her career.

A whip-smart and dynamic thriller and sly social commentary that is perfect for anyone who has ever felt manipulated, threatened, or overlooked in the workplace, The Other Black Girl will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last twist.

View Details >>

The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream

Dean Jobb

”When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.
 
Structured around the doctor’s London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.
 
Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream’s life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed—the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream’s crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who “murdered simply for the sake of murder.” For fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre.

View Details >>

Never Saw Me Coming

Vera Kurian

You should never trust a psychopath. But what if you had no choice?

It would be easy to underestimate Chloe Sevre… She’s a freshman honor student, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. She spends her time on yogalates, frat parties and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her.

Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study of psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements.

When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan for revenge into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths—and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.

View Details >>

Into the Drowning Deep

Mira Grant

The ocean is home to many myths,

But some are deadly. . .

Seven years ago the Atargatis set off on a voyage to the Mariana Trench to film a mockumentary bringing to life ancient sea creatures of legend. It was lost at sea with all hands. Some have called it a hoax; others have called it a tragedy.

Now a new crew has been assembled. But this time they're not out to entertain. Some seek to validate their life's work. Some seek the greatest hunt of all. Some seek the truth. But for the ambitious young scientist Victoria Stewart this is a voyage to uncover the fate of the sister she lost.

Whatever the truth may be, it will only be found below the waves.

But the secrets of the deep come with a price.

View Details >>

The Final Girl Support Group

Grady Hendrix

In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives...but what happens after?

Like his bestselling novel The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix's latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films--movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she's been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized--someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

View Details >>

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

Ashley Winstead

Six friends.
One college reunion.
One unsolved murder.

Ten years after graduation, Jessica Miller has planned her triumphant return to her southern, elite Duquette University, down to the envious whispers that are sure to follow in her wake. Everyone is going to see the girl she wants them to see—confident, beautiful, indifferent. Not the girl she was when she left campus, back when Heather Shelby's murder fractured everything, including the tight bond linking the six friends she'd been closest to since freshman year.

But not everyone is ready to move on. Not everyone left Duquette ten years ago, and not everyone can let Heather's murder go unsolved. Someone is determined to trap the real killer, to make the guilty pay. When the six friends are reunited, they will be forced to confront what happened that night—and the years' worth of secrets each of them would do anything to keep hidden.

Told in racing dual timelines, with a dark campus setting and a darker look at friendship, love, obsession, and ambition, In My Dreams I Hold A Knife is an addictive, propulsive read you won't be able to put down.

View Details >>

The River

Peter Heller

From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars, the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip--a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence

Wynn and Jack have been best friends since freshman orientation, bonded by their shared love of mountains, books, and fishing. Wynn is a gentle giant, a Vermont kid never happier than when his feet are in the water. Jack is more rugged, raised on a ranch in Colorado where sleeping under the stars and cooking on a fire came as naturally to him as breathing. When they decide to canoe the Maskwa River in northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries, and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns.

But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman?

From this charged beginning, master storyteller Peter Heller unspools a headlong, heart-pounding story of desperate wilderness survival.

View Details >>

Think of a Number

John Verdon

An extraordinary fiction debut, Think of a Number is an exquisitely plotted novel of suspense that grows relentlessly darker and more frightening as its pace accelerates, forcing its deeply troubled characters to moments of startling self-revelation.

Arriving in the mail over a period of weeks are taunting letters that end with a simple declaration, “Think of any number…picture it…now see how well I know your secrets.” Amazingly, those who comply find that the letter writer has predicted their random choice exactly. For Dave Gurney, just retired as the NYPD's top homicide investigator and forging a new life with his wife, Madeleine, in upstate New York, the letters are oddities that begin as a diverting puzzle but quickly ignite a massive serial murder investigation.

What police are confronted with is a completely baffling killer, one who is fond of rhymes filled with threats and warnings, whose attention to detail is unprecedented, and who has an uncanny knack for disappearing into thin air. Even more disturbing, the scale of his ambition seems to widen as events unfold.

Brought in as an investigative consultant, Dave Gurney soon accomplishes deductive breakthroughs that leave local police in awe. Yet, even as he matches wits with his seemingly clairvoyant opponent, Gurney's tragedy-marred past rises up to haunt him, his marriage approaches a dangerous precipice, and finally, a dark, cold fear builds that he's met an adversary who can't be stopped.

In the end, fighting to keep his bearings amid a whirlwind of menace and destruction, Gurney sees the truth of what he's become – what we all become when guilty memories fester – and how his wife Madeleine's clear-eyed advice may be the only answer that makes sense.

A work that defies easy labels -- at once a propulsive masterpiece of suspense and an absorbing immersion in the lives of characters so real we seem to hear their heartbeats – Think of a Number is a novel you'll not soon forget.
 

View Details >>

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders

Vincent Bugliosi

In the summer of 1969, in Los Angeles, a series of brutal, seemingly random murders captured headlines across America. A famous actress (and her unborn child), an heiress to a coffee fortune, a supermarket owner and his wife were among the seven victims. A thin trail of circumstances eventually tied the Tate-LeBianca murders to Charles Manson, a would-be pop singer of small talent living in the desert with his "family" of devoted young women and men. What was his hold over them? And what was the motivation behind such savagery? In the public imagination, over time, the case assumed the proportions of myth. The murders marked the end of the sixties and became an immediate symbol of the dark underside of that era.

Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecuting attorney in the Manson trial, and this book is his enthralling account of how he built his case from what a defense attorney dismissed as only "two fingerprints and Vince Bugliosi." The meticulous detective work with which the story begins, the prosecutor's view of a complex murder trial, the reconstruction of the philosophy Manson inculcated in his fervent followers…these elements make for a true crime classic. Helter Skelter is not merely a spellbinding murder case and courtroom drama but also, in the words of The New Republic, a "social document of rare importance."

Some images in this ebook are not displayed due to permissions issues.

View Details >>

The Collective

Alison Gaylin

USA Today bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of Never Look Back and If I Die Tonight plumbs the dark side of justice and the depths of diabolical revenge in this propulsive novel of psychological suspense that melds the driving narrative of Then She Was Gone with the breathtaking twists of The Chain and the violent fury of Kill Bill

Just how far will a grieving mother go to right a tragic wrong?

Camille Gardener is a grieving—and angry—mother who, five years after her daughter’s death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible.

When her rash actions draw the attention of a secret group of women—the collective— Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability. Fueled by mutual rage, the collective members devise and act out retribution fantasies via precise, anonymous, highly coordinated revenge killings.

As Camille struggles to comprehend whether this is a role-playing exercise or terrifying reality, she must decide if these women are truly avenging angels or monsters. Becoming more deeply enmeshed in the group, Camille learns truths about the collective—and about herself—that she may not be able to survive

View Details >>

The Man in Milan

Vito Racanelli

For fans of Daniel Silva and David Baldacci comes a gripping thriller based on real world events that will have you riveted until the final page is turned.

When NYPD detectives Paul Rossi and Hamilton P. Turner begin investigating the Sutton Place murder of an Italian air force pilot, the last thing they expect is that they will and find themselves sucked into the potential cover-up of the Ustica massacre, the most horrific aviation crime in Italian history, in which all 81 souls on board perished, where Italian President Francesco Cossiga blamed a missile deployed by the French Navy for the disaster.

But as they begin investigating, Rossi, recovering from a broken marriage, and Turner, an African-American opera buff, poet, and former lawyer with ambitions to be mayor, come up against NYPD bureaucratic obstacles and stonewalling by the Italian Consulate in NYC. Lieutenant Laura Muro, the policewoman sister of the victim, comes to New York to aid the investigation, but soon the trio find themselves in the crosshairs of the Gladio, Italy's powerful, shadowy political cabal whose reach extends to the highest reaches of New York political and ruling class.

From New York to Italy, Rossi, Turner, and Muro must uncover the shocking truth about one of the most notorious disasters in airline history, and how this infamous act ties to the present-day murder. Riveting, erudite, and surprising at every turn, THE MAN IN MILAN announces a major new voice in international thriller fiction.

View Details >>

Never

Ken Follett

The new must-read epic from master storyteller Ken Follett: more than a thriller, it’s an action-packed, globe-spanning drama set in the present day.


 “Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.” So says Pauline Green, president of the United States, in Follett’s nerve-racking drama of international tension.
 
A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country’s secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis.
 
Struggling to prevent the outbreak of world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover with jihadists; a brilliant Chinese spymaster; and Pauline herself, beleaguered by a populist rival for the next president election.

Never is an extraordinary novel, full of heroines and villains, false prophets and elite warriors, jaded politicians and opportunistic revolutionaries. It brims with cautionary wisdom for our times, and delivers a visceral, heart-pounding read that transports readers to the brink of the unimaginable.

 

 

View Details >>

Termination Shock

Neal Stephenson

From Neal Stephenson — who coined the term "metaverse" in his 1992 novel Snow Crash — comes a sweeping, prescient new thriller that transports readers to a near-future world in which the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics.

One man – visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. – has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied?

Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock brings together a disparate group of characters from different cultures and continents who grapple with the real-life repercussions of global warming. Ultimately, it asks the question: Might the cure be worse than the disease?

Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, Termination Shock sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential solutions and dire risks, and wraps it all together in an exhilarating, witty, mind-expanding speculative adventure.

View Details >>

The Flight Attendant

Chris Bohjalian

From the author of The Guest Room, a powerful story about the ways an entire life can change in one night: A flight attendant wakes up in the wrong hotel, in the wrong bed, with a dead man - and no idea what happened.

Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She's a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them, and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with. She sees his dark hair. His utter stillness. And blood, a slick, still wet pool on the crisp white sheets. Afraid to call the police - she's a single woman alone in a hotel room far from home - Cassie begins to lie. She lies as she joins the other flight attendants and pilots in the van. She lies on the way to Paris as she works the first class cabin. She lies to the FBI agents in New York who meet her at the gate. Soon it's too late to come clean-or face the truth about what really happened back in Dubai. Could she have killed him? If not, who did?

Set amid the captivating world of those whose lives unfold at forty thousand feet, The Flight Attendant unveils a spellbinding story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol and the devastating consequences of addiction, and of murder far from home.

View Details >>

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer

Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter. How Christopher Johnson McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw the maps away. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

Jon Krakauer constructs a clarifying prism through which he reassembles the disquieting facts of McCandless's short life. Admitting an interst that borders on obsession, he searches for the clues to the drives and desires that propelled McCandless. 

When McCandless's innocent mistakes turn out to be irreversible and fatal, he becomes the stuff of tabloid headlines and is dismissed for his naiveté, pretensions, and hubris. He is said to have had a death wish but wanting to die is a very different thing from being compelled to look over the edge. Krakauer brings McCandless's uncompromising pilgrimage out of the shadows, and the peril, adversity, and renunciation sought by this enigmatic young man are illuminated with a rare understanding--and not an ounce of sentimentality. Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, Into the Wild is a tour de force. The power and luminosity of Jon Krakauer's stoytelling blaze through every page.

View Details >>

One by One

Ruth Ware

Getting snowed in at a luxurious, rustic ski chalet high in the French Alps doesn’t sound like the worst problem in the world. Especially when there’s a breathtaking vista, a full-service chef and housekeeper, a cozy fire to keep you warm, and others to keep you company. Unless that company happens to be eight coworkers…each with something to gain, something to lose, and something to hide.

When the cofounder of Snoop, a trendy London-based tech start-up, organizes a weeklong trip for the team in the French Alps, it starts out as a corporate retreat like any other: PowerPoint presentations and strategy sessions broken up by mandatory bonding on the slopes. But as soon as one shareholder upends the agenda by pushing a lucrative but contentious buyout offer, tensions simmer and loyalties are tested. The storm brewing inside the chalet is no match for the one outside, however, and a devastating avalanche leaves the group cut off from all access to the outside world. Even worse, one Snooper hadn’t made it back from the slopes when the avalanche hit.

As each hour passes without any sign of rescue, panic mounts, the chalet grows colder, and the group dwindles further…one by one.

View Details >>

When No One Is Watching

Alyssa Cole

Rear Window meets Get Out in this gripping thriller from a critically acclaimed and New York Times Notable author, in which the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood takes on a sinister new meaning…

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

 

View Details >>

The Pull of the Stars

Emma Donoghue

In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews).

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

View Details >>

Interference

Brad Parks

From international bestselling author Brad Parks comes an emotional, heart-pounding thriller that explores the scientific unknown--and one woman's efforts to save her husband from its consequences.

Quantum physicist Matt Bronik is suffering from strange, violent seizures that medical science seems powerless to explain--much to the consternation of his wife, Brigid.

Matt doesn't think these fits could be related to his research, which he has always described as benign and esoteric. That, it turns out, is not quite true: Matt has been prodding the mysteries of the quantum universe, with terrible repercussions for his health. And perhaps even for humanity as a whole.

Then, in the midst of another seizure, Matt disappears. When foul play is feared, there is no shortage of suspects. Matt's research had gained the attention of Chinese competitors, an unscrupulous billionaire, and the Department of Defense, among others.

With Matt's life in clear danger, Brigid sets out to find him. Will Matt be killed before she reaches him, or could the physics that endangered him actually be used to save his life?

View Details >>

Your House Will Pay

Steph Cha

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

A Best Book of the Year
Wall Street Journal * Chicago Tribune * Buzzfeed * South Florida Sun-Sentinel * Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel * Book Riot * LitHub 

A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions in Los Angeles, following two families—one Korean-American, one African-American—grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime

In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She’s distraught that her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace’s understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale.

But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

View Details >>

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission--and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn't know that. He can't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time. And he's just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery--and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian--while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

View Details >>

In the Heart of the Sea

Nathaniel Philbrick

Winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick's book is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of whaling, with deep resonance in American literature and history.

In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than ninety days in three tiny boats. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents and vivid details about the Nantucket whaling tradition to reveal the chilling facts of this infamous maritime disaster. In the Heart of the Sea, recently adapted into a major feature film starring Chris Hemsworth, is a book for the ages.

View Details >>

We All Wore Stars

Theo Coster

In 1941, Theo Coster was a student at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum, 1 in a class of 28 Jewish children that the Nazis had segregated from the rest of the Dutch population. Among Theo's fellow students was a young Anne Frank, whose diary would later become one of the most important documents of the Holocaust. In this remarkable group portrait, Coster and five of his fellow classmates gather their personal stories and memories of Anne. The accounts collected here do not just help us to rediscover Anne Frank. They also stand on their own as remarkable stories of ingenuity and survival during the Holocaust—from Albert Gomes de Mesquita, who hid in ten different towns across Europe—to Hannah Goslar, who experienced the horrors of Bergen-Belsen but also made a miraculous reconnection with Anne days before her death.

View Details >>

The Sisters of Auschwitz

Roxane van Iperen

The unforgettable story of two unsung heroes of World War II: sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper who joined the Dutch Resistance, helped save dozen of lives, were captured by the Nazis, and ultimately survived the Holocaust.

Eight months after Germany’s invasion of Poland, the Nazis roll into The Netherlands, expanding their reign of brutality to the Dutch. But by the Winter of 1943, resistance is growing. Among those fighting their brutal Nazi occupiers are two Jewish sisters, Janny and Lien Brilleslijper from Amsterdam. Risking arrest and death, the sisters help save others, sheltering them in a clandestine safehouse in the woods, they called “The High Nest.”

This secret refuge would become one of the most important Jewish safehouses in the country, serving as a hiding place and underground center for resistance partisans as well as artists condemned by Hitler. From The High Nest, an underground web of artists arises, giving hope and light to those living in terror in Holland as they begin to restore the dazzling pre-war life of Amsterdam and The Hague. 

When the house and its occupants are eventually betrayed, the most terrifying time of the sisters' lives begins. As Allied troops close in, the Brilleslijper family are rushed onto the last train to Auschwitz, along with Anne Frank and her family. The journey will bring Janny and Lien close to Anne and her older sister Margot. The days ahead will test the sisters beyond human imagination as they are stripped of everything but their courage, their resilience, and their love for each other.

Based on meticulous research and unprecedented access to the Brilleslijpers’ personal archives of memoirs and photos, Sisters of Auschwitz is a long-overdue homage to two young women’s heroism and moral bravery—and a reminder of the power each of us has to change the world.

View Details >>

Anne Frank Remembered

Miep Gies

She found the diary and brought the world a message of love and hope.

It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts....Yours, Anne

For the millions moved by Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,here at last is Miep's own astonishing story. For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims.

From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity. Each page rings with courage and heartbreaking beauty.

View Details >>

The Holocaust: a New History

Laurence Rees

In June 1944, Freda Wineman and her family arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. After a cursory look from an SS doctor, Freda's life was spared and her mother was sent to the gas chambers. Freda only survived because the Allies won the war -- the Nazis ultimately wanted every Jew to die. Her mother was one of millions who lost their lives because of a racist regime that believed that some human beings simply did not deserve to live -- not because of what they had done, but because of who they were.

Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting the survivors and perpetrators of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this sweeping history, he combines this testimony with the latest academic research to investigate how history's greatest crime was possible. Rees argues that while hatred of the Jews was at the epicenter of Nazi thinking, we cannot fully understand the Holocaust without considering Nazi plans to kill millions of non-Jews as well. He also reveals that there was no single overarching blueprint for the Holocaust. Instead, a series of escalations compounded into the horror. Though Hitler was most responsible for what happened, the blame is widespread, Rees reminds us, and the effects are enduring.

The Holocaust: A New History is an accessible yet authoritative account of this terrible crime. A chronological, intensely readable narrative, this is a compelling exposition of humanity's darkest moment.

View Details >>

Into the Forest

Rebecca Frankel

One family’s inspiring true story of love, escape, and survival

In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.

During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life.

From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

View Details >>

Clara's War

Clara Kramer

An extraordinary story of survival, fear, courage, love; a tribute to the human spirit

Clara Kramer was a typical Polish Jewish teenager from a small town at the outbreak of the Second World War. When the Germans invaded, her family home was given to a Volksdeutsch family, the Becks. Mr. Beck was known to be an alcoholic and a vocal anti-Semite. But on hearing that Jewish families were being led into the woods and shot, Mr. Beck took in told the Kramers and two other Jewish families. Although he didn't "like" Jews he did not think they should be killed. 18 people in all, went to live in a bunker dug out of the basement. They were confident that the war would be over in a matter of weeks. But the weeks turned into 18 months.

Clara was 14 years old when she entered the bunker. An avid reader, she kept a diary, writing with a blue pencil in a little notebook. She wrote down details of their confined life - no one could hide anything from each other in the bunker, and their proximity to the Becks - with only floorboards separating them- meant she was aware of everything going on upstairs as well. As time went by, the two parallel worlds became one. Mr. Beck fell in love with one of Clara's cousins. One day, Mrs. Beck came home to discover the affair. She faced the painful choice of sending the offending girl away to her death - and endangering the lives of 17 other people - or keeping her husband's girlfriend under her roof. She chose the latter. Clara became like a daughter to Mrs. Beck, and tried to atone for her cousin's sins by sneaking upstairs when the coast was clear and cleaning the house. Clara relished the cleaning -a rare opportunity to stretch and move freely. Mr. Beck hustled and schemed to get money to feed and care for the three families downstairs. The logistics were perilous. With rationing, the SS, Gestapo, and informers everywhere, the task was not only to find the money, but also to buy enough food for 20 people without raising suspicions. Rumours started that the Becks were harbouring Jews - there was panic in the house.

Mr. Beck decided that the best way to deal with the rumours was to invite the SS and Gestapo in for a party. He was a gracious host and it was a small town without much to do, so the SS and Gestapo started to visit the Becks almost every night, drinking and laughing and singing to all hours. Meanwhile Clara and her family were just a few feet below, listening, in complete silence. In a wonderful twist of fate, after the war, Clara's diary saved the Becks. When the Russians arrived, the Becks were arrested and were to be sent to a camp. But through a Russian friend, Clara managed to get her diary to the Commissar in charge. He had it read and thanks to Clara's account, the Becks were released.

Clara says that everything she has learned about life and love, courage and family, she has learned from the war, and in particular from the Becks upstairs. Clara's diary is in the Holocaust Museum in Washington. The bunker in Poland still exists. Based in New Jersey, Clara founded and runs a Holocaust and Prejudice Reduction Center at Keane State University.

View Details >>

The Betrayal of Anne Frank

Rosemary Sullivan

Using new technology, recently discovered documents and sophisticated investigative techniques, an international team-led by an obsessed retired FBI agent-has finally solved the mystery that has haunted generations since World War II: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why?

Over thirty million people have read The Diary of a Young Girl, the journal teen-aged Anne Frank kept while living in an attic with her family and four other people in Amsterdam during World War II, until the Nazis arrested them and sent them to a concentration camp. But despite the many works-journalism, books, plays and novels-devoted to Anne's story, none has ever conclusively explained how these eight people managed to live in hiding undetected for over two years-and who or what finally brought the Nazis to their door.

 

With painstaking care, retired FBI agent Vincent Pankoke and a team of indefatigable investigators pored over tens of thousands of pages of documents-some never before seen-and interviewed scores of descendants of people familiar with the Franks. Utilizing methods developed by the FBI, the Cold Case Team painstakingly pieced together the months leading to the infamous arrest-and came to a shocking conclusion.

The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation is the riveting story of their mission. Rosemary Sullivan introduces us to the investigators, explains the behavior of both the captives and their captors and profiles a group of suspects. All the while, she vividly brings to life wartime Amsterdam: a place where no matter how wealthy, educated, or careful you were, you never knew whom you could trust.

View Details >>

My Name Is Selma

Selma van de Perre

Selma van de Perre was seventeen when World War II began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had not been an issue. But by 1941 it had become a matter of life or death. On several occasions, Selma barely avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. While her father was summoned to a work camp and eventually hospitalized in a Dutch transition camp, her mother and sister went into hiding—until they were betrayed in June 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. In an act of defiance and with nowhere else to turn, Selma took on an assumed identity, dyed her hair blond, and joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years “Marga” risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as Aryan, she traveled around the country and even to Nazi headquarters in Paris, sharing information and delivering papers—doing, as she later explained, what “had to be done.”

In July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp as a political prisoner. Unlike her parents and sister who she later found out died in other camps—Selma survived by using her alias, pretending to be someone else. It was only after the war ended that she could reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma.
 

View Details >>

I Want You to Know We're Still Here

Esther Safran Foer

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR

Esther Safran Foer grew up in a home where the past was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust loomed in the backdrop of daily life, felt but never discussed. The result was a childhood marked by painful silences and continued tragedy. Even as she built a successful career, married, and raised three children, Esther always felt herself searching.

So when Esther's mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation--that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust--Esther resolves to find out who they were, and how her father survived. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and a hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds reshapes her identity and gives her the opportunity to finally mourn.

I Want You to Know We're Still Here is the poignant and deeply moving story not only of Esther's journey but of four generations living in the shadow of the Holocaust. They are four generations of survivors, storytellers, and memory keepers, determined not just to keep the past alive but to imbue the present with life and more life.

View Details >>

Treasures from the Attic

Mirjam Pressler

The story of Anne Frank, her family and the famous diaries, told with the help of thousands of letters, documents and photographs recently discovered in an attic.

Anne Frank wrote a diary from the age of 13 as she hid for over two years in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse escaping the horrors of Nazi occupation. An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, it is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century, famed throughout the world. Since first publication in 1947, the diary has been read by tens of millions of people in many different translations. A bestseller in its 1952 and 1997 (definitive) editions, it remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit.

Recently discovered letters, documents and photographs of Anne and her family including letters from her, her father's letters from Auschwitz and his poignant descriptions of searching for his family after the war and his discovery of the diaries, have been made into a family saga by Mirjam Pressler, the editor of the definitive edition of the Diary. The book, which reads like a novel, an epic, fateful, family saga, recounts the story of Anne's family both before, during and after the war. It contrasts the normality of family life with the horrors of persecution, deportation and the concentration camps and through it we gain new insight into Anne and her iconic diary.

View Details >>

I Have Lived a Thousand Years

Livia Bitton-Jackson

What is death all about? What is life all about?

So wonders thirteen-year-old Elli Friedmann as she fights for her life in a Nazi concentration camp. A remarkable memoir, I Have Lived a Thousand Years is a story of cruelty and suffering, but at the same time a story of hope, faith, perseverance, and love.

It wasn’t long ago that Elli led a normal life that included family, friends, school, and thoughts about boys. A life in which Elli could lie and daydream for hours that she was a beautiful and elegant celebrated poet.

But these adolescent daydreams quickly darken in March 1944, when the Nazis invade Hungary. First Elli can no longer attend school, have possessions, or talk to her neighbors. Then she and her family are forced to leave their house behind to move into a crowded ghetto, where privacy becomes a luxury of the past and food becomes a scarcity. Her strong will and faith allow Elli to manage and adjust, but what she doesn’t know is that this is only the beginning. The worst is yet to come...

View Details >>