Historical Literary Fiction Saga

Das Schicksal einer Familie in einer bewegten Zeit. Und eine Liebe, die alles überwindet. Augsburg, 1920. In der Tuchvilla blickt man voller Optimismus in die Zukunft. Paul Melzer ist aus russischer Kriegsgefangenschaft zurück und übernimmt die Leitung der Tuchfabrik, um der Firma wieder zu altem Glanz zu verhelfen. Seine Schwester Elisabeth zieht mit einer neuen Liebe wieder im Herrenhaus der Familie ein. Und Pauls junge Frau Marie will sich einen lang gehegten Traum erfüllen: ihr eigenes Modeatelier.

In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.

Norwegen, 1941: In dem kriegsgebeutelten Land verlieben sich Lisbet und ihre Freundin Oda in die falschen Männer - in deutsche Soldaten. Ihre verbotene Liebe fordert einen hohen Preis, und die beiden jungen Frauen verlieren alles, was ihnen lieb ist. Ausgerechnet bei den deutschen Besatzern scheinen sie Hilfe zu finden, doch dann wird Lisbet von ihrer kleinen Tochter getrennt. Erst lange Zeit später findet sich ihre Spur - in Deutschland.

Missionary Julia Foster loves working alongside her parents, but when the family must return to England due to illness, she readily accepts the burden for her parents' financial support. Taking on a job at Highland Hall as governess, she quickly finds that teaching her four ill-mannered charges at a grand estate is more challenging than expected.

Maine, 2012. An old man is dying with the weight of a plundered necklace on his conscience. As an US Army Captain in 1946 Salburg, guarding the 'Hungarian Gold Train' full of looted Jewish treasure, he fell in love with camp survivor and helped her escape to Israel. Now, as his granddaughter sets out to repatriate the necklace, secrets buried in the past are uncovered, stories of love and deceit linked to that beautiful, peacock-shaped pendant and to a priceless, long-lost painting.

It's 1943 and the country is at war. An unlikely group of land girls are finding out about life, love and loss, forming surprising friendships along the way. When Alice Todd's husband runs off with another woman, she is forced to find a means to provide for herself and her young son. Accepting a position as a hostel warden at an old Devonshire farmhouse, Alice finds herself looking after ten volunteer land girls. The job is not as easy as it first seems.

Caín pone de manifiesto lo que hay de moderno y sorprendente en la prosa de Saramago: la capacidad de hacer nueva una historia que se conoce de principio a fin. Una reflexión acerca del origen del poder y de las manipulaciones que las distintas religiones y sus aliados temporales han ejercido sobre las conciencias de los hombres para evitar que el pensamiento sea libre y el uso de la voluntad independiente de criterios religiosos.

The separate lives of these driven men and independent women from Europe and America are drawn to a common destiny that beckons seductively from the wild and remote flanks of the American West.

Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he did not commit, Benya Golden joins a penal battalion made up of Cossacks and convicts to fight the Nazis. He enrolls in the Russian cavalry, and on a hot summer day in July 1942, he and his band of brothers are sent on a suicide mission behind enemy lines - but is there a traitor among them? The only thing Benya can truly trust is his horse, Silver Socks, and that he will find no mercy in the onslaught of Hitler's troops as they push east.

As recovery from World War II begins, expatriate American NoraTours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing 16-year-old daughter. There she unexpectedly meets up with an oldacquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emergedfrom the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts tosurvive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter's life. Lee suffersfrom what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Body & Soul is the story of a young man whose life is transformed by a gift. The gift is not without price - the work is relentless, the teachers exacting - but the reward is a journey that takes him to the drawing rooms of the rich and powerful, private schools, a gilt-edged marriage, and Carnegie Hall. Claude moves through this life as if he were playing a difficult composition, swept up in its drama and tension, surprised by its grace notes. Music, here, becomes a character in its own right, equaled in strength only by the music of Frank Conroy's own unmistakable, true voice.

One of the greatest novels of the 19th century. Jean Valjean, who for decades has been hunted by the ruthless policeman Javert after breaking parole, agrees to care for a factory worker's daughter. The decision changes their lives forever.

The Leung family leads a life of secluded luxury in Hong Kong. But in December 1941, the Empire of Japan invades the colony. The family is quickly dragged into a spiral of violence, repression, and starvation. To survive, they entomb themselves and their friends in the Leung mansion. But this is only a temporary reprieve, and the Leungs are forced to send their children away. The youngest boy, Chung-Man, escapes with some of his siblings, and together they travel deep into the countryside to avoid the Japanese invaders.

In 1965 Manhattan, patrons flock to Masha’s to savor its brisket bourguignon and impeccable service and to admire its dashing owner and head chef Peter Rashkin, the most eligible bachelor in town. But Peter does not care for the parade of eligible women who come to the restaurant hoping to catch his eye. Running Masha’s consumes him, as does his terrible guilt over surviving the horrors of the Nazi death camp while his wife, Masha - the restaurant’s namesake - and two young daughters perished. Then exquisitely beautiful June Bouquet, an up-and-coming young model, appears at the restaurant, piercing Peter’s guard.

In apartheid South Africa, free-spirited young Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional community by running a café. When she meets Miriam, a young traditional wife and mother, their unexpected attraction turns their world upside down.

On a morning in 1924, a young woman rises from the floor of her family's small home in Belorussia to find her parents and her husband slaughtered beside her and her infant daughter, Sophie, missing. When her aunt tells her the baby is dead, Lillian emigrates to America. She is working as a seamstress at the Yiddish Theater and enjoying cafe society when a cousin arrives and insists that her daughter is still alive, in Siberia.

Set in post-revolutionary Iran from 1983 to 2011, this stunning debut novel follows a group of mothers, fathers, children, and lovers, some related by blood, others brought together by the tide of history that washes over their lives. Finally, years later, it is the next generation that is left with the burden of the past and their country’s tenuous future as a new wave of protest and political strife begins. Children of the Jacaranda Tree is an evocative portrait of three generations of men and women inspired by love and poetry, burning with idealism, chasing dreams of justice and freedom.

At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives....

In the early 1900s an important ship sinks into the Caribbean Sea, just as the Virgin Islands are transferred from Danish to American rule. Orphaned by the sunk vessel are two sisters and their half-brother, now faced with an uncertain identity and future. Each of them is unusually beautiful, and each is in possession of a particular magic that will either sink or save them. Chronicling three generations of an island family from 1916 to the 1970s, Land of Love and Drowning is a novel of love and magic.

Finally available as an audiobook, Joyce Carol Oates' lost classic: a satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose 19th-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture.