Historical Literary Fiction Saga

During the Nazi occupation, fifteen-year-old Paul Vertune, the sensitive son of wheat farmers, prefers gazing at the ocean and contemplating life's mysteries over toiling in the fields of the Brittany coast. One fateful day, Paul's life is spared by a compassionate German soldier with eyes as blue as the sea. When Paul's village is liberated, an angry mob turns against their occupiers. The German soldier, near death, asks Paul to promise him one thing: find his daughter and tell her that her father loved her.

June 1939. Francis Dempsey and his shell-shocked brother Michael are on an ocean liner from Ireland bound for their brother Martin's home in New York City, having stolen a small fortune from the IRA. During the week that follows, the lives of these three brothers collide spectacularly with big-band jazz musicians, a talented but fragile heiress, a Jewish street photographer facing a return to Nazi-occupied Prague, a vengeful mob boss, and the ghosts of their own family's revolutionary past.

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Orphaned into an unforgiving foster home and raised as an outsider, Weird-Eye shoulders her unflattering nickname. She relies on her vivid imagination to sustain her work as a midwife bringing newborns into the world while World War II overruns her native Finland, desecrating life. She finds herself drawn to the handsome, otherworldly Johannes Angelhurst, a war photographer working for the SS.

Sabahat, a beautiful young Muslim woman, is known in her family for her intelligence, drive, and stubbornness. She believes there is more in store for her life than a good marriage and convinces her parents to let her pursue her education, rare for young Turkish women in the 1920s. But no one - least of all Sabahat herself - expects that in the course of her studies she will fall for a handsome Armenian student named Aram.

Louis Begley creates multi-faceted characters that come to life under the spell of his crystalline prose. Returning his readers to the wealthy and privileged world of About Schmidt, he introduces them, this time, to an especially poignant protagonist. “A happy man, as the world goes,” Thomas Mistler feels an odd sense of liberation now that he has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. This hard-driving Madison Avenue mogul suddenly has an excuse to live for the moment. But spending time alone in Venice is not the free-wheeling, self-indulgent experience he had hoped for.

Late October, 1962. Wes Avery, a one-time Air Force tail-gunner, is living his version of the American Dream as loving husband to Sarah, doting father to seventeen-year-old Charlotte, and owner of a successful Texaco station along central Florida's busiest highway. But after President Kennedy announces that the Soviets have nuclear missiles in Cuba, Army convoys clog the highways and the sky fills with fighter planes. Within days, Wes's carefully constructed life begins to unravel.

An American sports journalist has come to the city to report on efforts by the rancher Don Cayetano Mota to revive his once-proud line of bulls. Not only does Mota pray to the Virgin Mary, but he takes on herculean acts of devotion during the solemn celebrations of Holy Week. With treacherous enemies waiting in the ring, Mota's struggle taps deeply in to life's mysteries, shaking the newspaperman's skepticism and opening his eyes to the wonder of faith.

Beginning in 1962 with a shocking loss, Shining Sea quickly pulls us into the lives of 43-year-old Michael Gannon's widow and offspring. Brilliantly described and utterly alive, the Gannon clan find themselves charting paths they never anticipated for decades to come.

Young, flame-haired Lucie raises horses on her father’s farm. One summer day, she meets a dark, handsome stranger, Joseph, and it is love at first sight. But their union is as improbable as their love is deep. For Joseph is a wanderer, a full-blooded Gypsy, a man for whom all Europe is a stomping ground. Despite their cultural differences, they marry, have three children, and lead a normal life with one exception: each spring their life is suspended as Joseph returns to his other family, the Gypsies, scattered to the four corners of Europe.

In fifteenth-century Italy, Paolo Uccello recognizes the artistic talent of his young daughter, Antonia, and teaches her how to create a masterpiece. The girl composes a painting of her mother and inadvertently sparks an enduring mystery. In the present day, a copyist painter receives a commission from a wealthy Chinese businessman to duplicate a Paolo Uccello painting. Together, the painter and his teenage daughter visit China, and in doing so they begin their escape from a tragic family past.

The daughter of a Torah scholar in eighteenth-century Ukraine, Gittel has always accepted her place in a family steeped in religion. Married at age twelve to a cold and reclusive rabbi, the young bride gives birth to two sons destined to follow their father's path. Finding very little comfort in family life, Gittel shares her dreams, visions, and a close spiritual understanding with her only confidant: her father-in-law, the Maggid of Mezeritch.

This richly textured novel tells a story of love and loss, sex and longing, and of the deceit that can lie at the heart of family relationships. Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present. In a family driven as much by jealousy and propriety as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation.

"Masterful...a classic parable of the human condition," said Publishers Weekly about Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets, and the same can be said about Canin's brilliant new novel. Breathtaking in its suspense and beauty, Carry Me Across the Water tells the story of a complex man's extraordinary life, lived against the backdrop of the central years of the twentieth century.

"Einen Schatz muss man ausgraben", sagt der siebenjährige Leo zu seinem erstaunten Vater Danny Wattin. Obwohl Danny in seiner weitläufigen jüdischen Familie die Saga vom Schatz des Urgroßvaters Hermann Isakowitz schon unzählige Male in den buntesten Varianten gehört hat, war ihm doch niemals die Idee gekommen, ihn wirklich zu suchen. Die beiden machen sich zusammen mit Leos Großvater auf den Weg nach Polen und auf eine Reise in die Vergangenheit ihrer Familie, im Gepäck eine Unmenge Butterstullen und ein uralter Straßenatlas.

"Einen Schatz muss man ausgraben", sagt der siebenjährige Leo zu seinem erstaunten Vater Danny Wattin. Obwohl Danny in seiner weitläufigen jüdischen Familie die Saga vom Schatz des Urgroßvaters Hermann Isakowitz schon unzählige Male in den buntesten Varianten gehört hat, war ihm doch niemals die Idee gekommen, ihn wirklich zu suchen. Die beiden machen sich zusammen mit Leos Großvater auf den Weg nach Polen und auf eine Reise in die Vergangenheit ihrer Familie, im Gepäck eine Unmenge Butterstullen und ein uralter Straßenatlas.

In the years following the Civil War, Mariah Reddick, former slave to Carrie McGavock - the "Widow of the South" - has quietly built a new life for herself as a midwife to the women of Franklin, Tennessee. But when her ambitious, politically minded grown son, Theopolis, is murdered, Mariah - no stranger to loss - finds her world once more breaking apart. How could this happen? Who wanted him dead?

Coventry, 1939. Days before the outbreak of World War II, a terrorist bomb explodes on a busy street, killing and maiming innocent civilians. A man is hanged on the evidence given by a young witness. As time goes on, the witness doubts her recollection of events, but her testimony has already had far-reaching consequences. Over sixty years later, in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings, Sara returns to her childhood home to find that her sister, Polly, missing for more than ten years, has finally come back too.

In the chaos aboard the sinking Titanic, Mair Parsons is separated from her infant daughter, Catherine, and her travelling companion and future mother-in-law, Ethel Jenkins. The disaster changes all their lives. During her repatriation to Britain, Mair has time to reassess her life and knows that before she can find happiness she must find the truth about her absent mother, even if it means leaving her beloved Wales and Catherine behind.

When the Shepards' car breaks down in pre-World War II New York City, a chain of events occurs that transforms the lives of the Shepards and the Drakes, as Evan and Rachel meet, court, and marry. But betrayal, disappointment, and secret schemes are on the horizon....