Historical Survival

Sixteen-year-old Nipper and his Gallipoli mates Lanky, Spud, Bluey and Wallaby Joe are starving, freezing and ill-equipped. By November 1915 they know that that there is more to winning a war than courage. The Gallipoli campaign has been lost. Nipper has played cricket with the Turks in the opposing dugout, dodged rocket fire and rescued drowning, freezing men when the blizzard snow melted. He is one of the few trusted with the secret kept from even most of the officers: how an entire army will vanish from the Peninsula over three impeccably planned nights.

In the deadly chaos of the First World War, one horse witnesses the reality of battle from both sides of the trenches. Bombarded by artillery, with bullets knocking riders from his back, Joey tells a powerful story of the truest friendships surviving in terrible times. One horse has the seen the best and the worst of humanity. The power of war and the beauty of peace. This is his story.

Geography dealt Korea a fateful role. Sandwiched between China and Japan, and within easy reach of Russia, Korea has suffered five major foreign occupations-by China, Mongolia, Japan, and after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union. It was in that tiny peninsula I was born when Korea was under the heel of Japan, when we were forced to take Japanese names and speak Japanese. With the end of World War II came the liberation, which was soon followed by the Korean War.

Romania, World War II. Nelu escapes from his home and finds shelter with other homeless children in the caves beneath Bucharest's spectacular concert hall. They call it "The Fortress". Daniel is the son of a well-to-do Jewish family living in the heart of Bucharest. On the eve of WWII, Daniel and his family are forced to flee and take refuge in those caves with the help of the children. Daniel, Nelu, and the other homeless children find themselves united when facing the Nazi threat.

In this brilliant debut novel, Noah's family (or Noe, as he's called here), his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, tell what it's like to live with a man touched by God, while struggling against events that cannot be controlled or explained. When Noe orders his sons to build an ark, he can't tell them where the wood will come from. When he sends his daughters-in-law out to gather animals, he can offer no directions, money, or protection.

June, 1941. Eleven-year-old Shmuel Sucha is startled awake by the sound of German planes over his hometown in western Ukraine. As the Nazi shadow begins to fall on their small Jewish community, Shmuel’s parents smuggle their son away to a local farm, just on the border of the surrounding forest.

Orphaned in Poland at the age of 13, Tadeusz "Tad" Haska survived World War II on the run, narrowly evading the Nazis every step of the way. After the war, he daringly escaped jail from the Soviet Secret Police, fled to Sweden, and launched an elaborate plan to smuggle his wife in a coffin on an all-male naval ship. Discover how Tad's knowledge of nine languages helped him survive in the face of unspeakable adversity.

Mt. Clemens, Michigan, 1887. Seventeen and headstrong, with marriage on her mind, Maggie is sure she has found her one true love. But when she collides head-on with betrayal, overwhelming loss, and ill-treatment, her life unravels. In a time when women had few rights, Maggie rises above adversity through rare determination and grit, becoming an independent woman ahead of her time. Yet before she can truly find peace, one heartbreaking, life-altering decision remains.

Bitty is a canary whose courage more than makes up for his diminutive size. Of course, as a miner bird who detects deadly gas leaks in a West Virginia coal mine during the Depression, he is used to facing danger. Tired of perilous working conditions, he escapes and hops a coal train to the state capital to seek help in improving the plights of miners and their canaries.

A boy and his elephant escape into the jungle when the Viet Cong attack his village immediately after the Vietnam war.

In the current wave of seafaring literature, no fictional sailor's story can match this true real-life adventure. With Charles Tyng's Before the Wind we roam the world of the early 19th century: visit Lord Byron in Italy, King Tamehameha in Hawaii, and skirt Napoleon's prison isle of St. Helena. We learn to siphon rum from the captain's cask, relive the historic battle of The Bulwark and The Chesapeake, and witness an encounter with a mermaid.

Bloodied and barely conscious, a teenage boy wakes up at the side of a railway track in the middle of nowhere. It’s night and the dead of winter–bone-chillingly cold. Where he is and how he got there, he doesn’t remember. Nor does he remember anything else for that matter–not even his own name. The only clue left behind is a backpack covered in a foot of snow lying next to him. The one thing he knows for sure is that if he doesn’t get up and start moving, he’s going to freeze to death.

Helen Colijn's account of her wartime experiences is a window into a largely overlooked dimension of World War II, the imprisonment of women and children in Southeast Asia by the Japanese and how these prisoners of war responded to their dire circumstances. The conditions were harsh, terrible. Food was scarce, medicine unavailable. Held in captivity for three and a half years, more than a third of the women in Helen's camp died of disease or starvation.

Snub is a young gorilla, living in the heart of what will eventually be known as Africa. She is jealous of her mother's new baby and restless in her need to explore. When a natural disaster shakes up her family, Snub finds herself as the guardian of her young sibling and lost in a reshaped world. Snub may feel orphaned, but she's not alone. There are other creatures stalking through the woods - a new form of predator, walking on two legs.

In a time when there were few options for a woman, the main character Andrée finds the courage to grow as a person and the strength to survive as a strong woman. Through a series of life-threatening ordeals, Andrée's journey begins when she is abandoned by her family, with no other option she becomes a nun, and is assigned to a mission in Haiti. She soon has to flee for her life in order to survive a revolution between the Vodun and French farmers.

Charlotte has spent her whole life fighting the British Empire, following in the footsteps of her parents and their group of rebels. But when her reunion with her mother laid bare horrible truths about the rebellion, Charlotte knew she had to escape. Now she is on the run, with no idea who the enemy is - or which of her compatriots is truly on her side.

Maxwell Smart tenía solo once años cuando toda su familia fue asesinada. Pudo haber muerto también, pero su madre le ordenó salvarse. Huyó al bosque, cavó un hoyo para refugiarse y buscó comida en las granjas cercanas. Con la ropa hecha harapos y al borde de la inanición, escapó repetidamente de la muerte a manos de los nazis. Después de meses en soledad, Maxwell se encontró con otro niño que deambulaba por el bosque en busca de comida. Janek, al igual que Maxwell, era huérfano y los dos se hicieron amigos.

A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: Its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire.

On August 6th, 1945 Shinji, a Japanese adolescent boy, helps his father below prepare their home for demolition from its roof top, he sees a blinding flash. An Earth-shattering blast with scorching heat sends him into complete darkness and total chaos. An atomic bomb has just exploded only three-quarters of a mile away from him, devastating all of Hiroshima in a blink.

The year was 1853, the crossing sickening, crowded, terrifying, and almost unbearable, and yet this family of six survived 40 miserable days and nights in the dark hold of the John Ruttle, a sailing ship built to haul freight, not passengers.