Literary Fiction War

A captivating and thought-provoking listen, War and Peace chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the lasting impact it had on five aristocratic families. It will take you on a soul-stirring journey as we follow several interconnected characters of the Tsarist society during the early 19th century as they navigate through love, fears, and personal struggles against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars.

Secret agent Augustus Whittlesby has spent a decade undercover in France, posing as an insufferably bad poet. The French surveillance officers can't bear to read his work closely enough to recognize the information drowned in a sea of verbiage. In the ninth installment of Lauren Willig's best-selling Pink Carnation series, the atrocious poet teams up with an American widow to prevent Napoleon's invasion of England.

It's the summer of 1959, and something magical can be witnessed at the end of the pier in beach town Brighton, England. Jack Robbins, Ronnie Deane, and Evie White are performing in a seaside variety show, starring as Jack Robinson, the compere comedian, and The Great Pablo and Eve, a magic act. By the end of the summer, Evie's glinting engagement ring will be flung to the bottom of the ocean, and one of the trifecta will vanish forever.

Rachel, the mother of the aging professor Thomas Vanderlinden, shared her life with two men. Both went by the name of Rowland Vanderlinden. The first husband went abroad and never returned. The second, whom Rachel also unquestioningly accepted as her husband, was a mystery. In an attempt to understand his mother's adventurous decisions regarding love and marriage, Thomas sets out on a journey to the far reaches of the Pacific to find the first Rowland, and his real father. As the mystery of the two Rowlands unfolds throughout the novel, so too does a fascinating portrait.

It is September 8, 1943, and 14-year-old Claudette Blum and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to find safety now that the Italians have broken from Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it quickly becomes an open battleground for the Nazis, the Allies, Resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.

The Last Kingdom is set in the England of the ninth and tenth centuries. These were the years when the Danish Vikings had invaded and occupied three of England's four kingdoms, and when King Alfred, his son, and grandson, fought back and won the freedom of the country again.

The year is 878 and Wessex is free from the Vikings.Uhtred, the dispossessed son of a Northumbrian lord, helped Alfred win that victory, but now he is disgusted by Alfred's lack of generosity and repelled by the king's insistent piety. He flees Wessex, going back north to seek revenge for the killing of his foster father and to rescue his stepsister, captured in the same raid. He needs to find his old enemy, Kjartan, a renegade Danish lord who lurks in the formidable stronghold of Dunholm.

In 1940, as the shadow of war lengthens over Europe, three mysterious travelers enter a village in Spain. They have the appearance of Parisian intellectuals, but the trio of two men and a woman are starving and exhausted from crossing illegally through the Pyrenees. Their story, told over a period of 48 tense hours, is narrated by one of the men, who slowly accepts his unthinkable fate. In a voice despairing and elegant, he calmly considers what he should do, and weighs what any one life means.

Blaine "Mick" McFadden managed to restore Donderath's magic partially, but not without a cost. He and the magic are now bound together, and the power remains dangerous and erratic - draining the life from him with every use. New threats are rising from the wreckage of the battered kingdoms, and warlords both mortal and undead vie for control.

Mallory, Miller and Andrea are united into a lethally effective team. Their mission: to silence the impregnable guns set in the tall cliffs of Navarone. On their success or failure rests one of the most critical offensives of the Second World War.

Xiang Li Cheng, the President of the People's Republic of China, has both a problem and a plan in Rick Campbell's thrilling Empire Rising. The problem is that the limited supply of oil available to China is threatening to derail his country's economic growth and prosperity. But to secure access to those resources, he must contend with powerful U.S. Navy and the Pacific Fleet. After a decades-long largely secret military build up, Cheng sets his plan in motion by suddenly invading Taiwan and drawing the Pacific Fleet in to its defense.

Portofino, Italy, 1943. A young woman steps off a boat in a scenic coastal village. Although she knows how to disappear in a crowd, Elodie is too terrified to slip by the German officers while carrying her poorly forged identity papers. She is frozen until a man she's never met before claims to know her. In desperate need of shelter, Elodie follows him back to his home on the cliffs of Portofino.

Set in Vienna from 1910 to 1946, All of You Every Single One is an atmospheric, original, and deeply moving novel about family, freedom, and how true love might survive impossible odds. Julia Lindqvist, a woman unhappily married to a famous Swedish playwright, leaves her husband to begin a passionate affair with a female tailor named Eve. The pair run away together and settle in the more liberal haven of Vienna, where they fall in love, navigate the challenges of their newfound independence, and find community in the city’s Jewish quarter.

Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family’s unnecessary appendage. Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been readby anyone.

During a briefing in Washington D.C., the President is informed of a threat to national security: a three-year-old boy named Akili, who is already the smartest being on the planet. Representing the next step in human evolution, Akili can perceive patterns and predict future events better than most supercomputers, and is capable of manipulating grand-scale events like pieces on a chess board.

In the charnel house that was Europe in the Second World War, there were few instances of shining moral courage, let alone secular sainthood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and Nazi resister, was the exception. This emblematic figure risked his life, and finally lost it, through his participation in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler and topple his regime.

Ambrose Bierce brings to life the heart rendering stories of divided loyalties, splitting families, states, countries, and individuals. He writes of the glory in beginning and savagery in the doing. Here is a moving anti-war series of stories if ever there was one. A must read by all students of American History and Literature, though perhaps best understood by older adults.

Simran is unable to move on. Grappling with the growing estrangement of her sister and daughter as well as the disintegration of her marriage, she wonders how her life has come to this. As the life she has carefully constructed unravels, she is forced to confront one of her most painful childhood memories - her parents sending her younger brother away from home.

At the age of 13, Pella Marsh emigrates with her family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. These enigmatic aborigines have names like Lonely Dumptruck and Hiding Kneel, and a civilization that baffles and frightens their human visitors. As the spikily independent Pella becomes an uneasy envoy between two species, Girl in Landscape deftly interweaves themes of exploration and otherness, loss, and sexual awakening.

On the brink of the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German-Jewish bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings. It has three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. And the narratives can be listened to one of two ways: either straight through or according to an alternate chapter sequence. The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl.