Political Historical Fiction

Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has just arrived from wartorn Europe to find that his brother, Daniel, has died in mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful career in the movies, and a heroic past choose to kill himself? Determined to uncover the truth, Ben enters the maze of the studio system and the uneasy world beneath the glossy shine of the movie business.

In the 1980s, a man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, South Africa, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. So begins the odyssey of Jimfish, who defies the usual classification of race that defines the rainbow nation. His journey through the last years of Apartheid will extend beyond South Africa to the wider world, where he will be an unlikely witness to the dying days of the 20th century.

When Matthew Luedecke leaves his small town for the university, he's hoping for a new start and a more exciting life. He'll get more than he bargained for. Recruited by a shadowy group of Nicaraguan ex-pats, Matt soon discovers how sheltered and blinded most Americans are when it comes to the covert machinations of world powers and the intricacies and danger of international intrigue. From an innocent pool party to a bloody firefight along the Coco River in Nicaragua's dense jungles, Matt is about to find out that an "exciting" may not be all it's cracked up to be.

A powerful evocation of a dangerous, chaotic, and tragic time, Booth is the story of the most infamous assassination in our history, as well as a riveting portrait of an enigmatic figure who continues to haunt the American imagination. Narrated by the only surviving conspirator in the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, Booth tells the story of John Surratt, a young man who falls under the spell of the charismatic and captivating John Wilkes Booth.

In one story we follow a group of starving, near-feral Eurasian refugees on a harrowing quest for survival; in the other we follow Pontus Beg, a policeman from a small border town on the steppe, as he investigates the death of a rabbi, one of the town's two remaining Jews. What follows is a gripping saga in which the two stories race toward each other, and Beg will be shaken to his core by what each one reveals about man's dark nature and the possibility - or impossibility - of his own redemption.

Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin in 1809. It looked like he would be a simple farmer, but Abe loved books and read anything he could get his hands on. In time, he became a successful lawyer and started getting attention as a politician. Known as a brilliant speaker, Abe impressed enough people to become the 16th president in 1861. Unfortunately, the country was heading for civil war. The issue of slavery divided the North and South, and soon President Lincoln faced the greatest emergency in American history.

The United States conducted highly classified atomic testing in the Marshall Islands. One of the ships used in the mock up fleet was a captured Japanese Battleship, the Nagato. These ships were equipped with an array of equipment, from cameras to Geiger counters, as well as various farm animals. These tests were intended to determine "Fleet Survivability" in the face of a thermonuclear implosion. Unfortunately, no one fully understood, or could even begin to imagine, the utter devastation about to be unleashed...or the consequences!

The phone rings in the California home of businessman Nate Michaels before the sun is up on October 24, 1962. An hour later he's on an Air Force jet to Washington. Michaels hasn't seen or spoken to President Kennedy since they met at Stanford in the fall of 1940, but now JFK needs his help to defuse the threat posed by Soviet missiles in Cuba. In both the Pentagon and the Kremlin, pro-war generals want a showdown, not a humiliating compromise.

Gogol's great comic masterpiece paints an hilariously satirical picture of provincial life in 19th century Russia. Its publication in 1847 not only provided inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian writers, but fanned the already flickering flames of social discontent which were eventually to flare up and consume Russia in the revolution of 1917.

In one of the most optimistic audio books to come out of Washington during these trying times, Congressman Tim Ryan presents us with an inspiring and hopeful view of our country’s future - and a roadmap for how to get there. Across America, people are feeling squeezed, exhausted, and running faster and faster while falling farther behind. The economy continues to struggle, wars rage on, and every week brings news of another environmental disaster. Everything seems broken and people feel helpless.

October 2007. Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto returns home after eight years of exile to seek political office once more. Assigned to cover her controversial arrival is TV journalist Ali Sikandar, the estranged son of a wealthy landowner from the interior region of Sindh.

In 1915, a German U-boat sank the British passenger liner Lusitania. Many Americans, including women and children, were among the 1200 dead, so the crime caused a storm of protest in America and helped plunge the US into World War I. In this gripping novel, an insurance investigator and his fiancée help a murdered longshoreman's widow who's been unjustly denied her husband's life insurance.

Layla James, a recent graduate and budding photographer, never knew anything about her father except that he named her for the iconic song by Eric Clapton. Her mother - steeped in a political activism that Layla rejects - kept their past shrouded in secrecy, and when she dies of cancer, she leaves only an enigmatic letter - the first in a series that will lead Layla through a cross-country network of '60s radicals and closer to the bombshell at the heart of her parents' past.

As the dictator Franco teeters on the edge of death - a death that will completely overturn the political structure of Spain - two couples are entwined. One, a husband and wife bored with the existence they have drifted into. The other, a passionate, combative pair who relish every moment of life. Into this potent mix a young American arrives, seeking his missing lover - bringing a shadow of danger into the machinations already at work. Soon the political tension in the country reaches the breaking point....

Roaming India in 1939 and the early 1940s, two flawed but extraordinary men latch onto each other with shocking consequences as each follows an ill-fated quest for “enlightenment.” Moses, a Polish Jew, is fleeing both the Nazis and his own failed marriage; Sahadeva, an itinerant Hindu monk, is trying to resolve his crisis of religious belief. Both men find themselves embroiled in hardship, shame, and chaos, stumbling into scandal and ultimately tragedy.

The Floating Admiral was the first of the Detection Club's collaborative novels, in which 12 of its members wrote a single novel. Eighty-five years later, 14 members of the club have once again collaborated to produce The Sinking Admiral. The Admiral is a pub in the Suffolk seaside village of Crabwell, the Admiral Byng. The Admiral is also the nickname of its landlord, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, as well as the name of the landlord's dinghy.

In a darkened cell, a brutally deposed dictator lies crippled - deprived of his power, his freedom and his eyes. On the edge of utter despair, his only companion is the young boy who brings him his meagre rations, a mere child who fears his own shadow. But to one who has held and lost the highest power, one thing alone is crystal clear: even emperors were mere children once. Ten years later the new ruler's son watches uneasily over his father's empire.

Au XIXe siècle, le périple d'une Française exilée en terre slave. Un destin tumultueux et aventurier marqué par un amour inconditionnel pour la Russie. "L'hiver revint avec ses troïkas, les chevaux résistant aux intempéries, frangés de glace, et soufflant des jets de fumée. Une foule massée sur les tribunes autour de cet immense champ nacré qu'était la Neva emprisonnée sous les glaces assistait aux courses de traîneaux sur patins d'acier. Sur la perspective Nevski, le collet relevé, en bonnet fourré et longue houppelande, les portiers enlevaient la glace. Ils veillaient ainsi toute la nuit."

Almost anything scares young Eleanor: mice, the dark, and a host of imaginary dangers. But she learns to hide her feelings - her father disapproves of fear, and she longs only to please him. She knows she will always disappoint her beautiful, socialite mother, because Eleanor is painfully shy and plain.

As a young debutante in Manhattan, she spends her days teaching needy children and touring crowded tenements.

The Wall is a new, brief collection of stories by Becker that have either never been translated into English or been published here in audiobook form before. The title story, "The Wall," recounts two boys’ risky adventure when they scale the wall of a transit camp to visit the ghetto their families have recently vacated. In "The Most Popular Family Story," a favorite anecdote recounted year after year at the gatherings of an extended Jewish family subtly marks the absences left by the Holocaust.