Catalog Search Results
Author
Summary
In 1837, Joseph Barbour, an upper servant in an English village, immigrates with his family to America so he can make his fortune in the nascent artillery business. A man of vision, Joseph foresees a time when wars will not be won with courage and brave hearts but rather by the nations with superior firearms. Joseph and his family settle in a rural Pennsylvania village, but his wife, Hilda, is unhappy and longs to return to England. Their shy and...
Author
Summary
The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until a recently transplanted English widow decides to move her into the great house and rename her. She remains bound to the plantation despite her "freedom." The arrival of a young English overseer dramatically changes life in the great house.
Author
Summary
The first novel from the elusive author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Set in the 1920s in Mexico, B. Traven's The Cotton-Pickers tells the story of Gerald Gales, who drifts in and out of jobs--on a cotton plantation, an oil field, in a pastry shop, and on a ranch--exposing the dangerous exploitation at each station and fomenting workers' rights along the way. Adventurous, funny, and full of humanity, TheCotton-Pickers challenges and delights...
Author
Summary
Alexias is a young aristocrat living during the end of Athens's Golden Age. Prized for his beauty and athletic prowess, Alexias studies under Sokrates with his closest friend, Lysis. Together, the young men come of age in an Athens on the verge of great upheaval. They attend the Olympics, partake in symposia, fight on the battlefields of the Peloponnesian War, and fall in love. The first of Mary Renault's celebrated historical novels of ancient Greece,...
5) Brookland
Author
Summary
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Los Angeles Times Book Review Favorite Book of the Year
Since her girlhood, Prudence Winship has gazed across the tidal straits from her home in Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan and yearned to bridge the distance. Now, established as the owner of the enormously successful gin distillery she inherited from her father, she can begin to realize her dream.
Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn,...
Author
Summary
"Istanbul, 1683: Mehmed IV, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, is preparing to lay siege to Vienna, capital of the Holy Roman Empire, when a mysterious visitor arrives in his bedroom--naked, covered in strange tattoos--to deliver a dangerous, world-changing message. Paris, 2017: Ottoman flags have been flying over the great city for three hundred years, ever since its fall--along with all of Europe--to the empire's all-conquering army. Notre Dame has...
Author
Summary
The year is 1846, and war is brewing between the United States and Mexico. Under the pretext of a scientific research expedition, Lt. John C. Fremont arrives in Sutter's Fort with Kit Carson, famous Indian Scout, and a few men. Also arriving in Sutter's Fort is Cat Reilly, who has been widowed on the long trip west and is now in desperate circumstances. She becomes romantically involved with a Russian count as well as in Fremont and Carson's political...
Author
Summary
The bestselling author of Tame the Wild Wind delivers a western historical romance of a lonely trapper and a woman with a deep and wounded past. When Sage McKenzie comes across a wild-eyed beauty in obvious distress, his first instinct is to turn and flee like the native tribes who fear this "crazy woman." As a man of the mountain, affairs of the heart are low priority. But her violet stare has him ensnared, and Sage knows he has to help her in any...
Author
Series
Raj quartet volume 3
Summary
Third in the epic quartet about the end of the Raj: "Scott throws us into India, wretched and beautiful . . . His contribution to literature is permanent." -The New York Times Book Review
India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between...
Author
Summary
"Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara's family is in terrible danger: her fifteen-year-old son, Abel, has disappeared, and her youngest daughter, Jasmin, is confined in a basement to prevent being pressed into service at the comfort stations. Her eldest daughter Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Cecily knows two things: that this is all her fault; and that her family must never learn the...
Author
Series
Summary
In 1963, Berlin is dark and dangerous. Len Deighton's skilled, jaded, anonymous hero of The IPCRESS File is now set to arrange the defection-and fake the death-of a leading Soviet scientist. A ferociously cool fable" (New York Times) and one of the first novels written after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Funeral in Berlin revels in the fraught, chilling atmosphere of a divided city"
Author
Series
Summary
During the fight for Scotland's independence, the mystical Order of the Knights Templar battles ancient evil and a treacherous king in this gripping alternate history. A powerful order of warrior monks forged in the fires of the Crusades during the twelfth century, the legendary Knights Templar did not vanish entirely following their failed campaigns in the Holy Land. Having attained great power and arcane skill, they withdrew from the public...
14) The holy thief
Author
Series
Chronicles of Brother Cadfael volume 19
Summary
Two groups seek refuge from the rain at Brother Cadfael's abbey, bringing with them mystery and mayhem In the chill, rainy autumn of 1144, two groups of visitors seek the hospitality of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul, and Brother Cadfael fears trouble has come in with them. Among the first arrivals is Brother Tutilo, a young Benedictine with a guileless face and-to Brother Cadfael's shrewd eyes-a mischievous intelligence. The second group, a...
Author
Summary
"The classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell. After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen--Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death...
16) A grave robbery
Author
Series
Veronica Speedwell mystery volume 9
Summary
"Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud's. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would...
Author
Series
American in Paris mystery volume 2
Summary
Tabitha Knight investigates the sudden death of a chef at a cooking school who poured himself a glass of wine from a rare vintage bottle. Set in midcentury Paris and starring Julia Child's fictional best friend, this magnifique reimagining of the iconic chef's years at Le Cordon Bleu blends a delicious murder mystery with a unique culinary twist.
18) Legacies
Author
Summary
A romance between a white woman and an Indian man during the Civil War. She is Diana Parmelee, daughter of a Union officer, he is Lije Stuart, a Harvard-educated lawyer from the Cherokee Nation, whose family owns a plantation and sides with the Confederacy. A sequel to The Proud and the Free.
Author
Summary
"Maud Heighton came to Lafond's famous Academie to paint, and to flee the constraints of her small English town. It took all her courage to escape, but Paris, she quickly realizes, is no place for a light purse. While her fellow students enjoy the dazzling decadence of the Belle Epoque, Maud slips into poverty. Quietly starving, and dreading another cold Paris winter, Maud is hired by Christian Morel as companion to his beautiful, young sister, Sylvie....
Author
Summary
"Stifled by tragedy, thirteen-year-old Grace Mockingbird yearns to escape her mother's controlling, grieving hand and find her voice in a small Kentucky coal mining town. A tragic family loss has driven a wedge between Grace and her mother, who seems to be silently punishing Grace by withholding her love. Grace does penance in every chore while doubting she'll ever earn her mother's forgiveness. But change arrives with the hot winds of summer as the...