Category
20th Century, C 1900 to C 1999
The Banned Books of Berlin
Berlin, 1933. The night skies are burning bright with huge bonfires of banned books, torched by the German Students Union. The Nazi party is swelling in number, and the universities, the centres of learning in Germany, are no longer a safe place for Anya, a young philosophy student. Anya can only...
Bea and the New Deal Horse
Bea wakes to Daddy’s note in a hayloft, where he abandoned her with her little sister after the stock market crash took everything: Daddy’s job at the bank, their home, Mama’s health and life. How is Bea supposed to convince the imposing Mrs. Scott to take in two stray children? Mrs. Scott’s money...
The Blood Years
Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from...
Book and Dagger
The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war. At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and,...
The Booklover
In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option:...
The Boxcar Librarian
When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work. Millie arrives to an eclectic...
The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz
Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and...
The Bridge at Andau
The Bridge at Andau is James A. Michener at his most gripping. His classic nonfiction account of a doomed uprising is as searing and unforgettable as any of his bestselling novels. For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a different...
Bruce Goff

Bruce Goff 2025

A major exploration of the work of American architect Bruce Goff, including the paintings, objects, and ephemera often overshadowed by his architectural legacy. Celebrated as one of the most innovative American architects of the twentieth century, Bruce Goff (1904–1982) practiced an unbounded...
Cotton Tenants
In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called...
Dead Wake

Dead Wake 2015

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas...
The Diary Keepers
A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to...
Fault Lines
In this fully updated second edition of their masterful history, leading historians and best-selling authors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of our current moment, answering the question: When—and how—did America become so polarized? It all starts in 1974 with the Watergate...
The Goddess of Warsaw
The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling dual timeline tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and...
Gossip From The Forest
In November 1918, after four long years of murderous conflict, six men gather in a railroad car in a secluded forest outside Paris, France, to negotiate an end to World War I. A pacifist, left-leaning diplomat with no military knowledge or experience, Matthias Erzberger has been selected by the...
Held

Held 2024

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has...
Hidden Portraits
Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women loved and inspired Pablo Picasso. They frequently appear as the women in his portraits, but they also pursued their own ambitions in dance, writing, painting, and...
Hotel Exile
Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history,...
The Icon and the Idealist
A riveting history about the little-known rivalry between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett that profoundly shaped reproductive rights in America. In the 1910s, as the birth control movement was born, two leaders emerged: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. While Sanger would go on to found...
In the Garden of Beasts
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
Innocence

Innocence 2014

The Ridolfi are a Florentine family of long lineage and little money. It is 1955, Italy is still struggling back after the war, and the family, like its decrepit villa and farm, has seen better days. Among the Ridolfi, only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality. But it’s a vitality...
Into Unknown Skies
The unbelievable history of the 1924 race to circumnavigate the globe for the first time by air, a nail-biting contest that pitted underdog US pilots against their better-funded European rivals, created technology that changed aviation, and convinced America that its future was in the sky. In the...
Isaac
September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found...
The Keeper of Lost Art
As Allied bombs rain down on Torino in the autumn of 1942, Stella Costa’s mother sends her to safety with distant relatives in a Tuscan villa. There, Stella finds her family tasked with a great responsibility: hiding nearly 300 priceless masterpieces from Florence, including Botticelli’s famous...
Kent State

Kent State 2025

On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, political fires that had been burning across America during the 1960s exploded. Antiwar protesters wearing bell-bottom jeans and long hair hurled taunts and rocks at another group of young Americans — National Guardsmen sporting gas masks and rifles....
The Last Fashion House in Paris
France, 1942 Once, Paulette Leblanc spent her days flirting, shopping and drawing elegant dresses in her sketch pad. Then German tanks rolled into France, and a reckless romance turned into deep betrayal. Blaming herself for her mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, Paulette is sent away to begin a new...
Last House

Last House 2025

It’s 1953, and for Nick Taylor, WWII veteran turned company lawyer, oil is the key to the future. He takes the train into the city for work and returns to the peaceful streets of the suburbs and to his wife, Bet, former codebreaker now housewife, and their two children, Katherine and Harry. Nick...
Last Twilight in Paris
A Parisian department store, a mysterious necklace and a woman’s quest to unlock a decade-old mystery are at the center of this riveting novel of love and survival, from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff. London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she...
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee and renowned photgrapher Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (The New York Times) In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans...
Letter From Birmingham Jail
On April 16, 1923, Dr.. Martin Luther King Jr., responded to an open letter written and published by eight white clergyman admonishing the civil rights demonstrations happening in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr.. King drafted his seminal response on scraps of paper smuggled into jail. King criticizes his...
The Lies We Leave Behind
Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is disappointed when an accident leaves her...
The Light of Battle
On June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower addressed the thousands of American troops preparing to invade Normandy, exhorting them to embrace the “Great Crusade” they faced. Then, in a fleeting moment alone, he drafted a resignation letter in case the invasion failed. In *The Light of Battle*,...
Nineteen Steps
Love blooms in the darkest days… It’s 1942, and air raid sirens continue to wail around London. Eighteen-year-old Nellie Morris counts every day lucky that she emerges from the underground shelters unharmed, her loving family still surrounding her. After a chance encounter with Ray, an...
One of Them
Anne Bishop seems like a typical Vassar sophomore—one of a popular group of privileged WASP friends. None of the girls in her circle has any idea that she’s Jewish, or that her real first name is Miriam. Pretending to be a Gentile has made life easier—as Anne, she no longer suffers the snubs, snide...
The Orphan’s Secret Library
For as long as Alice Carmichael can remember, the only thing she’s been able to count on is the written word. The war may have taken everything from her, but the stories she cherishes provide solace and escape into a world that is more hopeful than 1942 England. So when Alice finds herself at the...
Our Evenings
Spanning decades of social and political change in Britain, Our Evenings follows the life of Dave Win, a mixed-race actor navigating identity, ambition, and belonging in a shifting cultural landscape. Sent to an elite boarding school through the kindness of a wealthy benefactor, Dave’s early...
Raffaella della Olga
The first book on an innovative artist who uses modified typewriters to create abstract and colorful bookworks and paintings. Raffaella della Olga makes unique artist’s books using modified typewriters and multicolor ink ribbons on a range of materials—from tracing paper to photo paper to...
Safiyyah
Safiyyah loathes the brutal Nazi occupation of Paris, even though her Muslim identity keeps her safe—or, at least, safer than her Jewish neighbors. Violence lurks in the streets, her best friend has fled, and even her place of refuge—the library—has turned shadowy and confusing, as the invaders fear...
Schindler
Based on a true story, Schindler's List follows Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero whose transformation unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. A businessman and opportunist at the outset, Schindler arrives in Kraków seeking profit, exploiting the cheap labor of...
Shy Creatures
In all failed relationships there is a tipping point. It goes unnoticed at the time but can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park… The London suburb of Croydon, 1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her...
Sisters of Belfast
Orphaned during the Second World War, Aelish and Isabel McGuire—known as the twins of Belfast—are given over to the austere care of the Sisters of Bethlehem. Though they are each all the other has, the girls are propelled in opposite directions as they grow up. Rebellious Isabel turns her back on...
Six Days in Bombay
When renowned painter Mira Novak arrives at Wadia hospital in Bombay after a miscarriage, she's expected to make a quick recovery, and her nurse, Sona, is excited to learn more about the vivacious artist who shares her half-Indian identity. Sona, yearning for a larger life, finds herself carried...
Soldiers in Hiding
It's Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo's lively nightclub scene. Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight against American troops in the...
The Splendid and the Vile
On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was...
The Sun Also Rises
The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is set during an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. The story lays bare...
Sword Beach
Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day—June...
The Teacher of Auschwitz
Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts. . . Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those...
Thunderstruck
In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect at the turn of the twentieth century during one of the greatest...
Twelve Post-War Tales
Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In the aftermath of World War II, a young Jewish private, stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members. In the...
Valiant Women
Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time. They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance...
Thunderstruck

70 Thunderstruck 2007

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect at the turn of the twentieth century during one of the greatest...
Hotel Exile

Hotel Exile July 7, 2026

Since its opening in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history,...
Twelve Post-War Tales

Twelve Post-War Tales May 12, 2026

Here are the soldiers and doctors and veterans, wives and lovers and children, who have been affected in ways both subtle and profound by the cataclysms of our times. In the aftermath of World War II, a young Jewish private, stationed in Germany, seeks the truth about lost family members. In the...
Raffaella della Olga

Raffaella della Olga January 27, 2026

The first book on an innovative artist who uses modified typewriters to create abstract and colorful bookworks and paintings. Raffaella della Olga makes unique artist’s books using modified typewriters and multicolor ink ribbons on a range of materials—from tracing paper to photo paper to...
Bruce Goff

Bruce Goff December 9, 2025

A major exploration of the work of American architect Bruce Goff, including the paintings, objects, and ephemera often overshadowed by his architectural legacy. Celebrated as one of the most innovative American architects of the twentieth century, Bruce Goff (1904–1982) practiced an unbounded...
The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist December 2, 2025

A riveting history about the little-known rivalry between Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett that profoundly shaped reproductive rights in America. In the 1910s, as the birth control movement was born, two leaders emerged: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett. While Sanger would go on to found...
Kent State

Kent State November 25, 2025

On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, political fires that had been burning across America during the 1960s exploded. Antiwar protesters wearing bell-bottom jeans and long hair hurled taunts and rocks at another group of young Americans — National Guardsmen sporting gas masks and rifles....
The White Lady

The White Lady November 25, 2025

A major new history of the two most important British secret service networks in the First and Second World Wars. Intelligence gathering was essential to both sides in the First and Second World Wars. At the heart of MI6’s efforts were two key networks in Belgium. Agents in The White Lady acted as...
Hidden Portraits

Hidden Portraits November 18, 2025

Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. These six extraordinary women loved and inspired Pablo Picasso. They frequently appear as the women in his portraits, but they also pursued their own ambitions in dance, writing, painting, and...
Sword Beach

Sword Beach November 11, 2025

Between 1941 and 1944, the British army contributed relatively little to World War II. On the unremittingly bloody Eastern Front, no Russian or German soldier had experienced the luxury of having four years to prepare and train for a resumption of the European continental campaign. But on D-Day—June...
Fault Lines

Fault Lines November 11, 2025

In this fully updated second edition of their masterful history, leading historians and best-selling authors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer uncover the origins of our current moment, answering the question: When—and how—did America become so polarized? It all starts in 1974 with the Watergate...
Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger October 28, 2025

The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war. At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and,...
One of Them

One of Them September 9, 2025

Anne Bishop seems like a typical Vassar sophomore—one of a popular group of privileged WASP friends. None of the girls in her circle has any idea that she’s Jewish, or that her real first name is Miriam. Pretending to be a Gentile has made life easier—as Anne, she no longer suffers the snubs, snide...
Our Evenings

Our Evenings August 19, 2025

Spanning decades of social and political change in Britain, Our Evenings follows the life of Dave Win, a mixed-race actor navigating identity, ambition, and belonging in a shifting cultural landscape. Sent to an elite boarding school through the kindness of a wealthy benefactor, Dave’s early...
The Orphan’s Secret Library
For as long as Alice Carmichael can remember, the only thing she’s been able to count on is the written word. The war may have taken everything from her, but the stories she cherishes provide solace and escape into a world that is more hopeful than 1942 England. So when Alice finds herself at the...
The Banned Books of Berlin
Berlin, 1933. The night skies are burning bright with huge bonfires of banned books, torched by the German Students Union. The Nazi party is swelling in number, and the universities, the centres of learning in Germany, are no longer a safe place for Anya, a young philosophy student. Anya can only...
Last House

Last House June 17, 2025

It’s 1953, and for Nick Taylor, WWII veteran turned company lawyer, oil is the key to the future. He takes the train into the city for work and returns to the peaceful streets of the suburbs and to his wife, Bet, former codebreaker now housewife, and their two children, Katherine and Harry. Nick...
The Teacher of Auschwitz

The Teacher of Auschwitz June 17, 2025

Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts. . . Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those...
The Keeper of Lost Art

The Keeper of Lost Art April 22, 2025

As Allied bombs rain down on Torino in the autumn of 1942, Stella Costa’s mother sends her to safety with distant relatives in a Tuscan villa. There, Stella finds her family tasked with a great responsibility: hiding nearly 300 priceless masterpieces from Florence, including Botticelli’s famous...
Six Days in Bombay

Six Days in Bombay April 15, 2025

When renowned painter Mira Novak arrives at Wadia hospital in Bombay after a miscarriage, she's expected to make a quick recovery, and her nurse, Sona, is excited to learn more about the vivacious artist who shares her half-Indian identity. Sona, yearning for a larger life, finds herself carried...
The Boxcar Librarian

The Boxcar Librarian March 4, 2025

When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work. Millie arrives to an eclectic...
Last Twilight in Paris

Last Twilight in Paris February 4, 2025

A Parisian department store, a mysterious necklace and a woman’s quest to unlock a decade-old mystery are at the center of this riveting novel of love and survival, from New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff. London, 1953. Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she...
Letter From Birmingham Jail

Letter From Birmingham Jail January 14, 2025

On April 16, 1923, Dr.. Martin Luther King Jr., responded to an open letter written and published by eight white clergyman admonishing the civil rights demonstrations happening in Birmingham, Alabama. Dr.. King drafted his seminal response on scraps of paper smuggled into jail. King criticizes his...
The Last Fashion House in Paris
France, 1942 Once, Paulette Leblanc spent her days flirting, shopping and drawing elegant dresses in her sketch pad. Then German tanks rolled into France, and a reckless romance turned into deep betrayal. Blaming herself for her mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, Paulette is sent away to begin a new...
Shy Creatures

Shy Creatures November 12, 2024

In all failed relationships there is a tipping point. It goes unnoticed at the time but can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park… The London suburb of Croydon, 1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her...
The Lies We Leave Behind

The Lies We Leave Behind November 5, 2024

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is disappointed when an accident leaves her...
Nineteen Steps

Nineteen Steps September 17, 2024

Love blooms in the darkest days… It’s 1942, and air raid sirens continue to wail around London. Eighteen-year-old Nellie Morris counts every day lucky that she emerges from the underground shelters unharmed, her loving family still surrounding her. After a chance encounter with Ray, an...
Into Unknown Skies

Into Unknown Skies September 17, 2024

The unbelievable history of the 1924 race to circumnavigate the globe for the first time by air, a nail-biting contest that pitted underdog US pilots against their better-funded European rivals, created technology that changed aviation, and convinced America that its future was in the sky. In the...
The Booklover

The Booklover's Library September 10, 2024

In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job. She and her beloved daughter Olivia have always managed just fine on their own, but with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option:...
Valiant Women

Valiant Women August 20, 2024

Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time. They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance...
The Light of Battle

The Light of Battle June 4, 2024

On June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower addressed the thousands of American troops preparing to invade Normandy, exhorting them to embrace the “Great Crusade” they faced. Then, in a fleeting moment alone, he drafted a resignation letter in case the invasion failed. In *The Light of Battle*,...
The Goddess of Warsaw

The Goddess of Warsaw May 28, 2024

The Goddess of Warsaw is an enthralling dual timeline tale of a legendary Hollywood screen goddess with a dark secret about her life in the Warsaw Ghetto. When the famous actress is threatened by someone from her past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and...
Safiyyah

Safiyyah's War May 7, 2024

Safiyyah loathes the brutal Nazi occupation of Paris, even though her Muslim identity keeps her safe—or, at least, safer than her Jewish neighbors. Violence lurks in the streets, her best friend has fled, and even her place of refuge—the library—has turned shadowy and confusing, as the invaders fear...
Sisters of Belfast

Sisters of Belfast February 27, 2024

Orphaned during the Second World War, Aelish and Isabel McGuire—known as the twins of Belfast—are given over to the austere care of the Sisters of Bethlehem. Though they are each all the other has, the girls are propelled in opposite directions as they grow up. Rebellious Isabel turns her back on...
The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz
Fritz Kleinmann was fourteen when the Nazis took over Vienna. Kurt, his little brother, was eight. Under Hitler’s brutal regime, their Austrian-Jewish family of six was cruelly torn apart. Taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, Fritz and his Papa, Gustav, underwent hard labor and...
The Diary Keepers

The Diary Keepers February 6, 2024

A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to...
Held

Held January 30, 2024

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has...
The Blood Years

The Blood Years October 10, 2023

Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He’s done his best to provide for them and shield them from...
Bea and the New Deal Horse
Bea wakes to Daddy’s note in a hayloft, where he abandoned her with her little sister after the stock market crash took everything: Daddy’s job at the bank, their home, Mama’s health and life. How is Bea supposed to convince the imposing Mrs. Scott to take in two stray children? Mrs. Scott’s money...
The Splendid and the Vile

The Splendid and the Vile February 15, 2022

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was...
Dead Wake

Dead Wake December 31, 2015

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were surprisingly at ease, even though Germany had declared the seas...
Innocence

Innocence October 14, 2014

The Ridolfi are a Florentine family of long lineage and little money. It is 1955, Italy is still struggling back after the war, and the family, like its decrepit villa and farm, has seen better days. Among the Ridolfi, only eighteen-year-old Chiara shows anything like vitality. But it’s a vitality...
Cotton Tenants

Cotton Tenants May 29, 2013

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a four-hundred-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called...
The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns October 4, 2011

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better...
Soldiers in Hiding

Soldiers in Hiding October 1, 2011

It's Tokyo, 1941. Teddy Maki and Jimmy Yakamoto are Japanese-American friends and jazz musicians playing Tokyo's lively nightclub scene. Stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Teddy and Jimmy are drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight against American troops in the...
In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts January 1, 2011

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is...
Thunderstruck

Thunderstruck September 25, 2007

In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men—Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication—whose lives intersect at the turn of the twentieth century during one of the greatest...
The Winds of War

The Winds of War February 5, 2002

Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events, as well as all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II, as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The Winds of War and its sequel War and...
War and Remembrance

War and Remembrance February 5, 2002

These two classic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold the compelling tale of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom. The multimillion-copy bestsellers that capture all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War -- and...
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James Agee and renowned photgrapher Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a landmark work of American photojournalism “renowned for its fusion of social conscience and artistic radicality" (The New York Times) In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans...
Isaac

Isaac's Storm July 11, 2000

September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found...