Interesting times

The first of a trilogy...At the time of greatest resentment and rebellion by the colonists against the British Government and displaying the prejeudice shown by people on both sides this novel centers around Makepeace Burke and her act of kindness by saving an English aristocrat from drowning.

"From the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, from Kwangtung, China to Wellington and Dunedin and the battlefields of the Western Front a story of two families. Yung faces a new land that does not welcome the Chinese. Alone, Katherine struggles to raise her children and find her place in the world. In a climate of hostility towards the foreign newcomers, Katherine and Yung embark on a poignant and far-reaching love affair. Back cover.

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders. August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost. In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history personal, political are…

Against the backdrop of Appalachia comes a multilayered post-Civil War saga of three generations of families - their dreams, their downfalls, and their faith. Nestled in the mountains of North Carolina sits Cataloochee. In a time when "where you was born was where God wanted you," the Wrights and the Carters, both farming families, travel to the valley to escape the rapid growth of neighboring towns and to have a few hundred acres all to themselves. But progress eventually winds its way to Cataloochee, too, and year after year the population swells as more people come to the valley to stake their fortune. never one to pass on an opportunity, Ezra Banks, an ambitious young man seeking some land to call his own, arrives in Cataloochee in the 1880s. His first order of business is to marry a Carter girl, Hannah, the daughter of the valley's largest landowner. From there Ezra's brood grows, as do those of the Carters and the Wrights. With hard work and determination, the burgeoning community transforms wilderness into home, to be passed on through generations. But the idyll is not to last, nor to be inherited: The government takes steps to relocate the valley's people to make room for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and tragedy will touch one of the clans in a single, unimaginable act.

The first of a trilogy ...A novel of Manhattan's first century follows two families- -one Dutch, the other British- -from the earliest days of the settlement to the Revolutionary War.

Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for James Fraser, a young soldier. This is the first of this captivating series.

"Yank is an ordinary enough teenager, except that he lives in a thermal wonderland frequented by tourists eager to view the geysers and boiling mud, and that one of those tourists (an American soldier visiting during the Second World War) was his father. The locals call the boy Yank, a nickname that makes him different and ensures his mother's husband will never accept him as his own. So who is Yank's real father? Yank has only his dreams to fill the void until the day a letter arrives. -book cover.

When silk merchant John Lambert marries off his two beautiful daughters, their fortunes are set to change forever. Elder daughter Jane starts a notorious liaison with Edward IV, while her sister, Isabel, as the new silkweaver to the court, becomes privy to its most intimate secrets. Could they hold the keys to power in this time of uncertainty?

One of the most powerful novels about the experience of war, first published in 1985 Captured by Hirohito's soldiers at the fall of Hong Kong and transferred to a Japanese slave camp outside Hiroshima, Captain Joe Sandingham was present when the bomb was dropped.

Weaving a vibrant tapestry of fact and fiction, Into the Wilderness sweeps us into another time and place. .and into the heart of a forbidden, incandescent affair between a spinster Englishwoman and an American frontiersman. Here is an epic of romance and history that will captivate readers from the very first page.

Moving between New York City and the New South of the early 1990s, with flashbacks to Mississippi's cataclysmic Freedom Summer of 1964, Magic Time tells the story of New York newspaper columnist Carter Ransom, a son of Mississippi, who had the great fortune and terrible luck of falling in love that summer with a New Yorkborn civil rights worker who wound up being killed alongside three coworkers. Carter's father, the local judge, presided over the first trial of the murders. But now there's evidence that the original trial was flawed, even fraudulent. And the question, among many others, is whether the good judge was knowingly involved in a cover-up.

The first in an excellent series...Dr. Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar of Salerno, a short and short-tempered medieval coroner, is hired in secret by King Henry II to find out who's behind the horrific murders of Christian children in Cambridge, England. Prominent local Jews stand accused; Henry wants them freed, mostly for the sake of their tax revenue. As Adelia examines the children's bodies and gets to know the people of Cambridge, she has no trouble assembling a long list of suspects, but she encounters considerable difficulty trying to narrow it down.

"In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm,a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not, charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and…

Revolves around two central characters: Lennie and George. Lennie is a man with the strength of two, but with the mind of a child, whose whole world centres around George, who steers him through life and protects him.

Moving from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London, the glittering courts of Louis XIV and all manner of places in between, this novel tells the stories of Daniel Waterhouse and Enoch Root. It concerns the men and women whose exploits defined the age of the High Baroque.

"Why would a runaway Virginia slave, having built a rewarding life in the East Indies as a silk merchant, risk everything by returning to America in 1840, eighteen years after taking her freedom? Anibaddh Lyngdoh claims that she intends to introduce a new kind of silk to the floundering American silk industry. But her true reason, as her old friend Grace MacDonald Pollocke discovers, is far more personal. Grace, now a Philadelphia portrait painter, undertakes a perilous investigation that leads to the discovery of old sins and crimes, and the commission of new ones. What laws may be broken, what sins and crimes committed,in the service of a higher justice? Deceit, forgery, fraud, perjury even murder? Publisher description.

Born near Rondout, New York, to a family steeped in wars both before and after independence, Will Harp returns home in 1864 for the first time in a decade, disconsolate over the campaigns being waged against Indians in the West even as the nation is busy tearing itself apart. His father is now buried in the Harp graveyard, surrounded by two preceding generations, and much else, too, has changed. For Mickey Blessing, though, these are heady times. Serving the darker needs of a prosperous businessman, Harry Grieves, he commands fear and respect as few Irish immigrants have managed to do in a society still hostile to their presence. The man he’d replaced had enlisted and is now missing in the horrors of Cold Harbor, leaving Mickey’s sister, Jane, fearing the worst about her fiancé’s survival. Coley Hinds, orphaned as a child, is fending for himself and fast growing savvy as the town around him bustles with trade and tragedy. In his stable-basement lodgings, he reads Western serials that he hopes will describe his future, but then falls under the sway of Mickey, who recognizes in him the powerless waif he once had been himself. All of these lives and more are intertwined when the bones of a mastodon surface on a neighboring farm that Will quickly purchases, pursuing a fervent boyhood interest. He finds an eager assistant in Coley, who suddenly needs refuge from budding criminality when Mickey suffers a hideous loss and develops an unhealthy obsession with a baby found on Jug Hill, where free black people have lived for generations. And before long, every fate is uncertain as calamity threatens to envelop them all

"In the late 1920s, Cataloochee, North Carolina, a settlement tucked deep in the Great Smoky Mountains, is home to nearly eleven hundred souls—many of them prosperous farmers whose ancestors broke the first furrows a century earlier. Now attorney Oliver Babcock, Jr., has been given the difficult task of presenting the locals with two options: sell their land to the federal government for the creation of a national park or remain behind at their own financial peril. While some of the area’s inhabitants seem ready to embrace a new and modern life, others, deeply embedded in their rural ways, are resistant. Silas Wright’s cantankerous unwillingness to sell or to follow the new rules leads to some knotty and often amusing predicaments. Jim Hawkins, hired by the Parks commission, has relocated his reluctant wife, Nell, and their children to Cataloochee, but Nell’s unhappiness forces Jim to make a dire choice between his roots and his family. And a sinister force is at work in the form of the deranged Willie McPeters, who threatens those who have decided to stay put."

Paris, July 1942: Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. But before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel'd'Hiv's sixtieth anniversary, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked by her Paris-based American magazine to write an article about this black day in France's past. Julia has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, married a Frenchman, and she is shocked both by her ignorance about the event and the silence that still surrounds it. In the course of her investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connects her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from the terrible days spent shut in at the Vel' d'Hiv' to the camps and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls, dressed in men's overalls, emerge from another freight car. Though they show no signs of abuse, fast as anyone can say Jim Crow, the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again. While the NAACP and the Communist Party vie to save the boys' lives and make political hay, and a wily criminal lawyer renowned for defending underworld characters battles age-old prejudices, a young journalist fights to rescue the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past.

As Hitler's Third Reich crumbles, an aristocratic Prussian woman and her child flee west away from the approaching Russian army. Eventually they form an unlikely alliance with a Jewish man escaping from the concentration camps.

Hal Treherne is a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other deep commitment is to Clara, his beautiful 'red, white and blue girl' who sustains him as he rises through the ranks. When Hal is transferred to the Mediterranean, Clara, now his wife, and their baby daughters join him. But Cyprus is no 'sunshine posting' and the island is in the heat of the Emergency: the British are defending the colony against Cypriots schoolboys and armed guerrillas alike battling for 'enosis' union with Greece. The skirmishes are far from glorious and operations often rough and bloody. Still, in serving his country and leading his men, Hal has a taste of triumph. Clara shares his sense of duty. She must settle down, make no fuss, smile. But action changes Hal, and Clara becomes fearful of the lethal tit-for-tat beyond the army base, and her increasingly distant husband. The atrocities Hal is drawn into take him further from Clara; a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come.

When Nat Swanson, a cowboy on the run, stumbles across the trapped survivors of an Indian Apache ambush, the last thing he imagines is that he will be trying to save the lives of three nuns and seven children. Sister St Agnes is convinced he has been sent by God.

By the early 1940s, when Ukrainian-born Irene Nemirovsky began working on what would become Suite Francaise the first two parts of a planned five-part novel she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic; her daughters took the manuscript with them into hiding. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Nemirovsky's literary masterpiece. The first part, "A Storm in June, opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion, during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. In the second part, "Dolce, we enter the increasingly complex life of a German…

The complex history of polygamy in the Mormon Church intertwines the story of Ann Eliza Young, the nineteenth and final wife of Brigham Young, who in 1875 leaves her husband and embarks on crusade to end polygamy, and a modern-day murder mystery in which a polygamous man has been found dead and one of his wives is accused of the crime.

In 1863, the War Between the States creeps toward its bloody conclusion. Searching for a life and future, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson is venturing west with his wife, Mary, and their three children. Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family's new start is shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away. Returning to face the unthinkable, his eldest son dead, his beloved Mary enslaved, and his remaining children absorbed into an alien society that will never relinquish its hold on them, the freedman vows not to rest until his family is whole again. Samuel Hammond follows a different road west. A Quaker whose fortune is destroyed by a capricious act, he has resigned himself to the role the Deity has chosen for him. As a new agent for the Office of Indian Affairs, it is Hammond's goal to ferret out corruption and win justice for the noble natives now in his charge. But the proud, stubborn people refuse to cease their raids, free their prisoners, and accept the farming implements and lifestyle the white man would foist upon them, adding fuel to smoldering tensions that…

Depicts the hardships and suffering endured by the Joads as they journey from Oklahoma to California during the Depression.

In her new novel The Lieutenant Kate Grenville once again visits the period of white Australian settlement to create her characters Daniel Rooke, a First Fleet soldier and astronomer, and Tagaran, a young Aboriginal girl he befriends. Daniel Rooke is taken up with his own interests, often going off to his makeshift observatory where he can be alone with his thoughts. His interest in languages takes over when he makes contact with Tagaran and between them they try to make sense of the place they find themselves in, between cultures.

"In 1868, on the barren shores of post-war Outer Banks North Carolina, the once wealthy Sinclair family moves for the summer to one of the first cottages on the ocean side of the resort village of Nags Head. Seventeen-year-old Abigail is beautiful, book-smart, but sheltered by her plantation life and hemmed-in by her emotionally distant family. To make good use of time, she is encouraged by her family to teach her father's fishing guide, the good-natured but penniless Benjamin Whimble, how to read and write. And in a twist of fate unforeseen by anyone around them, there on the porch of the cottage, the two come to love each other deeply, and to understand each other in a way that no one else does. But when, against everything he claims to represent, Ben becomes entangled in Abby's father's Ku Klux Klan work, the terrible tragedy and surprising revelations that one hot Outer Banks night brings forth threaten to tear them apart forever. -Publisher description.

"It is 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands, and summer has been hard. Fourteen years have passed since Rachel and Isaac DuPree left Chicago to stake a claim in this unforgiving land. Isaac, a former Buffalo Soldier, is fiercely proud: black families are rare in the West, and black ranchers even rarer. But it hasn't rained in months, the cattle bellow with thirst, and supplies are dwindling. Pregnant, and struggling to feed her family, Rachel is isolated by more than just geography. She is determined to give her surviving children the life they deserve, but she knows that her husband will never leave his ranch: land means a measure of equality with the white man, and Isaac DuPree is not about to give it up just because times are hard. Somehow Rachel must find the strength to do what is right for her children, for her husband, and for herself. Publisher description.

After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is sentenced in 1806 to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a death sentence. But among the convicts there is a whisper that freedom can be bought, an opportunity to start afresh. Away from the infant township of Sydney, up the Hawkesbury River, Thornhill encounters men who have tried to do just that. As Thornhill and his family stake their claim on a patch of ground by the river, the battle lines between old and new inhabitants are drawn.

A sequence of stories about the Vietnam War, this book also has the unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. It aims to summarize America's involvement in Vietnam, and her coming to terms with that experience in the years that followed.

It is 1895. Robert Wallis, would-be poet, bohemian and impoverished dandy, accepts a commission from coffee merchant Samuel Pinker to categorise the different tastes of coffee and encounters Pinker's free-thinking daughters. A romance blossoms with Emily, the youngest. Robert realises that the muse and marriage may be incompatible after all. Sent to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the coffee trade, he becomes obsessed with a slave girl, Fikre. He decides to use the money he has saved to buy her from her owner a decision that will change not only his own life, but also the lives of the three Pinker sisters

Twenty years after her early 1960s military father is forced to choose between loyalties in the wake of a local murder, Madeleine begins to understand the case's implication and launches a search for the killer.

In 1894 Carrie McGavock is an old woman who has only her former slave to keep her company and the almost 1,500 soldiers buried in her backyard. Years before, rather than let someone plow over the field where these young men had been buried, Carrie dug them up and reburied them in her own personal cemetery. Now, as she walks the rows of the dead, an old soldier appears. It is the man she met on the day of the battle that changed everything. The man who came to her house as a wounded soldier and left with her heart. He asks if the cemetery has room for one more. In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause. Known throughout the country as "the Widow of the South, Carrie McGavock gave her heart first to a stranger, then to a tract of hallowed ground-and became a symbol of a nation's soul. The novel flashes back thirty years to the afternoon of the Battle of Franklin, five of the bloodiest hours of the Civil War. There were 9,200 casualties that fateful day. Carrie's home the Carnton…

Sarah begins her diary in the summer of 1881, when her family sets out on the wagon trail from Arizona Territory to Texas. As they travel through a land of rattlesnakes and Indians, hastily dug graves and unbearable loneliness, Sarah turns out to be her family's greatest support.

Set in 1938 on the Canadian Prairies, Under This Unbroken Sky, tells the story of a farming family from the Ukraine who, having survived war and Stalin's labour camps, set out to make a living from an unrelenting land in a new country. The harsh vicissitudes of farming life and tensions within the family combine to generate a conflict that ends in tragedy. This is the harrowing and magnificent tale of an immigrant family whose desperate hands work the earth and preserve its gifts, while equally desperate minds plot much darker deeds. Nearly all is lost when a brother is pitted against a sister, a mother against her newborn, with dramatic and breath-taking consequences.

Set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, orphaned and adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her.

Their lives and dreams dramatically compromised by the Great Depression, three individuals journey to the vast construction site of the Hoover Dam in Nevada in the hopes of starting their lives over or exacting revenge.

This is the story of a young woman's struggle to save her family and her soul during the most extraordinary year of 1666, when plague suddenly visited a small Derbyshire village and the villagers, inspired by a charismatic preacher, elected to quarantine themselves to limit the contagion.