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Twelve Post-War Tales
by Graham Swift
A new collection of stories from the Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift about lives shaped and haunted by war.
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. From a disease specialist coming out of retirement to a woman reflecting on her childhood during World War II, these stories show history in the making, the reverberations across decades of each conflict. Rich with triumph and loss, grief and missed opportunities, moments of grace and contemplation, Twelve Post-War Tales is a collection of masterpieces in miniature.
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A Fate Forged in Fire (Bonded to Beasts #1)
by Hazel McBride
A Celtic-inspired romantasy about a gifted blacksmith who must use her wits and fire magic to overthrow the corrupt powers ruling her kingdom.
Once a territory built on matriarchal rule and values, Tìr Teine has since grown frail from a long line of fruitless kings. The kingdom has been most recently oppressed by True Religion, a group who has steadily poisoned the region with their anti-magic teachings. Born to rule and blessed by fire, Aemyra has begrudgingly lived in hiding, waiting in anticipation for the current king’s death so she can bond to his dragon, claim her throne, and protect her people. But when her ambitious plan is foiled, she is thrust into a game of vicious politics and plots.
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Battle of the Bookstores
by Ali Brady
Rivalry and romance spark between two bookstore managers who find themselves competing for the same promotion.
Despite managing bookstores on the same Boston street, Josie Klein and Ryan Lawson have never interacted much—Josie’s store focuses on serious literature, and Ryan’s sells romance only. But when the new owner of both stores decides to combine them, the two are thrust into direct competition. Only one manager will be left standing, decided by who turns the most profit over the summer. When the walls between their stores come tumbling down, Josie and Ryan realize not all’s fair in love and war. And maybe, if they’re lucky, happily-ever-after isn't just for the books.
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The Usual Desire to Kill
by Camilla Barnes
An often hilarious, surprisingly moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter.
Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Her mother likes to bring conversation back to the War, although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of each visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.” Wry and propulsive, The Usual Desire to Kill is the story of a singularly eccentric family and long-buried secrets that shape them.
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Behooved
by M. Stevenson
A cozy, slow-burn romantasy featuring a duty-bound noblewoman and a prince who would rather be in a library than on a throne.
Bianca knows her duty comes before her heart. So when the threat of war looms, she agrees to marry the neighboring kingdom’s heir. But Prince Aric, Bianca’s betrothed, is cold, aloof, and seems to hate her on sight. To make matters worse, on their wedding night, an assassination attempt goes awry―leaving Aric magically transformed into a horse. Sunset returns Aric to human form, but they soon discover the assassination attempt is part of a larger plot against the throne.
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These Days
by Lucy Caldwell
Two sisters, four nights, one city.
April, 1941. Belfast has escaped the worst of the war–so far. Over the next two months, it's going to be destroyed from above: many won't make it through, and no one who does will remain unchanged.
These Days follows the lives of two sisters, Emma and Audrey—one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman–as they try to survive the horrors of the Belfast Blitz. A heartbreaking and incredible story, These Days is about living under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay true to ourselves.
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The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation
by John Bicknell
A riveting look into the volatile relationship between President Abraham Lincoln and John C. Frémont, a daring explorer known as the Pathfinder.
In 1856 the fledgling Republican party nominated as its first candidate for president John C. Frémont, the dashing explorer of the American West known as the Pathfinder and a radical opponent of slavery. He lost, but when the Civil War broke out, Lincoln tapped him for high command, setting the two on a collision course over how to deal with slavery during the conflict. Despite Frémont’s tyrannical command, involvement with fraud, and losing every battle he fought, Lincoln still compared him to Moses and praised him as a pioneer--a pathfinder--for emancipation. Frémont's is an important--and never dull--story, and in telling it, readers gain a better understanding of not only Frémont, but also Lincoln, emancipation, and the Civil War.
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When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
by Jordan Thomas
A hotshot firefighter’s gripping firsthand account of a record-setting fire season.
Eighteen of California’s largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term “megafire” to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible just a generation ago: burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction. In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. A riveting narrative about a growing climate crisis, When It All Burns is a story of community in the most perilous of circumstances.
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The Raider: the Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II
by Stephen R. Platt
The extraordinary life of World War II hero Evans Carlson–commander of America’s first special forces–who dedicated his life to bridging the cultural divide between the United States and China.
Evans Carlson was a man of mythical status even before World War II, the war that would make him a military legend. By December of 1941, at the age of 45, Carlson had already faced off against Sandinistas in the jungles of Nicaragua and served multiple tours in China. While embedded with Mao’s communist forces during the Sino-Japanese War, he learned their guerrilla tactics and later formed the Marine Raiders: the progenitors of America’s special operations forces. The Raider provides the first authoritative account of Carlson’s larger-than-life exploits, including research based on newly discovered diaries and correspondence in English and Chinese.
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Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
by Alan Weisman
A long-awaited portrait of hope and resilience from award-winning environmental journalist Alan Weisman.
Bestselling author of The World Without Us returns ten years later with a book focusing on what it means to be a human on the front lines of our planet’s existential crisis. To write Hope Dies Last, Weisman traveled the globe, witnessing climate upheaval and other devastations, and meeting people striving to undo our past transgressions. From the flooding of the Marshall Islands to the revived wetlands in Iraq, from the Netherlands and Bangladesh to the Korean DMZ and to cities and coastlines in the U.S., he has encountered the best of humanity battling heat, hunger, rising tides, and imperiled nature. Having reached a point of no return in our climate confrontation, how do we move forward as we approach a future decidedly different from what we had expected?
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Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II
by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
A panoramic history of World War II that identifies the war’s origin not as a conflict between democracy and fascism, but as a colonial race that forged the Soviet and American empires.
This new international history of World War II will challenge conventional Western understandings of the conflict as an ideological crusade against fascism concentrated in Western Europe, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Instead, the book will argue that WWII was a massive colonial struggle waged by rival empires, focused along the periphery of Eurasia. Race and empire, rather than ideology, formed the touchstone of this global conflict that would force its key players into a perpetual war on a scale never before seen. The war marked the culmination of modern imperialism, ushered in a new age of atomic war, and set the stage for global imperial competitions in the postwar era.
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So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs--and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease
by Thomas Levenson
The centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.
As late as the Civil War in the 1860s, most soldiers who perished died not on the battlefield but of infected wounds, typhoid, and other diseases. Twenty years later, one of the most radical intellectual transformations in germ theory changed everything: the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind’s greatest killers. As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-spanning history, the delay in understanding microbes has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the West, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When nineteenth-century scientists finally made the connection, life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. Levenson traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored—and, as a result, how human minds often fail to ask the right questions.
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