A captivating novel of the tragedies of war, as lives cross, dreams are shattered, and futures altered as the hours pass during the first day of the Battle of the Somme.On July 1st, 1913, four very different men are leading four very different lives.Exactly three years later, it is just after seven in the morning, and there are a few seconds of peace as the guns on the Somme fall silent and larks soar across the battlefield, singing as they fly over the trenches. What follows is a day of catastrophe in which Allied casualties number almost one hundred thousand. A horror that would have been unimaginable in pre-war Europe and England becomes a day of reckoning, where their lives will change forever, for Frank, Benedict, Jean-Batiste, and Harry.Elizabeth Speller once again sublimely captures the dangerously romantic atmosphere of war-torn Europe in her latest novel that will leave critics and readers astounded.

Product Description: Winner of the South Carolina First Novel PrizeShortly before daybreak in War, West Virginia, a passing train derails and spills an avalanche of coal over 16-year-old Emma Palmisano's house, trapping her sleeping family inside. The year is 1924, and the remote mines of Appalachia have filled with families like Emma s poor immigrant laborers building new lives half a world away from the island of Sicily...read more

Product Description: The "Last Will and Testament of Jesus Christ": Forged or Found? November, A.D. 439, at Ravenna, Italy, capital of the Western Roman Empire. Surgeon Getorius Asterius and his wife Arcadia are called to examine the body of Behan, a monk seemingly drowned in a penitential rite gone awry...read more

Product Description: A California Book Award FinalistOne of Oprah's Book Club's Ten Fantastic Books for Fall 2010Historical Novel Review Editors' ChoiceExiled in Paris, the frail, elderly Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St...read more

Product Description: Three Top Writers Continue the Epic Fantasy Adventure Begun in the Best-Seller The Shadow of the Lion.Prince Manfred and his mentor and bodyguard, the deadly warrior Erik, survived dangers and enemies both  natural and supernmatural, and if they thought that their new mission was going to be anything but more of the same, they soon gave up on that hope...read more

Product Description: In 1617 Jamestown, Virginia, a daring deception leads to dangerous passion in this riveting blend of romance, intrigue and adventure. Desperate to find and wed her childhood sweetheart and to escape a marriage arranged by her London guardians, Catherine Parke secretly boards a ship bound for Jamestown...read more

Washington's demoralized army anticipates a grueling winter in 1777 with virtually no supplies before they are joined by German volunteer Baron von Steuben, who endeavors to reorganize the army as a professional fighting force.

Product Description: An iridescent jewel of a novel that proves love is the mother of invention In the early 1800s, a young Italian contessa, Carolina Fantoni, realizes she is going blind shortly before she marries the town's most sought-after bachelor...read more

Product Description: This was a time when Spain was revered, feared, and hated in the easterly seas; when the devil had no color, no name, and no flag; and when the only thing needed to summon hell on earth (or sea) was a Spaniard and his sword. Accompanied by his faithful foster son, Íñigo, Captain Alatriste accepts a job as a mercenary aboard a Spanish galleon...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: When Lorinda Jameson s bankrupt father commits suicide and the infamous Black Hand mafia is dispatched to collect his debts or her head the young orphan and Philadelphia debutante rechristens herself Etta Place and goes West. Etta initially earns her way as a Harvey Girl waitress in a remote Colorado railroad outpost, but fate and murder soon intervene and Etta joins forces with Butch Cassidy s notorious gang, The Wild Bunch...read more

Product Description: Born for Freedom is a story written from the viewpoint of Lucy, a six-year-old girl, who was born in Lithuania under the Soviet occupation. Through the heroine's eyes the reader comes to know her native village and what social-political changes took place in the country in the 1960's, the time when the terror-stricken nation tried to reconcile with its recent postwar past...read more

Product Description: This absurdist comedy is set in a fictional penal colony, Old & New Bridgeford, in early 19th-century Australia. The use of boisterous language and over-the-top characters present history through a wickedly satirical lens.