A sweeping, gorgeously written debut novel of duty to family and country, passion, and blood ties unraveling in the charged political climate of Berlin between the wars.“Empire of the Senses is lush, smart, sexy, affecting, interesting, beautifully researched and well made. Spending time in the world of this novel is an absolute pleasure.” —Aimee BenderLev Perlmutter, an assimilated, cultured German Jew, enlists to fight in World War I, leaving behind his gentile wife Josephine and their children, Franz and Vicki. Moving between Lev's and Josephine's viewpoints, Part I of the novel focuses on Lev's experiences on the Eastern Front—both in war and in love—which render his life at home a pale aftermath by comparison. Part II picks up in Berlin in 1927-1928: the Perlmutter children, now young adults, grapple with their own questions—Franz, drawn into the brown shirt movement, struggling with his unexpressed homosexuality; Vicki, seduced by jazz, bobbed hair, and falling in love with a young man who wants to take her to Palestine.Unlike most historical novels of this kind, The Empire of the Senses is not about the Holocaust but rather about the brew that led to it, and about why it was unimaginable to ordinary people like Lev and his wife. Plotted with meticulous precision and populated by characters who feel and dream to the fullest, it holds us rapt as the tides of cultural loss and ethnic hatred come to coexist with those of love, passion, and the power of the human spirit.

Product Description: A sweeping, gorgeously written debut novel of duty to family and country, passion, and blood ties unraveling in the charged political climate of Berlin between the wars.“Empire of the Senses is lush, smart, sexy, affecting, interesting, beautifully researched and well made...read more

Excerpt: ...together, and sat together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together-true Rauenthal. His robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful heavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream of the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position of interpreter of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindled to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was not devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her father's board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to be enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from much talking and excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaring the wine princely. Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not for the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?' 'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!' 'Glorious!' He toasted the grape. 'Wine of the grape is the young bride-the young sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten of gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stem clusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her heaven- kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the Rhine. We-will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come? we two!' The picture of...

Product Description: Blank 100 page lined journal for your thoughts, ideas, and inspiration

Product Description: A gripping historical thriller set in 1930s Munich, "Prisoner of Night and Fog" is the evocative story of an ordinary girl faced with an extraordinary choice in Hitler s Germany. Fans of "Code Name Verity" will love this novel full of romance, danger, and intrigue...read more

Product Description: [ Young Adult Fiction (Ages 12-17) ][Read by Heather Wilds]A gripping historical thriller set in 1930s Munich, Prisoner of Night and Fog is the evocative story of an ordinary girl faced with an extraordinary choice in Hitler's Germany...read more

It's 1938, and twelve-year-old Edith is about to move from the tiny German village she's lived in all her life to a place that seems as foreign as the moon: Chicago, Illinois. And she will be doing it alone. This dramatic and chilling novel about one girl's escape from Hitler's Germany was inspired by the experiences of the author's mother, one of twelve hundred children rescued by Americans as part of the One Thousand Children project.This title has Common Core connections.Is It Night or Day? is a 2011 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Product Description: Award-winning author Anna Funder delivers an affecting and beautifully evocative debut novel about a group of young German exiles who risk their lives to awaken the world to the terrifying threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Based on real-life events and people, All That I Am brings to light the heroic, tragic, and true story of a small group of left-wing German social activists who mounted a fierce and cunning resistance from their perilous London exile, in a novel that fans of Suite Francaise, The Piano Teacher, and Atonement will find irresistible and unforgettable...read more

Product Description: What really happened that afternoon in November 1938, when a young Polish Jew walked into the German embassy in Paris and shots rang out? The immediate consequence was concrete: Nazis retaliated with Kristallnacht—“Night of Broken Glass”—the beginning of the Holocaust...read more

Product Description: In their youth, Manni and Franzi, together with their brothers, Ziggy and Sebastian, captured Germany's collective imagination as the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers - one of the most popular vaudeville acts of the old Weimar days...read more

A neighborhood cat observes the changes in German and Jewish families in its town during the period leading up to Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass that becomes the true beginning of the Holocaust. This cats-eye view introduces the Holocaust to children in a gentle way that can open discussion of this period.

In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labor. And there is a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, who the pair know as Manfred–who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred–assuming any of them even survive. Perhaps not since The English Patient has a novel so deftly captured both the power and poignancy of romance and the terror and tragedy of war. Skillfully portraying the flesh and blood of history, Chris Bohjalian has crafted a rich tapestry that puts a face on one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies–while creating, perhaps, a masterpiece that will haunt readers for generations.From the Hardcover edition.

In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labor. And there is a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, who the pair know as Manfred–who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred–assuming any of them even survive. Perhaps not since The English Patient has a novel so deftly captured both the power and poignancy of romance and the terror and tragedy of war. Skillfully portraying the flesh and blood of history, Chris Bohjalian has crafted a rich tapestry that puts a face on one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies–while creating, perhaps, a masterpiece that will haunt readers for generations.From the Hardcover edition.

Tells the story of Marianne Kohn, an eleven-year-old Jewish girl in Berlin in 1938 who experiences the division in her homeland due to the Nazi regime, and who eventually boards a boat to take her to safety in London