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  Terra Incognita - A Novel of the...

  Ruth Downie

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  It is spring in the year 118, and Hadrian has been emperor of Rome for less than a year. After his long and reluctant investigation of the murders of a handful of local prostitutes, Gaius Petreius Ruso needs to get out of town. With that in mind, he has volunteered for a posting with the army in the far reaches of Britannia-a calmer place for a tired man.But the edge of the Roman Empire is a volatile place; the independent tribes of the North dwell near its borders. These hinterlands are the homeland of Ruso's slave, Tilla, who has scores of her own to settle there: Her tribespeople, under the leadership of the mysterious Stag Man, are fomenting a rebellion against Roman control; and her former lover is implicated in the grisly murder of a soldier. Ruso, once again unwillingly pulled into the murder investigation, is appalled to find that Tilla is still spending time with the prime suspect. Worse, he is honor-bound to try to prove the man innocent--and the army wrong-by finding another culprit. Soon both Ruso's and Tilla's lives are in jeopardy, as is the future of their burgeoning romance.Terra Incognita shines light on a remote corner of the ancient world, where Ruso's luck is running short-again.

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  Red Plenty

  Francis Spufford

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  Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. 
  Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

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  Garden of Stones

  Sophie Littlefield

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  Lucy Takeda is just fourteen years old, living in Los Angeles, when the bombs rain down on Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, she and her mother, Miyako, are ripped from their home, rounded up-along with thousands of other innocent Japanese-Americans-and taken to the Manzanar prison camp.Buffeted by blistering heat and choking dust, Lucy and Miyako must endure the harsh living conditions of the camp. Corruption and abuse creep into every corner of Manzanar, eventually ensnaring beautiful, vulnerable Miyako. Ruined and unwilling to surrender her daughter to the same fate, Miyako soon breaks. Her final act of desperation will stay with Lucy forever . . . and spur her to sins of her own.

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  The Maid of Milan

  Beverley Eikli

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  How much would you pay for a clear conscience?   Adelaide Leeson wants to prove herself worthy of her husband, a man who married her when she was at her lowest. Lord Tristan Leeson is a model of diplomacy, curbing the fiery impulses of his youth to preserve his wife’s health. But as Tristan’s political career rises and Adelaide revels in society’s adulation, the secrets of the past are uncovered. And there’s a high price to pay for a life of deception.

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  The Last Supper - And Other Stories

  Howard Fast

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  Sixteen stories that depict America—and the world—emerging from the wreckage of World War IIFrom a glimpse of Coca-Cola’s first appearance in a remote part of the Arabian desert to the tale of a wealthy, paranoid man building a shelter after the first hydrogen bomb tests, the stories in The Last Supper depict a world coming to grips with the new post-war reality. As always, Howard Fast has an ear for the way history echoes through the generations, and his tales of American ascendency are complemented by crisp fictional portraits of the country’s earliest days, including three stories drawn from the life of colonial statesman Samuel Adams. Compelling and insightful, The Last Supper is an absorbing collection of mid-century Americana and a window into the mind of one of the country’s greatest modern writers. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author’s estate.

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  The Winthrop Covenant

  Louis Auchincloss

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  Spanning three centuries, these nine stories share the conflicts of a wealthy New England family while portraying the rise and fall of the Puritan ethic. 
   
  The Winthrop Heritage begins in the stern confines of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—Governor John Winthrop’s covenant with God versus Anne Hutchinson’s compulsion to martyrdom. The burden of conscience falls in varying ways to the Governor’s descendants. To his grandson, a judge in the Salem witch trials, it means dying in torment. To Rebecca Bayard, wife of a Hudson Valley patroon, it becomes an obsessive sense of duty leading to ironic consequences. It persuades an American diplomat, negotiating in Paris with the canny Talleyrand, to reject the easy gain of private power. 
   
  On the eve of the Civil War, Winthrop Ward, pillar of rectitude in New York society, finds himself playing God at the price of his own humanity. At the century’s turn, there is Adam Winthrop, wealthy clubman and cultural arbiter, and his protégée Ada Guest—the passionate bluestocking novelist who opts to escape his stifling patronage. In a New England boarding school in the 1920s, the headmaster’s bedeviled Winthrop soul becomes a strange challenge to the chaplain. On the current scene, young and fashionable Natica Seligmann yearns for salvation from an empty life. And finally, there is John Winthrop Gardiner, staunch State Department hawk, whose son is an Army deserter—and whose alcoholic ex-wife perceives only too clearly the latter-day perversions of the Puritan spirit. 
   
  A compassionate, searching, and wholly arresting view of a moral strain that, for better or worse, has marked our national character, The Winthrop Covenant is one of Louis Auchincloss’ highest fictional achievements.

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