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  Maybe Esther - A Family Story

  Katja Petrowskaja

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  An inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving literary debut that pieces together the fascinating story of one woman’s family across twentieth-century Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. 
  Katja Petrowskaja wanted to create a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents. Her idea blossomed into this striking and highly original work of narrative nonfiction, an account of her search for meaning within the stories of her ancestors. 
  In a series of short meditations, Petrowskaja delves into family legends, introducing a remarkable cast of characters: Judas Stern, her great-uncle, who shot a German diplomatic attaché in 1932 and was sentenced to death; her grandfather Semyon, who went underground with a new name during the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, forever splitting their branch of the family from the rest; her grandmother Rosa, who ran an orphanage in the Urals for deaf-mute Jewish children; her Ukrainian grandfather Vasily, who disappeared during World War II and reappeared without explanation forty-one years later—and settled back into the family as if he’d never been gone; and her great-grandmother, whose name may have been Esther, who alone remained in Kiev and was killed by the Nazis. 
  How do you talk about what you can’t know, how do you bring the past to life? To answer this complex question, Petrowskaja visits the scenes of these events, reflecting on a fragmented and traumatized century and bringing to light family figures who threaten to drift into obscurity. A true search for the past reminiscent of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, and Michael Chabon’s Moonglow, Maybe Esther is a poignant, haunting investigation of the effects of history on one family.

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  The Trapper's Last Shot - A Novel

  John Yount

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  A powerhouse novel about an idealistic young man’s return to a rural Southern town simmering with prejudice and anger Separation papers in hand, Beau Jim Early sets out one hot, dry August morning in 1960 from Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for his brother’s farm in Cocke County, Georgia. After six years in the army, civilian life is not as easy as it looks. In short order, Beau Jim gets conned by a shoe-shine boy, buys a Studebaker with bad brakes, and spends nearly every cent of the $400 he won in a crap game the night before. But Beau Jim is a man who can roll with the punches, and the drive into his hometown is as exhilarating as he thought it would be. His brother’s farm, however, is a different story. Older by fifteen years, Dan Early has given up his apartment and gone into debt to buy a barren piece of land that his wife, Charlene, calls a “wore out patch of misery.” Sheila, their seven-year-old daughter, is unnaturally slow and shy and has been held back in school—a source of great shame. As Beau Jim hustles pool with Claire, a former high school classmate whose secret life is not as safe as he believes it to be, and makes time with Yancey, a voluptuous redhead finally looking to settle down, Dan’s frustration and pity for himself mount. When Charlene sparks his rage, he commits an act so shocking and horrific it brings the whole county to its knees. A spellbinding tale of decent people fighting for their lives in a world overrun with poverty and ignorance, The Trapper’s Last Shot is vintage John Yount—forceful, finely crafted, and absolutely unforgettable.

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  The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows...

  Sandra Gulland

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  Passion intertwines with fate in this riveting and historically rich novel about the journey of a woman from poverty to ultimate power in Revolution-era France. In this first of three books inspired by the life of Josephine Bonaparte, Sandra Gulland has created a novel of immense and magical proportions. We meet Josephine in the exotic and lush Martinico, where an old island woman predicts that one day she will be queen. The journey from the remote village of her birth to the height of European elegance is long, but Josephine's fortune proves to be true. By way of fictionalized diary entries, we traverse her early years as she marries her one true love, bears his children, and is left betrayed, widowed, and penniless. It is Josephine's extraordinary charm, cunning, and will to survive that catapults her to the heart of society, where she meets Napoleon, whose destiny will prove to be irrevocably intertwined with hers.

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  Florida Straits - Key West Book 1

  Laurence Shames

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  Top-notch suspense and "killer" comedy merge in this rollicking national best-seller filled with funky characters, resounding dialogue and inappropriately named "wise" guys. In the grand tradition of Elmore Leonard, Laurence Shames creates an outrageous heavyweight thriller that's heavy on atmosphere and action. Joey Goldman is a low level New York hustler. He's taking a working vacation in South Florida, and looking to score big with a time-share scam. His half brother Gino Delgatto is a man in need of a fall guy. When they meet in Key West, the term "dysfunctional family" takes on a new meaning. Will one of them succeed, or will the Miami mob find an eye-popping way to dispose of them both? Critically-acclaimed narrator Richard Ferrone brings every character to life-from bad guys in shiny blue suits to Steve the naked landlord-with a crackling intensity you will love.

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  Night in Shanghai

  Nicole Mones

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  In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats. From being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, he becomes the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure, and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war. 
  Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and has been bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party. 
  Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation to Night in Shanghai's final, impossible choice. 
  In this stunningly researched novel, Nicole Mones not only tells the forgotten story of black musicians in the Chinese jazz age, but also weaves in a startling true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in the West.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Rudyard Kipling, D H Lawrence,...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  The zenith of Empire is bookended by two catastrophic wars that slaughter vast swathes of humanity.  And yet authors manage to record and create fragile libraries of humanity, its talents, its dreams and increasingly its nightmares. 
   
  01 - The 20th Century - The English Men - An Introduction 
  02 - They by Rudyard Kipling 
  03 - The Rocking Horse Winner by D H Lawrence 
  04 - The Interlopers by Saki the pseudonym for H H Munro 
  05 - The Diary of a God by Barry Pain 
  06 - The Juryman by John Galsworthy 
  07 - The Kit Bag by Algernon Blackwood 
  08 - The Haunted Orchard by Richard Le Gallienne 
  09 - Carnacki, The Ghost Finder - No 1 - The Gateway of the Monster by William Hope Hodgson 
  10 - Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad by M R James 
  11 - August Heat by W F Harvey 
  12 - The Matador of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett

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