Other books that might interest you

• 

  Land of Dreams - A Novel

  Kate Kerrigan

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Set in 1940s Los Angeles, the compelling final installment in New York Times bestselling author Kate Kerrigan’s sweeping immigrant trilogy begun in Ellis Island and City of Hope—a story of family, love, danger, and ambition in Hollywood during World War II.Irish immigrant Ellie Hogan has finally achieved the American Dream. But her comfortable bohemian life on Fire Island, New York, is shattered when her eldest adopted son, Leo, runs away, lured by the promise of fortune and fame in Hollywood. Determined to keep her family intact, Ellie follows him west, uprooting her youngest son and long-time friend Bridie.In Los Angeles, Ellie creates a fashionable new home among the city’s celebrities, artists, and movie moguls. She is also drawn into intense new friendships, including talented film composer Stan, a man far different from any she has ever met, and Suri, a beautiful Japanese woman and kindred spirit, who opens Ellie’s eyes to the injustices of her country.While Leo is dazzled by Hollywood’s glitz, Ellie quickly sees that the golden glamour masks a world of vanity and greed. Though she tries to navigate them around the dangers of their new home, she will not be able protect them from an even more terrifying threat: war.

  Show book

• 

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

  • 0
  • 1
  • 0

  The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Vicente Blasco Ibañez and translated into English by Charlotte Brewster Jordan, depicts two branches of a family with its roots in the pampas of Argentina. The wealthy Argentinian, Julio Madariaga, comes from Spain and raises himself from poverty, becoming a self-made, wealthy cattleman. He is a man of extremes; an honest man with a rascally knack for taking advantage of others; a self-made man with overweening pride, prejudices, and a sharp, flinty temper that can spark into violence, he is at the same time given to great generosity toward those who are under him. This almost feudal lord has two daughters who marry expatriates, a Frenchman and a German. 
  Julio Madariaga leaves his stamp on these two families who, after his death, return to the native countries of his two sons in law. At that time, the mood of Europe is in many ways similar to that of the old gaucho, a mixture of generosity, explosive anger, romanticism, strong prejudices, and wounded pride, a mood composed of extremes painted on an oversized canvas. World War I is waiting in the wings and will leave its own stamp on the old gaucho's lineage, pitting them against each other on opposite sides in the violent first year that many think will last only a few months but will, in fact, result in improbable destruction and loss of lives. An old Russian visionary given to drink, looks out on red skies one day and experiences its coming in a vision: hoofbeats; and riders. --Summary by Tony Oliva and released to public domain.

  Show book

• 

  Evermore - A Saga of Slavery and...

  Gretchen Craig

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Nicolette Chamard, a woman of color in the most color-conscious city in the world, rejoices when the Union Army marches into New Orleans. At last her people will be free, and even knowing her collaboration with the Union will put her in danger, she means to help make it happen. Marcel Chamard, Nicolette's privileged white half-brother, surveys the same parade and sees conquerors, not liberators. If the Union wins the war, it will mean the end of the slave-holding culture, the end of wealth and ease. Marcel wants nothing to change, not the family's rich cane plantation, not the life he plans with his lovely white bride, and not the life he lives with his beloved colored mistress and their two sons. Finnian McKee, a Union Army officer, comes from a family of abolitionists. He is determined to do his small part to make the ideal of freedom a reality for all. When he meets the fascinating Nicolette Chamard, he is too new to New Orleans to recognize that though she is light-skinned, she is by Louisiana standards a Negress. Torn apart by the war and by a culture that forbids their union, his heart's desire is to find love with this woman that will transcend the bonds of race.

  Show book

• 

  A Quilt for Christmas

  Sandra Dallas

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  It is 1864 and Eliza Spooner's husband Will has joined the Kansas volunteers to fight the Conferedates, leaving her with their two children and in charge of their home and land.  Eliza is confident that he will return home, and she helps pass the months making a special quilt to keep Will warm during his winter months in the army.  When the unthinkable happens, she takes in a a woman and child who have been left alone and made vulnerable by the war, and she finds solace and camaraderie amongst the women of her quilting group.  And when she is asked to help hide an escaped slave, she must decide for herself what is right, and who can she can count on to help her.

  Show book

• 

  The Great Prince Died - A Novel...

  Bernard Wolfe

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “Illuminating. . . . No one who reads [this novel] . . . can fail to be gripped by a tale well told. Its message is one the free world will ignore at its peril.” —Selden Rodman, New York Times 
   
  On August 20, 1940, Marxist philosopher, politician, and revolutionary Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice axe in his home in Coyoacán, Mexico. He died the next day. 
   
  In The Great Prince Died, Bernard Wolfe offers his lyrical, fictionalized account of Trotsky’s assassination as witnessed through the eyes of an array of characters: the young American student helping to translate the exiled Trotsky’s work (and to guard him), the Mexican police chief, a Rumanian revolutionary, the assassin and his handlers, a poor Mexican “peón,” and Trotsky himself. Drawing on his own experiences working as the exiled Trotsky’s secretary and bodyguard and mixing in digressions on Mexican culture, Stalinist tactics, and Bolshevik history, Wolfe interweaves fantasy and fact, delusion and journalistic reporting to create one of the great political novels of the past century. 
   
  “Wolfe is a remarkable and essential lost American voice, and Great Prince is one of his finest books.” —Jonathan Lethem, national bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude 
   
  “A novel which burns its way into your mind and your memory. If you read it, you will not forget it.” —Newsday 
   
  “A hell of a read.” —Larry Grobel, Los Angeles Free Press 
   
  “Wolfe has written such convincing fiction that it may be difficult to remember that history may have happened in some other way.” —Maurice Dolbier, New York Herald Tribune 
   
  “Powerfully told.” —Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times, The Book Report

  Show book

• 

  The Diplomat's Daughter - A Novel

  Karin Tanabe

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  For fans of All the Light We Cannot See and Orphan Train, the author of the “thought-provoking” (Library Journal, starred review) and “must-read” (PopSugar) novel The Gilded Years crafts a captivating tale of three young people divided by the horrors of World War II and their journey back to one another.During the turbulent months following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, twenty-one-year-old Emi Kato, the daughter of a Japanese diplomat, is locked behind barbed wire in a Texas internment camp. She feels hopeless until she meets handsome young Christian Lange, whose German-born parents were wrongfully arrested for un-American activities. Together, they live as prisoners with thousands of other German and Japanese families, but discover that love can bloom in even the bleakest circumstances.When Emi and her mother are abruptly sent back to Japan, Christian enlists in the United States Army, with his sights set on the Pacific front—and, he hopes, a reunion with Emi—unaware that her first love, Leo Hartmann, the son of wealthy of Austrian parents and now a Jewish refugee in Shanghai, may still have her heart.Fearful of bombings in Tokyo, Emi’s parents send her to a remote resort town in the mountains, where many in the foreign community have fled. Cut off from her family, struggling with growing depression and hunger, Emi repeatedly risks her life to help keep her community safe—all while wondering if the two men she loves are still alive.As Christian Lange struggles to adapt to life as a soldier, his unit pushes its way from the South Pacific to Okinawa, where one of the bloodiest battles of World War II awaits them. Meanwhile, in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, as Leo fights to survive the squalor of the Jewish ghetto, a surprise confrontation with a Nazi officer threatens his life. For each man, Emi Kato is never far from their minds.Flung together by war, passion, and extraordinary acts of selflessness, the paths of these three remarkable young people will collide as the fighting on the Pacific front crescendos. With her “elegant and extremely gratifying” (USA TODAY) storytelling, Karin Tanabe paints a stunning portrait of a turning point in history.

  Show book