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  The Island

  Victoria Hislop

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  A number one bestseller in the UK, this captivating and epic tale of family ties, romance, war, disease, and history is set on the beautiful Greek Island of Crete.On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding plans a trip to her mother's childhood home in Plaka, Greece hoping to unravel Sofia's hidden past. Given a letter to take to Sofia's old friend, Fotini, Alexis is promised that through Fotini, she will learn more.Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga—Greece's former leper colony. Fotini at last reveals the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war, and passion. Alexis discovers how intimately her family is connected with the island, and how secrecy holds them all in its powerful grip.Atmospheric and captivating, The Island transports listeners and keeps them gripped to the very last word.

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  The Great Prince Died - A Novel...

  Bernard Wolfe

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  “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

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  Slaves to the Generals - Dien...

  Nathan Toulane

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  “Slaves to the Generals” is a captivating and poignant love story set against the backdrop of the tumultuous final years of French colonial rule in Vietnam. The novel follows the journey of a British Foreign Legionnaire named Brian Miller, who arrives in the colony full of ambition and ready to fight for the French Foreign Legion. 
  However, as Miller’s tour of duty progresses, he observes the reality of the conflict in a different light. He witnesses brutal atrocities committed by both sides and becomes increasingly disillusioned with the French government’s colonial policies. 
  Then Miller meets a beautiful Vietnamese girl named Dai Long, and falls deeply in love with her, despite the many challenges and obstacles that stand in their way. Therefore, Miller and Dai Long dream of a future together away from Vietnam. 
  As the novel reaches its climax, Miller must make a tough decision: continue to fight for a cause he no longer believes in, or betray his fellow legionnaires and follow his heart. The ending is gut-wrenching and bittersweet, as Miller’s and Dai Long’s fate is sealed amid the chaos of the 1954 battle at Dien Bien Phu. 
  Overall, “Slaves to the Generals” is a powerful and thought-provoking novel that explores the complexities of love, family and war, and the consequences of blind loyalty to a cause. It is a must-read for anyone interested in this period, and for fans of romance, military, and historical fiction.

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  The East Indiaman

  Ellis K. Meacham

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  The Naval Service of the Honorable East India Company, popularly known as the Bombay Marine, operated in romantic areas in perilous times. From the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, from Calcutta to Canton, the Company ships were famous for their speed and daring. The "Bombay Buccaneers" who sailed them were the stuff of legend.For Percival Merewether, 1806 would be a year to remember. For in January of that year he was promoted from First Lieutenant to become the junior Captain in the Company's Service and given the command of his first ship-the Rapid.Armed with ten 9-pounders, the Rapid was a match for any pirate ship that crossed its bows, and in it Captain Merewether was to spend as action-packed and eventful a first year as any ambitious young seafarer could have wished.Merewether had quick wits and daring to match his ambition. And with mutinies, diplomatic intrigues, and skirmishes with the French to occupy him, he soon found that he needed both qualities as never before . . .

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  The Blighted Road

  Anna McCormac

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  The Blighted Road is a 17th-century story of two women’s harrowing journeys through plague and a brutal witch-hunt. Orla, renowned healer and mid-wife in rural England, confronts stillbirths and a mysterious, deadly sickness afflicting her community. The local superstitious people suspect these sinister events are the actions of the Devil. Desperate for answers, Orla’s investigation into past plague outbreaks reveal a shocking correlation with the harvesting of blighted grain. Her revolutionary findings lead to accusations of witchcraft. Meanwhile, Abigail, a young Londoner faces the horror of life in the plague-ridden city. After losing her family to the Black Death, Abigail escapes the locked gates of London. She flees on the plague road to Salisbury, which is fraught with danger and despair. 
  The separate tales of these women weave in and out as they reach a time and place where they are united by grief, loss and an uncanny will to survive.

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  Barren Island

  Carol Zoref

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  How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York's Jamaica Bay, where the city's dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh. 
  The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World's Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars.

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