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  The Janissary Tree - A Novel

  Jason Goodwin

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  The Janissary Tree, the first book in a new series, is set in a most extraordinary world and features a most extraordinary sleuth.It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim Togalu, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world. You see, Yashim is a eunuch.He leads us into the palace's luxurious seraglios and Istanbul's teeming streets, and leans on the wisdom  of a dyspeptic Polish ambassador, a transsexual dancer, and a Creole-born queen mother. He finds sweet salvation in the arms of another man's wife (this is not your everyday eunuch). And he introduces us to the Janissaries. For 400 years earlier the sultan had them crushed. Are the Janissaries staging a brutal comeback?

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  Invasion - Thomas Kydd Book 10

  Julian Stockwin

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  Napoleon's forces are poised to invade Britain, and Commander Thomas Kydd's ship is at the forefront of the fleet. Then Kydd is abruptly withdrawn from the fleet and sent back to Dover on a secret mission to guard a mysterious American inventor. He is furious to find he will miss his opportunity to prove himself in battle. Yet Kydd's role in the approaching war may be the most crucial part he has ever played.A W. F. Howes audio production.

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  The Man in the Wooden Hat

  Jane Gardam

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  Second in the Old Filth trilogy. “An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful” (The Washington Post). 
   
  Acclaimed as Jane Gardam’s masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. 
   
  They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s. 
   
  As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the fifty-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and thoroughly satisfying. 
   
  “Funny and affecting . . . It’s remarkable.” —The New York Times Book Review 
   
  “The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam . . . [a] superb novel.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR 
   
  “Told with quintessentially British humor . . . Gardam’s prose is witty and precise.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) 
   
   
   
  “It’s magnificent. . . . Funny, intelligent and immensely moving.” —Kirkus Reviews

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  Bear's Loose Tooth

  Karma Wilson

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  Praised for their whimsical word play and gentle lessons, best-selling author Karma Wilson's Bear books never fail to delight young fans. In Bear's Loose Tooth, listeners are transported deep into the forest for a cozy story about Bear and his woodland friends. While munching on his lunch one day, Bear feels something wobbly in his mouth. Bear has a loose tooth, and it isn't long before his friends hop, crawl, and fly to his aid.

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  Second Front - The Allied...

  Alexander M. Grace

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  What would have happened if Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy was overruled? This novel of an alternate D-Day explores this fascinating scenario. One of the great arguments of World War II took place among Allied military leaders over when and where to launch a second front against Germany in Europe. Stalin, holding on by his teeth in Russia, urged a major invasion from the west as soon as possible. The Americans, led by Marshall and Wedemeyer, argued likewise. It was Churchill who got his way, however, with his Mediterranean strategy, including a campaign on the Italian peninsula, which he mistakenly called the “soft underbelly of Europe.” This realistic, fact-based work posits what would have happened had Churchill been overruled, and that rather than invading North Africa in the fall of 1942, then Sicily and Italy, the Allies had hit the coast of southern France instead. The key element that enables the alternative scenario is the cooperation of Vichy, which was negotiated at the time but refused. If the Allies had promised sufficient force to support the French, however, the entire southern coastline of France would have been undefended against a surprise invasion. In this book, once the Allied armies are ashore, Germans stream toward the front, albeit through a gauntlet of Maquis, Allied paratroopers, and airpower. Meantime the Allied forces push up the Rhône Valley and titanic armored clashes take place near Lyons. Already in desperate straits at Stalingrad, where they had committed their air and armored reserves, the Germans had also yet to switch to a full total-war economy, with tanks like the Panther and Tiger not yet deployed. This fascinating alternative history comes close to informing us exactly what might have happened had D-Day in Europe come as early as some had wished.

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  The Prussian Captain

  Ann Brough

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  1898 . . . Edward turned twenty nine-years-old on the ship. Looking out over the gray water back towards America, his heart ached for both the country he had adopted and loved, and for the woman he had lost there. He was returning to England without having "made good". Without any fortune.When Edward meets Gertrude and is captivated by her youth and beauty, his hope for the future is transformed. But this is an era when the rich and poor of England each have their own firmly defined limits. More than any social boundary is a far greater problem—he's already married.Giving a glimpse into the realities of the very wealthy and the desperately impoverished of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, The Prussian Captain is the story of two opposite lives colliding. One is marked by finery, decorum, servants, and first-class adventures crisscrossing the Atlantic. The other is stuck in a life of abuse, alcoholism, and the depressed state of the working poor of industrialized England.

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