New Releases - Historical Fiction

"Gripping and authentic...Kanon's imagination flourishes [and] the narrative propulsion is clear. A thoroughly satisfying piece of entertainment that extends a tentacle into some serious moral reflection." -- The New York Times Book Review

The "master of the genre" ( The Washington Post ) Joseph Kanon returns with a heart-pounding and intelligent espionage novel about a Nazi war criminal who was supposed to be dead, the rogue CIA agent on his trail, and the beautiful woman connected to them both.

Seventeen years after the fall of the Third Reich, Max Weill has never forgotten the atrocities he saw as a prisoner at Auschwitz--nor the face of Dr. Otto Schramm, a camp doctor who worked with Mengele on appalling experiments and who sent Max's family to the gas chambers. As the war came to a close, Schramm was one of the many high-ranking former-Nazi officers who managed to escape Germany for new lives in South America, where leaders like Argentina's Juan Perón gave them safe harbor and new identities. With his life nearing its end, Max asks his nephew Aaron Wiley--an American CIA desk analyst--to complete the task Max never could: to track down Otto in Argentina, capture him, and bring him back to Germany to stand trial.

Unable to deny Max, Aaron travels to Buenos Aires and discovers a city where Nazis thrive in plain sight, mingling with Argentine high society. He ingratiates himself with Otto's alluring but wounded daughter, whom he's convinced is hiding her father. Enlisting the help of a German newspaper reporter, an Israeli agent, and the obliging CIA station chief in Buenos Aires, he hunts for Otto--a complicated monster, unexpectedly human but still capable of murder if cornered. Unable to distinguish allies from enemies, Aaron will ultimately have to discover not only Otto, but the boundaries of his own personal morality, how far he is prepared to go to render justice.

"With his remarkable emotional precision and mastery of tone" ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review), Joseph Kanon crafts another compelling and unputdownable thriller that will keep you breathlessly turning the pages.

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The last thing eighteen-year-old Wilhelmina "Willa" MacCarthy wants is to be a nun. It's 1936, and as the only daughter amongst four sons, her Irish-Catholic family is counting on her to take her vows - but Willa's found another calling. Each day she sneaks away to help Doctor Katherine Winston in her medical clinic in San Francisco's Richmond District.

Keeping secrets from her family only becomes more complicated when Willa agrees to help the doctor at a field hospital near the new bridge being built over the Golden Gate. Willa thinks she can handle her new chaotic life, but as she draws closer to a dashing young ironworker and risks grow at the bridge, she discovers that hiding from what she truly wants may be her biggest lie of all.

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A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK

"I've been a huge Jojo Moyes fan. Her characters are so compelling. . . It's such a great narrative about personal strength and really captures how books bring communities together." -Reese Witherspoon

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!

From the author of Me Before You, t he perfect holiday gift for booklovers, set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.

Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt's new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky.

What happens to them--and to the men they love--becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity and passion. These heroic women refuse to be cowed by men or by convention. And though they face all kinds of dangers in a landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful, at others brutal, they're committed to their job: bringing books to people who have never had any, arming them with facts that will change their lives.

Based on a true story rooted in America's past, The Giver of Stars is unparalleled in its scope and epic in its storytelling. Funny, heartbreaking, enthralling, it is destined to become a modern classic--a richly rewarding novel of women's friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond our grasp for the great beyond.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!

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"Cinematic . . . The spaces she creates for her characters . . . have the aura of realms." -- The New York Times Book Review

Named a Most Anticipated Book of Fall by The New York Times, Real Simple, Electric Literature, and more.

A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West.

Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel's nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with Henry, a young card cheat. When Henry is eventually discovered and run out of town, Julius takes off to search for him in the plazas and dives of Tijuana, trading one city of dangerous illusions and indiscretions for another.

On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promises them everything.

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A young woman is caught up in a dangerous double life on behalf of her country during World War II in Danielle Steel's thrilling new novel.

At eighteen, Alexandra Wickham is presented to King George V and Queen Mary in an exquisite white lace and satin dress her mother has ordered from Paris. With her delicate blond looks, she is a stunning beauty who seems destined for a privileged life. But fate, a world war, and her own quietly rebellious personality lead her down a different path.

By 1939, Europe is on fire and England is at war. From her home in idyllic Hampshire, Alex makes her way to London as a volunteer in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. But she has skills that draw the attention of another branch of the service. Fluent in French and German, she would make the perfect secret agent.

Within a year, Alex is shocking her family in trousers and bright red lipstick. They must never know about the work she does--no one can know, not even the pilot she falls in love with. While her country and those dearest to her pay the terrible price of war, Alex learns the art of espionage, leading to life-and-death missions behind enemy lines and a long career as a spy in exotic places and historic times.

Spy follows Alex's extraordinary adventures in World War II and afterward in India, Pakistan, Morocco, Hong Kong, Moscow, and Washington, D.C., when her husband, Richard, enters the foreign service and both become witnesses to a rapidly changing world from post-war to Cold War. She lives life on the edge, with a secret she must always keep hidden.

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