Here is a poignant story of a soviet boy’s ascent into manhood, and his extraordinary affection for his mysterious grandmother, carefree, who captivates him with vivid stories of her childhood in France—a distant country far more elegant, and stimulating than Russia in the 1970s and ’80s. This epic tale is full of tenderness and passion, pain and heartbreak; mesmerizing, in every way.

A major novel. Victor brombert, the New York Times Book Review. Winner of the prix goncourt and prix médicis: “One of the great novels of this century” Donald Newlove, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Skillfully constructed and elegantly written . . . Hailed as extraordinary from coast to coast, this bestselling novel by National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Andreï Makine traces a sentimental journey that embraces many of the dramatic events in Russia during the twentieth century.

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Night Train to Lisbon

The bestselling novel of love and sacrifice under fascist rule, and “a treat for the mind. One of the best books I have read in a long time” Isabel Allende. Raimund gregorius, a professor of dead languages at a Swiss secondary school, lives a life governed by routine. A meditative, deliberate exploration of loneliness, language and the human condition” The San Diego Union-Tribune, Night Train to Lisbon “calls to mind the magical realism of Jorge Amado or Gabriel Garcia Marquez .

. . The closer raimund comes to the truth of prado’s life, and eventual fate, working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, an extraordinary tale takes shape amid the labyrinthine memories of Prado’s intimate circle of family and friends, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them. Night train to lisbon was adapted into bille august’s award-winning 2013 film starring Jeremy Irons, Lena Olin, Christopher Lee, and Charlotte Rampling.

Then, an enigmatic portuguese woman stirs his interest in an obscure, and mind-expanding book of philosophy that opens the possibility of changing Raimund’s existence. Raimund, now obsessed with unlocking the mystery behind the man, is determined to meet all those on whom Prado left an indelible mark.

Among them: his eighty-year-old sister, who maintains her brother’s house as if it were a museum; an elderly cleric and torture survivor confined to a nursing home; and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the Resistance. Allusive and thought-provoking, intellectually curious and yet heartbreakingly jaded, ” and inexorably propelled by the haunting mystery at its heart The Providence Journal.

That same night, he takes the train to lisbon to research the book’s phantom author, Amadeu de Prado, a renowned physician whose principles led him to confront Salazar’s dictatorship.

The Zone: A Prison Camp Guard's Story

Arguably dovlatov’s most significant work, The Zone illuminates the twisted absurdity of the life of a prison guard: “Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. As igor receives portions of the prison camp manuscript, so too does the reader. Written in sergei dovlatov’s unique voice and unmatched style, The Zone is a satirical novelization of Dovlatov’s time as a prison guard for the Soviet Army in the early 1960s.

Snapshots of the prison are juxtaposed with the narrator’s letters to Igor Markovich of Hermitage Press in which he urges Igor to publish the very book we’re reading. Almost any guard deserved a prison term. Full of dovlatov’s trademark dark humor and dry wit, events, and the book fittingly begins with the following disclaimer: “The names, The Zone’s narrator is an extension of his author, and dates given here are all real.

Therefore, any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious. From the exiled Russian author of The Suitcase. Reading dovlatov is a joyous, thrilling, usually hilarious experience” The New Yorker. And all fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental. What follows is a complex novel that captures two sides of Dovlatov: the writer and the man.

I invented only those details that were not essential.

Mrs. Miniver

An international sensation when it was first published, this novelized collection of those columns won America’s heart—and broad public support for entering WWII. . Miniver’s story was so essential to Allied morale that when William Wyler’s film adaption was made, President Roosevelt ordered it rushed to theaters.

Winston Churchill once remarked that Mrs. Miniver, the fictional british housewife featured in Jan Struther’s newspaper columns about quotidian English life, did more for the Allied cause than a flotilla of battleships. Miniver’s domestic concerns expanded from automobiles and Christmas shopping to include gas masks, keeping calm, and carrying on.

As tensions rose across Europe, Mrs. Mrs. The beloved classic novel of an english housewife bravely enduring WWII—the basis for the Academy Award–winning film starring Greer Garson.

The Keepers of the House

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Shirley Ann Grau, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection. Faced with such deep-seated racism, Abigail is pushed to defend her family at all costs. Her fortunes reverse when her family’s mixed-race heritage comes to light and her community—locked in the prejudices of the 1960s—turns its back on her.

Seven generations of the howland family have lived in the Alabama plantation home built by an ancestor who fought for Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812. A “beautifully written” pulitzer prize–winning novel about prejudice and a distinguished family’s secrets in the American South The Atlantic Monthly.

A “novel of real magnitude, tradition, ” the keepers of the House is an unforgettable story of family, and racial injustice set against the richly drawn backdrop of the American South Kirkus Reviews. . Over the course of a century, the howlands accumulated a fortune, fought for secession, and helped rebuild the South, establishing themselves as one of the most respected families in the state.

The inheritor of the howland manse, Abigail hides the long-buried secret of her grandfather’s thirty-year relationship with his African American mistress. But that history means little to Abigail Howland.

The Secret River

This man booker award finalist and commonwealth Prize-winner is an “unforgettable” tale of crime and survival in colonial Australia Chicago Tribune. In 1806 william thornhill, steals a load of wood and, sal, an illiterate English bargeman and a man of quick temper but deep compassion, is deported, along with his beloved wife, as a part of his lenient sentence, to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia.

The secret river is the tale of william and sal’s deep love for their small, exotic corner of the new world, and William’s gradual realization that if he wants to make a home for his family, he must forcibly take the land from the people who came before him. Acclaimed around the world, the secret river is a “magnificent” work of historical fiction that “pulls us ever deeper into a time when one community’s opportunity spelled another’s doom” The New Yorker.

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Count Belisarius

Eminent historical novelist and classicist Robert Graves presents a vivid account of a time in history both dissolute and violent, and demonstrates one again his mastery of this historical period. It presents a compelling portrait of a man bound by a strict code of honor and unrelenting loyalty to an emperor who is intelligent but flawed, and whose decisions bring him to a tragic end.

Loosely based on procopius’ history of the justinian Wars and Secret History, this novel tells the general’s story through the eyes of Eugenius, a eunuch and servant to the general’s wife. Threatened by invaders on all sides, the Roman Empire in the sixth century fought to maintain its borders. Leading its defense was the byzantine general Belisarius, a man who earned the grudging respect of his enemies, and who rose to become the Emperor Justinian’s greatest military leader.

A brilliant piece of scholarship. Kirkus reviews “the scope of the book is massive—encompassing religious controversy and cultural developments as well as military history—yet, throughout, Graves succeeds in blending historical details with the development of his main characters. Historical Novel Society.

A vigorous tale. . . A gripping and vivid historical fiction that captures the full sweep of history during the fall of the Roman Empire through the eyes of a servant.

Blue Thirst: Tales of Life Abroad

Though a diplomat of the modern world, he served under men whose experience stretched back to the days before the telephone, when solutions for crises had to be devised by the ambassador, and not phoned in from London. A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most mesmerizing speakersLawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu.

. Interwar greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero’s Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, poetry, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family, given during a 1970s visit to California, and the joy of the islands as no other writer can.

When war came to the mediterranean, Durrell was swept into diplomatic service, an adventure he recounts in his second lecture. These two lectures on long-vanished worlds are an elegant demonstration of the evocative power of Durrell’s unmatched storytelling.

Baltasar and Blimunda: A Novel Harvest Book

Weaving together multiple storylines to present both breathtaking fiction and incisive commentary, renowned Portuguese writer and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, religious criticism, José Saramago spins an epic and captivating yarn, equal parts historical fiction, political satire, and whimsical romance.

. A romance and an adventure, a rumination on royalty and religion in 18th-century Portugal and a bitterly ironic comment on the uses of power. The new york times Portugal, 1711. Hailed by usa today as “an unexpected gem, exquisite historical detail, ” Baltasar and Blimunda is a captivating literary tour de force, full of magic and adventure, and the power of both human folly and human will.

The portuguese king promises the greedy prelates of the Church an expansive new convent, should they intercede with God to give him an heir. A lonely priest works in maniacal solitude on his Passarola, a heretical flying machine he hopes will allow him to soar far from the madness surrounding him. A young couple, if tormented, brought together by chance, live out a sweet, romance.

Meanwhile, amid the fires and horrors of the inquisition, angry crowds and abused peasants rejoice in spectacles of cruelty, from bullfighting to auto-da-fe; disgraced priests openly flout God’s laws; and chaos reigns over a society on the brink of disaster.

A Walker in the City Harvest Book

With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, ” the mysterious, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to “the city, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned.

The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, familiar neighborhoods for something new.

Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer. A literary icon’s “singular and beautiful” memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn The New Yorker. Is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.

The new York Times.

To Dance with the White Dog

But, real or not, the creature soothes Sam’s grief and ultimately reconciles him with his own mortality. They talk about him as if he can’t hear them, questioning how he’ll run a farm, drive his truck, or live by himself. After fifty-seven years of marriage, they are unsure how their elderly father will survive on his own.

When sam tells his children about a white dog who visits him, yet seems invisible to everyone else, they are sure that grief and old age have taken a toll on their father. In this “hauntingly beautiful story about love, family, and relationships, ” a mysterious dog helps an elderly man in his final days Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

In this bittersweet story of love, and coming to terms with death, “master storyteller” Terry Kay takes readers on Sam’s journey with his white dog, grief, bringing solace and comfort to the inevitable transition that all must make The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After sam peek’s beloved wife Cora dies, his children are worried about him.

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