The Good Sister


Maggie Christensen - 2017
    A lifetime of regret. A love that spans the yearsIn 1938, as the world hurtled towards war, twenty-year-old Isobel MacDonald fell madly in love. But fate and her own actions conspired to deny her the happiness she yearned for. Many years later, plagued with regrets and with a shrill voice from the past ringing in her ears, she documents the events that shaped her life.In 2015, sixty-five-year-old Bel Davison returns from Australia to her native Scotland to visit her terminally ill aunt. Reading Isobel’s memoir, she is beset with memories of her own childhood and overcome with guilt. When she meets her aunt’s solicitor, events seem to spiral out of control and, almost against her will, she finds herself drawn to this enigmatic Scotsman.What is it that links these two women across the generations? Can the past influence the future?

The Last Laugh of Edouard Bresson


Amélie Antoine - 2017
    It’s a treasure hunt.To his fans, Édouard Bresson is the greatest comic standing—charismatic, adored, unmatched, and aiming ever higher for the unpredictable. To his ex-wife, he fulfilled all expectations, except as a husband and a lover. To his brother, he’s a hero. And to his estranged son, Arthur, he’s always been a mystery. Never more so than now…After the performance of a lifetime at the sold-out Stade de France, Édouard decides to vanish. Très drôle.Arthur isn’t laughing. Édouard has sent him a letter and instructions to a puzzle—a treasure hunt for the son he ignored and misses and loves. If Arthur is willing to find out everything there is to know about his father and to understand the choices he made, all he has to do is put the pieces together.As the trail of clues winds its way through the past—reflected in the memories of both father and son—what unfolds is a surprising journey of forgiveness, family, and self-discovery.

The Bourne Identity


Robert Ludlum - 1980
    Suffering from amnesia, he does not even know that he is Jason Bourne. What manner of man is he? What are his secrets? Who has he killed?

Jack 1939


Francine Mathews - 2012
    Reckless. Brilliant. Deadly. A young Jack Kennedy travels to Europe on a secret mission for Franklin Roosevelt as the world braces for war.It’s the spring of 1939, and the prospect of war in Europe looms large. The United States has no intelligence service. In Washington, D.C., President Franklin Roosevelt may run for an unprecedented third term and needs someone he can trust to find out what the Nazis are up to. His choice: John F. Kennedy.It’s a surprising selection. At twenty-two, Jack Kennedy is the attractive but unpromising second son of Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain (and occasional political adversary). But when Jack decides to travel through Europe to gather research for his Harvard senior thesis, Roosevelt takes the opportunity to use him as his personal spy. The president’s goal: to stop the flow of German money that has been flooding the United States to buy the 1940 election—an election that Adolf Hitler intends Roosevelt lose.In a deft mosaic of fact and fiction, Francine Mathews has written a gripping espionage tale that explores what might have happened when a young Jack Kennedy is let loose in Europe as the world careens toward war. A potent combination of history and storytelling, Jack 1939 is a sexy, entertaining read.

Rogue Male


Geoffrey Household - 1939
    An Englishman plans to assassinate the dictator of a European country. But he is foiled at the last moment and falls into the hands of ruthless and inventive torturers. They devise for him an ingenious and diplomatic death but, for once, they bungle the job and he escapes. But England provides no safety from his pursuers - and the Rogue Male must strip away all the trappings of status and civilization as the hunter becomes a hunted animal.

Night Over Day Over Night


Paul Watkins - 1988
    His struggle to survive a war he scarcely comprehends is rendered in the urgent, beautifully spare, memorable prose of a born storyteller.

Without Warning


Thomas C. Sanger - 2017
    It had become a silhouette barely distinguishable against the darkening twilight sky, but Lemp was close enough to see the foaming white wave thrown up by its bow. He smiled when the spray arched higher, signaling the ship had begun changing course again.“You’re right on schedule,” he said to the image in his eyepiece.Lemp’s pulse quickened with the knowledge that his war was about to begin . . .On September 1, 1939, the passenger liner Athenia set sail from Glasgow for Montreal by way of Belfast and Liverpool. She carried 1,100 passengers, nearly three-quarters of whom were women and children. On September 3, Athenia was torpedoed by a German submarine. In Without Warning, author Thomas C. Sanger tells the harrowing story of the sinking of the Athenia from the perspective of eight people: six passengers, Athenia’s chief officer, and the commander of the German U-boat.Based on accounts written by passengers, personal interviews with survivors and descendants of survivors, books, newspaper stories, and original documents, Without Warning honors the memory of Athenia’s passengers, both living and dead.

Red Mistress


Elizabeth Blackwell - 2020
    She has no premonitions of war, let alone the revolution that is about to destroy her comfortable world.Her once-noble family is stripped of every possession, and more terrible losses soon follow. To save what’s left of her family and future, Nadia marries a zealous Bolshevik in an act of calculated reinvention.It won’t be her last.When she agrees to work undercover for the Soviets in 1920s Paris, Nadia is drawn into a beautiful yet treacherous world of secrets and deceit. Beset by conflicting loyalties and tested by a forbidden love affair, she becomes embroiled in a conspiracy that ends with a shocking murder. What chances will she take to determine her own fate?

The Given Day


Dennis Lehane - 2008
    The Given Day tells the story of two families—one black, one white—swept up in a maelstrom of revolutionaries and anarchists, immigrants and ward bosses, Brahmins and ordinary citizens, all engaged in a battle for survival and power.Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.Here, too, are some of the most influential figures of the era—Babe Ruth; Eugene O'Neill; leftist activist Jack Reed; NAACP founder W. E. B. DuBois; Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's ruthless Red-chasing attorney general; cunning Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge; and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover.Coursing through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminating in the Boston Police Strike of 1919, The Given Day explores the crippling violence and irrepressible exuberance of a country at war with, and in the thrall of, itself. As Danny, Luther, and those around them struggle to define themselves in increasingly turbulent times, they gradually find family in one another and, together, ride a rising storm of hardship, deprivation, and hope that will change all their lives.

In the Shadow of Winter


Lorna Gray - 2015
    But the near-dead man is no stranger and when she recognises Matthew Croft, the old ties of a failed romance tug deeply. Her sweetheart has returned from the war…Suspicion, the police and the panicked flight of a desperate man beat a path to her door. And with a wanted man hidden in her home and stealing back into her heart, Eleanor must be on her guard—for the net is closing in on them both and enemies are all around…

Two Princes and a Queen


Shmuel David - 2017
    In the face of persecution against Jews, Hanne and his parents joins a harrowing voyage down the Danube River, eventually meant to reach pre-State Israel. The passengers aboard the three creaking river-boats are constantly torn between hope and despair in their attempt to reach safety. A dying father implores his son to uncover the truth about his past On his death-bed, Hanne implores his son, Alan, to find out what became of his first love, Inge, whom he was forced to leave under tragic circumstances during the river journey. Alan becomes inexorably drawn to delving into the past. He pores over his father’s journals as well as other survivor diaries and letters, together with recorded interviews with Erica, the one survivor left in NYC, and learns the bitter truth contained in Inge’s death camp diary. A devoted son discover a little-know story that must be shared Bit by bit, Alan uncovers the horrendous story of the young lovers’ harrowing voyage down the Danube River along with Hundreds of other jews attempting to flee the Nazis for Israel in a historic fiasco that came to be called the Kladovo-Sabac Affair. While focusing on a touching love story, this historical novel also tells the ill-fated, real-life stories of other people who shaped the journey. Scroll up now to get your copy of Two Princes and a Queen!

Without Remorse


Tom Clancy - 1993
    When that past reaches out for her in a particularly horrifying fashion, he vows revenge and, assembling all of his old skills, sets out to track down the men responsible, before it can happen again.At the same time, the Pentagon is readying an operation to rescue a key group of prisoners in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp. One man, they find, knows the terrain around the camp better than anyone else they have: a certain former Navy SEAL named John Kelly.Kelly has his own mission. The Pentagon wants him for theirs. Attempting to juggle the two, Kelly (now code-named Mr. Clark) finds himself confronted by a vast array of enemies, both at home and abroad - men so skillful that the slightest misstep means death. And the fate of dozens of people, including Kelly himself, rests on his making sure that misstep never happens.Men aren't born dangerous. They grow dangerous. And the most dangerous of all, Kelly learns, are the ones you least expect...As Clancy takes us through the twists and turns of Without Remorse, he blends the exceptional realism and authenticity that are his hallmarks with intricate plotting, knife-edge suspense and a remarkable cast of characters.

The Strangler Vine


M.J. Carter - 2014
    The East India Company rules India - or most of it; and its most notorious and celebrated son, Xavier Mountstuart, has gone missing.William Avery, a down-at-heel junior officer in the Company's army, is sent to find him, in the unlikely company of the enigmatic and uncouth Jeremiah Blake. A more mismatched duo couldn't be imagined, but they must bury their differences as they are caught up in a search that turns up too many unanswered questions and seems bound to end in failure.What was it that so captivated Mountstuart about the Thugs, the murderous sect of Kali-worshippers who strangle innocent travellers by the roadside? Who is Jeremiah Blake and can he be trusted? And why is the whole enterprise shrouded in such secrecy?In the dark heart of Company India, Avery will have to fight for his very life, and in defence of a truth he will wish he had never learned.M. J. Carter is a former journalist and the author of two acclaimed works of non-fiction: Anthony Blunt: His Lives and The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One.

The Saboteur


Andrew Gross - 2017
    Both the Allies and the Nazis are closing in on attempts to construct the decisive weapon of the war. Kurt Nordstrum, an engineer in Oslo, puts his life aside to take up arms against the Germans as part of the Norwegian resistance. After the loss of his fiancée, his outfit whittled to shreds, he commandeers a coastal steamer and escapes to England to transmit secret evidence of the Nazis’s progress towards an atomic bomb at an isolated factory in Norway. There, he joins a team of dedicated Norwegians in training in the Scottish Highlands for a mission to disrupt the Nazis’ plans before they advance any further.Parachuted onto the most unforgiving terrain in Europe, braving the fiercest of mountain storms, Nordstrum and his team attempt the most daring raid of the war, targeting the heavily-guarded factory built on a shelf of rock thought to be impregnable, a mission even they know they likely will not survive. Months later, Nordstrum is called upon again to do the impossible, opposed by both elite Nazi soldiers and a long-standing enemy who is now a local collaborator—one man against overwhelming odds, with the fate of the war in the balance, but the choice to act means putting the one person he has a chance to love in peril.Based on the stirring true story, The Saboteur is Andrew Gross’s follow-up to the riveting historical thriller, The One Man. A richly-woven story probing the limits of heroism, sacrifice and determination, The Saboteur portrays a hero who must weigh duty against his heart in order to singlehandedly end the one threat that could alter the course of the war.

The Kaminsky Cure


Christopher New - 2005
    The matriarch, Gabi, was born Jewish but converted to Christianity in her teens. The patriarch, Willibald, is a Lutheran minister who, on one hand is an admirer of Hitler, but on the other hand, the conflicted father of children who are half-Jewish. Mindful and resentful of her husband’s ambivalence, Gabi is determined to make sure her children are educated, devising schemes to keep them in school even after learning that any child less than 100% Aryan will eventually be kept from completing education. She even hires tutors who are willing to teach half-Jewish children and in this way comes to hire Fraulein Kaminsky who shows Gabi how to cure her frustration and rage: to keep her mouth filled with water until the urge to scream or rant has passed.This beautifully rendered novel of WWII, “seen through a child’s eye, makes delusion and hypocrisy shockingly stark.” (The Guardian)