Missing Quail Crossings


Jennifer McMurrain - 2015
    As Dovie’s longtime love, Gabe Pearce, and her adoptive son, Elmer Brewer, return home, the family is overjoyed. The happiness of their reunion is cut short when the news that Dovie’s son-in-law, Evalyn’s husband, Robert, is missing in action. Even with Robert MIA, there is a ray of light when the Brewer’s long lost sister, Ellie arrives in their hometown, Knollwood, TX. With little information regarding her troubled past, Dovie takes Ellie home to Quail Crossings without hesitation, hoping to start the healing process for the young girl who now refuses to speak. As Ellie deals with a lifetime of abuse, Elmer adjusts to life off the battlefield, and Evalyn aches for her lost love. Dovie is quickly realizing that the Germans may have surrendered but the battle at home is just beginning.

Sioux Dawn


Terry C. Johnston - 1990
    His Plainsmen series brims with colorful characters, fierce battles and compelling historical lore.The Civil War was over, and a great westward march began. Settlers and soldiers poured out of the East along the Bozeman Trail, cutting deep into sacred Sioux hunting grounds. For Red Cloud and his warriors, there would be no choice but to fight for their ancestral rights.Seen through the eyes of gruff Sergeant Seamus Donegan, here is the historically accurate tale of a tragic opening to the war between two great civilization: the Fetterman Massacre of 1866.

The Three Musketeers


Alexandre DumasPierre Toutain-Dorbec - 1844
    Dumas transforms minor historical figures into larger- than-life characters: the Comte d’Artagnan, an impetuous young man in pursuit of glory; the beguilingly evil seductress “Milady”; the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu; the weak King Louis XIII and his unhappy queen—and, of course, the three musketeers themselves, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, whose motto “all for one, one for all” has come to epitomize devoted friendship. With a plot that delivers stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, and, of course, great bouts of swordplay, The Three Musketeers is eternally entertaining.

City of Tranquil Light


Bo Caldwell - 2010
    . . A beautiful, searing book that leaves an indelible presence in the mind." --Patricia Hampl, author of "The Florist's Daughter "Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng-- City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love--and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them?Told through Will and Katherine's alternating viewpoints--and inspired by the lives of the author's maternal grandparents--"City of Tranquil Light" is a tender and elegiac portrait of a young marriage set against the backdrop of the shifting face of a beautiful but torn nation. A deeply spiritual book, it shows how those who work to teach others often have the most to learn, and is further evidence that Bo Caldwell writes "vividly and with great historical perspective" ("San Jose Mercury News").

The Very Best of R. K. Narayan Timless Malgudi


R.K. Narayan - 2014
    Narayan, easily one of the most influential and important writers of India, populated the fictional town of Malgudi with a host of unforgettable characters: Swami and his gang of friends, the Talkative Man, Raju the guide and Sampath the printer, among many others. These characters have carved out a place for themselves in popular imagination and live on, still fresh and endlessly entertaining, many decades after they first appeared.Timeless Malgudi brings together a selection of the best and the most enduring of R.K. Narayan’s fiction and non-fiction. The Guide examines, with wit and irony, how a man becomes a godman. The story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ describes an attempt at cross-cultural communication which goes haywire, with hilarious consequences. The excerpt from My Days, Narayan’s autobiography, paints a poignant picture of the author’s childhood while the ‘Misguided “Guide”’ is a cynical, sharply written chronicle of the making of the film Guide, based on his novel. Also included in this volume are excerpts from the travelogue My Dateless Diary and a brilliant retelling of the Tamil epic Silappadikaram.Catering both to Narayan aficionados and to readers who have not yet been introduced to his work, Timeless Malgudi is as much a showcase of Narayan’s writing as it is a celebration of Malgudi, the town which time does not touch.

The Guns of Frank Eaton


David Althouse - 2017
    Frank’s thirst for a reckoning takes him across the lawless Indian Territory, to Southwest City, Missouri, to the wide-open mesa lands of eastern New Mexico and, finally, to Albuquerque. Curses hide behind every corner of the devil and death trail as Frank rides hell-bent on a quest that will send him into legend either as an outlaw, or a hero. “David Althouse is one of the freshest voices in Western historical fiction today.” -- John Legg, author of Blood of the Scalphunter “David Althouse captures the majesty and mayhem of the western frontier through a masterful style of storytelling rich in colorful descriptions of people, places and events. Althouse’s historical knowledge of the Great American West and Southwest, coupled with his lyrical and panoramic depictions of the mountain and mesa rich backdrops, brings the Old West alive for readers who often have to pause and catch their breath to keep up with the action. In David Althouse’s stories, the reader sees the sights, hears the sounds and smells the gunpowder!” -- Justin Brotton, Editor, Distinctly Oklahoma Magazine To follow author David Althouse, visit www.davidalthouse.com

Emma Brown


Clare Boylan - 2003
    One hundred fifty years later, Clare Boylan has finished Brontë's novel, sparking a sensational literary event. With pitch-perfect tone that is utterly true to Brontë's voice, Boylan delivers a brilliant tale about a mysterious young girl, Matilda, who is delivered to a girls' school in provincial England. When everything about the girl's wealthy background turns out to be a fiction, it falls to a local gentleman, Mr. Ellin, and a childless widow, Isabel Chalfont, to begin a quest for her past and her identity that takes them from the drawing rooms of country society to London's seamiest alleys. With all the intelligence and pathos of the novel's originator, Boylan develops Brontë's sketch of a girl without a past into a stunning portrait of Victorian society with a shameful secret at its heart.

Խաչագողի հիշատակարանը


Րաֆֆի - 1882
    He was an Armenian from that part of Armenia which was under the Mohammedan rule of the Shah of Persia. In the Diary of a con artist he proposes the civic duties and responsibilities of individuals. He vividly depicts the dark side of the human being but proposes the nurture as opposed to the nature theory. He suggests the society as responsible for creating fertile grounds for individuals' actions. Hence, he proposes the responsibility of the society to its individual in parallel with civic duties of the individuals to the society.

Dances with Wolves


Michael Blake - 1988
    Thievery and survival soon forced him into the Indian camp, where he began a dangerous adventure that changed his life forever. Relive the adventure and beauty of the incredible movie, Dances with Wolves.

West of Here


Jonathan Evison - 2011
    A failed accountant by the name of Ethan Thornburgh has just arrived in Port Bonita to reclaim the woman he loves and start a family. Ethan’s obsession with a brighter future impels the damming of the mighty Elwha to harness its power and put Port Bonita on the map.More than a century later, his great-great grandson, a middle manager at a failing fish- packing plant, is destined to oversee the undoing of that vision, as the great Thornburgh dam is marked for demolition, having blocked the very lifeline that could have sustained the town. West of Here is a grand and playful odyssey, a multilayered saga of destiny and greed, adventure and passion, that chronicles the life of one small town, turning America’s history into myth, and myth into a nation’s shared experience.

Sea of Poppies


Amitav Ghosh - 2008
    Her destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean shortly before the outbreak of the Opium Wars in China. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a diverse cast of Indians and Westerners on board, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed tribeswoman, from a mulatto American freedman to a free-spirited French orphan. As their old family ties are washed away, they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais, or ship-brothers. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of Canton.

The Archbishop: A Novel


Hieromonk Tihon - 2017
     Rather than abandoning his parish in search of the truth, Father Paul’s quest is a simple one: to find the true essence of Christianity. A Modern Day Apostle to the Downtrodden Set against the backdrop of a harsh and cold Russian countryside along the River Volga, with its unyielding poverty and hardships, The Archbishop follows Father Paul as he searches to understand God and the parlous state of the world around him. It is not until he meets the eponymous Archbishop that he finds revelations that do more than just answer his soul-searching questions. More than this, he finds a true shepherd determined to spread a more authentic message of Christ to the people who follow him. But even the divine truth that Father Paul finally finds in this dreary, cold hamlet where religion seems to be fading from relevance is not free from earthly machinations. Although he discovers something that will change his life forever, the realities of the world around him remain unyielding and unchanging. The Archbishop is a book that does not shy away from asking big questions – nor from answering them. Author Hieromonk Tihon’s identity has long since been lost to history and his fate unknown, but the vivid characters and intricately drawn world created in this book have indicated that The Archbishop may be an autobiographical work. Condemned, burned, and banned by iconoclastic Bolsheviks during the earliest years of Soviet Russia as it pushed an agenda of militant atheism, The Archbishop's spiritual guidance was almost lost among countless other Eastern Orthodox works. The Archbishop provides deep spiritual insight and guidance into a world distant from ours, despite the chasms of difference in culture, time, and space. Sometimes funny, often tragic, and other times angering, this hidden Orthodox gem does not shy away from asking big questions – nor from answering them. It remains a work full of spiritual lessons that will resonate profoundly with the modern-day American Orthodox clergy and their laity.

The North Water


Ian McGuire - 2016
    . .1859. A man joins a whaling ship bound for the Arctic Circle. Having left the British Army with his reputation in tatters, Patrick Sumner has little option but to accept the position of ship's surgeon on this ill-fated voyage. But when, deep into the journey, a cabin boy is discovered brutally killed, Sumner finds himself forced to act. Soon he will face an evil even greater than he had encountered at the siege of Delhi, in the shape of Henry Drax: harpooner, murderer, monster . . . 'A tour de force' Hilary Mantel'Riveting and darkly brilliant' Colm Tóibín

Citizens Creek


Lalita Tademy - 2014
    Cow Tom, born into slavery in Alabama in 1810 and sold to a Creek Indian chief before his tenth birthday, possessed an extraordinary gift: the ability to master languages. As the new country developed westward, and Indians, settlers, and blacks came into constant contact, Cow Tom became a key translator for his Creek master and was hired out to US military generals. His talent earned him money--but would it also grant him freedom? And what would become of him and his family in the aftermath of the Civil War and the Indian Removal westward? Cow Tom's legacy lives on--especially in the courageous spirit of his granddaughter Rose. She rises to leadership of the family as they struggle against political and societal hostility intent on keeping blacks and Indians oppressed. But through it all, her grandfather's indelible mark of courage inspires her--in mind, in spirit, and in a family legacy that never dies. Written in two parts portraying the parallel lives of Cow Tom and Rose, Citizens Creek is a beautifully rendered novel that takes the reader deep into a little known chapter of American history. It is a breathtaking tale of identity, community, family--and above all, the power of an individual's will to make a difference.

Brother Man


Roger Mais - 1954
    It is a portrait of a ghetto saint - an ordinary man selected by the universe to bring enlightenment to poor belittled people.