Book picks similar to
1918 by David Cornish
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Goddamn This War!
Jacques Tardi - 2008
Vastly different sequentially (eschewing Trenches' splintered narrative, Goddamn is split into six chronological chapters, one for each year of the war), graphically (Tardi deploys his more recent pen-ink-and-watercolor technique, with the bold colors of the early chapters fading into a grimy near-monochrome in the later ones as the war drags on), and narratively (all of Goddamn is told, with insight, dark wit and despair, as a first-person reminiscence/narration by an unnamed soldier), Goddamn This War! shares with Trenches its sustained sense of outrage, pitch-black gallows humor, and impeccably scrupulous historical exactitude. In fact, Goddamn This War! includes an extensive year-by-year historical text section written by Tardi's frequent World War I research helpmate, the historian and collector Jean-Pierre Verney, including dozens of stunning rare photographs and visual documents from his personal collection.
The Foundling Duke - A Regency Romance
Audrey Harrison - 2017
Family secrets can’t always be kept hidden. James Massey, Marquess of Avery, is hated by his mother and can’t understand why. Leonard Massey, Duke of Yarnton, has a secret that will protect his son but destroy his wife. Catherine Massey, Duchess of Yarnton, hates her husband and son and is determined they will be rejected by society. One family on an inevitable path of self-destruction. No one will come away unscathed.
The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox
Jennifer Lee Carrell - 2003
After barely surviving the agony of smallpox themselves, they flouted eighteenth-century medicine by borrowing folk knowledge from African slaves and Eastern women in frantic bids to protect their children. From their heroic struggles stems the modern science of immunology as well as the vaccinations that remain our only hope should the disease ever be unleashed again.Jennifer Lee Carrell transports readers back to the early eighteenth century to tell the tales of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, two iconoclastic figures who helped save London and Boston from the deadliest disease mankind has known.
Napoleon's Pyramids
William Dietrich - 2007
The first book in Dietrich’s fabulously fun New York Times bestselling series, Napoleon’s Pyramids follows the irrepressible Gage—a brother in spirit to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman—as he travels with Napoleon’s expedition across the burning Egyptian desert in an attempt to solve a 6,000 year old riddle with the help of a mysterious medallion. Here is superior adventure fiction in the spirit of Jack London, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard, and fans of their acclaimed successors—James Rollins, David Liss, Steve Berry, Kate Mosse—will certainly want to get to know Ethan Gage.
Prince Felix Yusupov: The Man Who Murdered Rasputin
Christopher Dobson - 1989
The murder of the Tsarina’s ‘Mad Monk’ sent shock waves through pre-revolutionary Russia. Many foretold it would mean the end of the monarchy — and they might have been right. But the murderers and their leader, the notorious Prince Yusupov, saw Rasputin’s hold over Nicholas II and his wife as an evil influence that was destroying Russia, whose armies were being slaughtered in the First World War. Yusupov was one of the richest men in Russia. He was also handsome, amusing and vain, boasting of the smallest waist of any man in Europe. Though married to the Tsar’s niece, Irina, he was homosexual and often paraded in women’s clothes — as such he even excited the attention of King Edward VII at the Théâtre des Capucines. During the revolution he was rescued at the eleventh hour with other members of the Imperial Family and went to Paris where he settled. His flamboyant lifestyle, his business adventures, court cases and struggles to raise money on the Yusupov jewels, as well as his friendships with the great of the time, including the Windsors, make exciting reading. Based on personal interviews and meticulous research, this enthralling biography captures the flavour of a bizarre, eventful and extraordinary life. Christopher Dobson is an author and foreign correspondent who has travelled the world in the pursuit of news. His front-line coverage of the wars in the Middle East and Vietnam won him widespread acclaim and he was voted International Journalist of the Year in 1968. He now specializes in writing about terrorism and is recognized as one of the leading experts in this field. Married with four children, he lives in Sussex where he spends as much time as he can fishing, shooting, gardening and reading. Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent digital publisher. For more information on our titles please sign up to our newsletter at www.endeavourpress.com. Each week you will receive updates on free and discounted ebooks. Follow us on Twitter: @EndeavourPress and on Facebook via http://on.fb.me/1HweQV7. We are always interested in hearing from our readers. Endeavour Press believes that the future is now.
Greetings from Myanmar
David Bockino - 2016
Traversing the country, he encounters a pompous Western businessman swindling his way to millions, a local vendor with a flair for painting nudes, and long ago legends of a western circus. Sensitively written and expertly researched, Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business is the story of a flourishing nation still very much in limbo and an answer to the hard questions that arise when tourism not only charts, but shapes a place as well.
The Bowl with Gold Seams
Ellen Prentiss Campbell - 2016
During the summer of 1945, the State Department selected the resort to serve as the detainment center for the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, his staff, and their families.The novel tells Hazel Shaw’s story of unexpected personal transformation — both as a young woman working at the hotel among the Japanese, and the further story of the reverberating lifelong consequences of that experience. The final events of the war challenge Hazel’s beliefs about enemies and friends, victory and defeat, love and loyalty. In the ensuing years she remains haunted by memories. Long after the end of the war, an unexpected encounter causes Hazel to return to the hotel and she must confront her past, come to terms with her present life, and determine her future.
Serafim and Claire
Mark Lavorato - 2014
Set in the vividly imagined streets of 1920s Montreal, Serafim and Claire is the beautiful, moving, and compulsively readable story of two dreamers whose worlds become forever connected.Claire Audette is a dancer whose reputation in the vaudeville houses of 1920s Montreal is rapidly on the rise. Serafim Vieria is a photographer and lonely immigrant, wandering the streets of the same city haunted by memories of a lost love in his native Portugal. Around them, the Twenties are roaring, and the metropolis is simmering: corrupt politicians, the burgeoning of jazz, the emerging suffragette movement, trouble in the Red Light, fascism in the Italian community, with the English/French divide cleaving through it all. And as Serafim and Claire’s lives begin to intertwine, a dangerous plot forms that could boost both their fortunes. Can their naïve yet cunning plan succeed? Can they make their own luck? And, if they fail, what will become of their budding love? Serafim and Claire is the unforgettable story of two idealistic yet flawed dreamers being drawn together, and of the vibrant city and times in which they live. In lush and beautiful prose, Mark Lavorato brings an entire world vividly to life.
The Spy
Paulo Coelho - 2016
HER ONLY CRIME WAS TO BE AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN When Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless. Within months she was the most celebrated woman in the city. As a dancer, she shocked and delighted audiences; as a courtesan, she bewitched the era’s richest and most powerful men. But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari’s lifestyle brought her under suspicion. In 1917, she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs Elysees, and accused of espionage. Told in Mata Hari’s voice through her final letter, The Spy is the unforgettable story of a woman who dared to defy convention and who paid the ultimate price.
The Sure Thing: The Greatest Coup in Horse Racing History
Nick Townsend - 2013
But one man has been proving them wrong for four decades. In the summer of 1975 Barney Curley, a fearless and renowned gambler, masterminded one of the most spectacular gambles of all time with a racehorse called Yellow Sam. It cost the bookmakers millions of pounds. They said that it could never happen again. But in May 2010, thirty-five years after his first coup, Curley staged the ultimate multimillion pound-winning sequel.The Sure Thing tells the complete story of how he managed to organise the biggest gamble in racing history – and how he then followed up with yet another audacious scheme in January 2014.
Our Country Friends
Gary Shteyngart - 2021
A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaulate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller, Super Sad True Love Story.