The Pilgrim of Hate

The Pilgrim of Hate

Ellis Peters

Ellis Peters

During the May of 1141, pilgrims gather at Shrewsbury. The news from the road is that a knight has been murdered in Winchester. Brother Cadfael suspects this distant crime has a solution close to home.
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From Sea to Shining Sea

From Sea to Shining Sea

JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Historical / Historical Fiction / Fiction

In one generation, the Clark family of Virginia fought for our nation's independence, and explored, conquered, and settled the continent from sea to shining sea. This powerfully written book recreates the warm life of the family, the dangers of the battlefield, the grueling journeys across an untamed wilderness, and the soul-stirring Lewis and Clark Expedition. This mighty epic is a fitting tribute to the wisdom and courage of Ann Rogers Clark, her husband John, and the ten sons and daughters they nurtured and inspired.
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Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Fishing the Sloe-Black River

Colum McCann

Literature & Fiction / Biographies & Memoirs

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane: a memory, a scent on the wind, the grace in the curve of a street. Fishing the Sloe-Black River is a work of pure augury, of the channeling and re-spoken lives of people exposed to the beauty of the everyday.
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Usher's Passing

Usher's Passing

Robert R. McCammon

Literature & Fiction / Horror / Historical Fiction

In this most gothic of Robert McCammon's novels, setting is key: the continuing saga of the Usher family (descended from the brother of Roderick and Madeline of Edgar Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher") takes place in the weird and picturesque heart of the North Carolina mountains. The haughty, aristocratic Ushers live in a mansion near Asheville; the poor but crafty mountain folk (whose families are just as ancient) live on Briartop Mountain nearby. At harvest time, when the book's action unfolds, the mountains are a blaze of color. Add to the mixture a sinister history of mountain kids disappearing every year, a journalist investigating those disappearances, a monster called "The Pumpkin Man," moldy books and paintings in a huge old library at the Usher estate, and a secret chamber with a strange device involving a brass pendulum and tuning forks--and you've got a splendid recipe for atmospheric horror. Originally published: New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984.
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Wanting

Wanting

Penny Jordan

Romance / Contemporary / Fiction

Read this classic romance by New York Times bestselling author Penny Jordan, now available for the first time in e-book! This man is more than a match for her!As a model, Heather is accustomed to being regarded as a sex object, but she makes certain no one in her private life treats her that way. She keeps men at a distance, rejecting would-be lovers as retribution for the traumatic experiences of her past.But all that changes when she meets Race Williams. He is a master at the game of enticement and denial, and for the first time Heather knows what it is to burn for something she can't have...Originally published in 1984
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Wintermind

Wintermind

Marvin Kaye

Marvin Kaye

In the aftermath of a bloody war, two cultures rediscovered one another after long centuries of isolation: the Coven, a pastoral tribe with strange telepathic powers, and the City, a race of immortals who preserved man’s scientific heritage. Slowly, the painful union of these two worlds began. But their joining unleashed an awesome, hidden force that overshadowed both races’ future.A haunting saga of America in the far future, WINTERMIND has all the color and sweep of a great epic, combined with the human insight and intimate characterization of two of the field’s most accomplished talents.
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A Real Gone Guy

A Real Gone Guy

Frank Kane

Frank Kane

"She called herself Denny Lyons ... and she was everything men dreamed of on long, lonely nights ... She had it all, from the white-gold hair that framed her expensive face to the graceful, slender ankles—and all those pleasant extras in-between ... She had everything—including big ideas. She was headed straight for the top and she thought she knew just how to get there ... But she had made one mistake—and someone thought that was one too many ... "
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The Summer Tree

The Summer Tree

Guy Gavriel Kay

Science Fiction & Fantasy

In the first volume of Guy Gavriel Kay’s classic trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry, five Toronto university students encounter a man who will change their lives, taking them from our world to discover their roles in an epic war looming in the first of all the worlds: Fionavar.
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The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

Barbara W. Tuchman

History / Biography

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government.   Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display. Praise for The March of Folly “A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.” —The New York Times Book Review*  * “An admirable survey . . . I haven’t read a more relevant book in years.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Boston Sunday Globe  * “A superb chronicle . . . a masterly examination.” —Chicago Sun-Times * From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Icehenge

Icehenge

Kim Stanley Robinson

Science Fiction & Fantasy

On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth's Stonehenge--but ten times the size, standing alone at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. What is it? Who came there to build it? The secret lies, perhaps, in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.
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Wilt on High:

Wilt on High:

Tom Sharpe

Literature & Fiction

Wilt is back - in form, and in a good deal of trouble. Henry Wilt is still teaching at the Fenland Tech, attempting to drill English into plasterers, dozing through tedious committee meetings and occasionally getting mildly plastered in 'The Pig in a Poke' with one of his few bearable colleagues. But the even tenor of his days is rudely interrupted when the shadow of drug dealing flickers across the Tech. Suddenly Wilt becomes the target of suspicion. His colleagues believe him to be responsible for triggering a departmental inquiry, and his old adversary Inspector Flint, knowing that he's guilty of something, sees a chance to settle a number of scores. What starts with an accusation of voyeurism in the staff lavatory (of the wrong gender to boot) leads, more or less directly, to a massive confrontation at a nearby US airbase with the forces of law and order on both sides and Wilt in his usual place - in the middle.
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God Knows

God Knows

Joseph Heller

Literature & Fiction

Joseph Heller's powerful, wonderfully funny, deeply moving novel is the story of David -- yes, King David -- but as you've never seen him before. You already know David as the legendary warrior king of Israel, husband of Bathsheba, and father of Solomon; now meet David as he really was: the cocky Jewish kid, the plagiarized poet, and the Jewish father. Listen as David tells his own story, a story both relentlessly ancient and surprisingly modern, about growing up and growing old, about men and women, and about man and God. It is quintessential Heller.
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