James Goodenough, whose family had originally settled in Connecticut from England brings his family to Ohio to carve out a new life for them in the Black Swamp in 1838. As swamp fever gradually picks off their children and they wrestle daily with survival. This course will see their family engulfed in tragedy and fifteen years later we pick up with their youngest son, Robert who has been running west since the trying to escape his memories of what...

"Claudine Burroughs--who works with William Monk's wife Hester at the women's clinic--expects nothing but an unbearably boring several hours from a Christmas party she attends with her husband. However, when an endearingly romantic poet has his prostitute companion crash the glittering event--and the woman winds up dead--Claudine has more on her hands than she bargained for. Feeling sorry for the poet, she sets out to uncover the truth about what...

International bestselling author Ken Follett has enthralled millions of readers with The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, two stories of the Middle Ages set in the fictional city of Kingsbridge. The saga now continues with Follett's magnificent new epic, A Column of Fire. In 1558, the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral look down on a city torn apart by religious conflict. As power in England shifts precariously between Catholics and...

"Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar and alchemist, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, drunk and lost, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in Golden Lane, an alley hard by Rudolf's great castle. Dressed in a velvet gown, wearing a large gold medallion around her neck, the woman is clearly well-born--or...

Prairie Lotus is a powerful, touching, multilayered book about a girl determined to fit in and realize her dreams: getting an education, becoming a dressmaker in her father's shop, and making at least one friend. Acclaimed, award-winning author Linda Sue Park has placed a young half-Asian girl, Hanna, in a small town in America's heartland, in 1880. Hanna's adjustment to her new surroundings, which primarily means negotiating the townspeople's almost...

"In the uneasy peace following World War I, nurse Bess Crawford runs into trouble and treachery in Ireland--in this twelfth book in the New York Times bestselling mystery series. The Great War is over--but in Ireland, in the wake of the bloody 1916 Easter Rising, anyone who served in France is now considered a traitor, including nurse Eileen Flynn and former soldier Michael Sullivan, who only want to be married in the small, isolated village where...

September 1941. Delivery boy Freddie Hackett, a message runner for a government office, witnesses an argument that ends in murder. He waits until the coast is clear... but arrives at the delivery address to come face to face with the killer. Dismissed by the police Freddie turns to Maisie Dobbs. She believes the boy, but must maintain extreme caution: she is working secretly for the Special Operations Executive, assessing candidates for crucial work...

"The latest novel in the enchanting Westcott series from New York Times bestselling author Mary Balogh. As a young man, Justin Wiley was banished by his father for mysterious reasons, but now his father is dead, and Justin has been Earl of Brandon for six years. A dark, dour man, he nonetheless takes it as his responsibility to care for his half-sister Maria when her mother dies. He travels to her home to fetch her back to the family seat at Everleigh...

In the anxious days after Pearl Harbor, talented "Life" magazine reporter Clara Shipley finds herself on top of one of the nation's most important stories--the race to discover penicillin at the Rockefeller Institute. When a researcher at the institute dies under suspicious circumstances, the stakes become starkly clear: a murder has been committed to obtain these lucrative new drugs. With lives and a new love hanging in the balance, Claire will put...

In London covering the Blitz with Edward R. Murrow, Frankie Bard meets a Cape Cod doctor in a shelter and promises that she'll deliver a letter for him when she finally returns to the United States. Filled with stunning parallels to today's world, "The Postmistress" is a sweeping novel about the loss of innocence of two extraordinary women--and of two countries torn apart by war.