Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, as the Ashikaga shogunate crumbled, Japan came to resemble one huge battlefield. Rival warlords vied for dominance, but from among them three great figures emerged, like meteors streaking against the night sky. These three men, alike in their passion to control and unify Japan, were strikingly different in personality: Nobunaga, rash, decisive, brutal; Hideyoshi, unassuming, subtle, com­plex; Ieyasu, calm, patient, calculating. Their divergent philosophies have long been recalled by the Japanese in a verse known to every schoolchild:

What if the bird will not sing?

Nobunaga answers, "Kill it!"

Hideyoshi answers, "Make it want to sing."

Ieyasu answers, "Wait."

This book, Taiko (the title by which Hideyoshi is still known in Japan), is the story of the man who made the bird want to sing.

Marek Mezencjusz Manilianus, obywatel rzymski, przybywa do Aleksandrii, gdzie zaczyna badać zawarte w świętych księgach przepowiednie i proroctwa różnych ludów cesarstwa. Za najbardziej intrygującą uznaje żydowską zapowiedź nadejścia odkupiciela i zbudowania Królestwa, zwłaszcza że wiele znaków i wydarzeń zdaje się świadczyć, iż czas ten właśnie nadszedł. Wyrusza w końcu do Jerozolimy i trafia na chwilę, gdy ukrzyżowany zostaje Jezus Nazarejski. Coraz bardziej zaciekawiony Marek rozpoczyna wędrówkę jego śladami…

The beautiful hetaera Thais was a real woman who inspired poets, artists and sculptors in Athens, Memphis, Alexandria, Babylon and Ecbatana. She traveled with Alexander the Great’s army during his Persian campaign and was the only woman to enter the capitol of Persia — Persepolis. Love, beauty, philosophy, war, religion — all that and more in a historic masterpiece by Ivan Yefremov.

With his U.S.A. trilogy, comprising THE 42nd PARALLEL, 1919, and THE BIG MONEY, John Dos Passos is said by many to have written the great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating what Edmund Wilson once called their “own little corners”, John Dos Passos was taking on the world. Counted as one of the best novels of the twentieth century by the Modern Library and by some of the finest writers working today, U.S.A. is a grand, kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation, buzzing with history and life on every page.

The trilogy opens with THE 42nd PARALLEL, where we find a young country at the dawn of the twentieth century. Slowly, in stories artfully spliced together, the lives and fortunes of five characters unfold. Mac, Janey, Eleanor, Ward, and Charley are caught on the storm track of this parallel and blown New Yorkward. As their lives cross and double back again, the likes of Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie make cameo appearances.

“David Drummond is fully invested in the project…. His interpretation fits Dos Passos’s unique style…Drummond’s approach brings listeners into this distinctive fictional world with fervor and energy.” — AudioFile

“The single greatest novel any of us have written, yes, in this country in the last one hundred years.” — Norman Mailer

(Chinese: 孫子兵法) is a Chinese military treatise written during the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it has long been praised as the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time.The Art of War is one of the oldest books on military strategy in the world. Like a work of mathematics or science, much of the work is dedicated to defining its concepts in what has been described as a series of formulas. It is the first and one of the most successful works on strategy and has had a huge influence on Eastern and Western military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu was the first to recognize the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He taught that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through a to-do list, instead it requires quickly responding appropriately to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a competitive environment, competing plans collide creating situations that no one plans.The book was first translated into a European language in 1782 by French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, and had possibly influenced Napoleon, and even the planning of Operation Desert Storm. Leaders as diverse as Mao Zedong, General Pervez Musharraf, Vo Nguyen Giap, and General Douglas MacArthur have claimed to have drawn inspiration from the work.The Art of War has also been applied, with much success, to business and managerial strategies.

In 1945, Elsie Schmidt was a naïve teenager, as eager for her first sip of champagne as she was for her first kiss. But in the waning days of the Nazi empire, with food scarce and fears of sedition mounting, even the private yearnings of teenage girls were subject to suspicion and suppression. Elsie’s courtship by Josef Hub, a rising star in the Army of the Third Reich, has insulated her and her family from the terror and desperation overtaking her country. So when an escaped Jewish boy arrives on Elsie’s doorstep in the dead of night on Christmas Eve, Elsie understands that opening the door puts all she loves in danger.

Sixty years later, in El Paso, Texas, Reba Adams is trying to file a feel-good Christmas piece for the local magazine. Reba is a rolling stone, perpetually on the run from memories of a turbulent childhood, but she’s been in El Paso long enough to get a full-time job and a full-time fiancé, Riki Chavez. Riki, an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, finds comfort in strict rules and regulations, whereas Reba knows that in every good story, lines will be blurred.

Reba's latest assignment has brought her to the shop of an elderly baker across town. The interview should take a few hours at most, but the owner of Elsie's German Bakery is no easy subject. Elsie keeps turning the tables on Reba, and Reba finds herself returning to the bakery again and again, anxious to find the heart of the story. For Elsie, Reba's questions have been a stinging reminder of darker times: her life in Germany during that last bleak year of WWII. And as Elsie, Reba, and Riki's lives become more intertwined, all are forced to confront the uncomfortable truths of the past and seek out the courage to forgive. 

Three Women Who Share One Fate: The Boleyn Inheritance.

Anne of Cleves: She runs from her tiny country, her hateful mother, and her abusive brother to a throne whose last three occupants are dead. King Henry VIII, her new husband, instantly dislikes her. Without friends, family, or even an understanding of the language being spoken around her, she must literally save her neck in a court ruled by a deadly game of politics and the terror of an unpredictable and vengeful king. Her Boleyn Inheritance: accusations and false witnesses.

Katherine Howard: She catches the king's eye within moments of arriving at court, setting in motion the dreadful machine of politics, intrigue, and treason that she does not understand. She only knows that she is beautiful, that men desire her, that she is young and in love – but not with the diseased old man who made her queen, beds her night after night, and killed her cousin Anne. Her Boleyn Inheritance: the threat of the axe.

Jane Rochford: She is the Boleyn girl whose testimony sent her husband and sister-in-law to their deaths. She is the trusted friend of two threatened queens, the perfectly loyal spy for her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and a canny survivor in the murderous court of a most dangerous king. Throughout Europe, her name is a byword for malice, jealousy, and twisted lust. Her Boleyn Inheritance: a fortune and a title, in exchange for her soul.

The Boleyn Inheritance is a novel drawn tight as a lute string about a court ruled by the gallows and three women whose positions brought them wealth, admiration, and power as well as deceit, betrayal, and terror. Once again, Philippa Gregory has brought a vanished world to life – the whisper of a silk skirt on a stone stair, the yellow glow of candlelight illuminating a hastily written note, the murmurs of the crowd gathering on Tower Green below the newly built scaffold.

It is 1939. Nazi Germany.

The country is holding its breath.

Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

Liesel Meminger finds her life changed when she unearths a single object from the snow. It is The Grave Digger’s Handbook, left there by accident at her brother’s funeral, and it is her first act of book thievery.

But these are dangerous times. When Liesel’s foster family hides a Jewish man in their basement, Liesel’s world is both opened up and closed down.

In superbly crafted prose that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

in which our narrator introduces:

himself—the colors—and the book thief

featuring:

himmel street—the art of saumensching—an ironfisted

woman—a kiss attempt—jesse owens—

sandpaper—the smell of friendship—a heavyweight

champion—and the mother of all watschens

featuring:

a girl made of darkness—the joy of cigarettes

—a town walker—some dead letters—hitler’s birthday—

100 percent pure german sweat—the gates of thievery—

and a book of fire

featuring:

the way home—a broken woman—a struggler—

a juggler—the attributes of summer—

an aryan shopkeeper—a snorer—two tricksters—

and revenge in the shape of mixed candy

featuring:

the accordionist—a promise keeper—a good girl—

a jewish fist fighter—the wrath of rosa—a lecture—

a sleeper—the swapping of nightmares—

and some pages from the basement

featuring:

a floating book—the gamblers—a small ghost—

two haircuts—rudy’s youth—losers and sketches—

a whistler and some shoes—three acts of stupidity—

and a frightened boy with frozen legs

featuring:

death’s diary—the snowman—thirteen

presents—the next book—the nightmare of

a jewish corpse—a newspaper sky—a visitor—

a schmunzeler—and a final kiss on poisoned cheeks

featuring:

champagne and accordions—

a trilogy—some sirens—a sky

stealer—an offer—the long

walk to dachau—peace—

an idiot and some coat men

featuring:

dominoes and darkness—the thought of

rudy naked—punishment—a promise keeper’s

wife—a collector—the bread eaters—

a candle in the trees—a hidden sketchbook—

and the anarchist’s suit collection

featuring:

the next temptation—a cardplayer—

the snows of stalingrad—an ageless

brother—an accident—the bitter taste

of questions—a toolbox, a bleeder,

a bear—a broken plane—

and a homecoming

featuring:

the end of a world—the ninety-eighth day—

a war maker—way of the words—a catatonic girl—

confessions—ilsa hermann’s little black book—

some rib-cage planes—and a mountain range of rubble

featuring:

death and liesel—some

wooden tears—max—

and the handover man

This sweeping historical novel tells the dramatic tale of that most intriguing of Renaissance women, Lucrezia Borgia. In 1502, the Borgia Terror is at its height. Pope Alexander VI and his infamous son, Cesare, have murdered their way to power: no one is safe. The poor are starving to death, the rich are terrified for their lives. Rome is under seige and the River Tiber is full of new bodies every day. Born into the most powerful and corrupt family at the heart of the snake-pit that is Renaissance Italy, Lucrezia Borgia is destined to be remembered by history as an evil, scheming seductress and poisoner. If a woman in Lucrezia's unenviable position is to survive, she must use the weapons at her disposal: sex, poison and intelligence. Having been raped by her father, the Pope, on her wedding night at the age of thirteen, Lucrezia is then faced with the murder of her first husband by her lecherous brother Cesare, who lusts after her himself. When a second marriage is proposed she fears she will be separated from her child, Giovanni, the result of her father's incestuous attentions. She is surprised and delighted to find herself falling in love with her second husband. But will she have the will and the courage to protect him when he becomes a threat to Alexander and Cesare's schemes?

Did the dead exist? Were they watching? Were they ghosts? Not the kind he’d imagined as a child, draped with white sheets, with the ability to walk through walls, but the kind that lodged themselves in your heart, in your memories, the kind that came to you in dreams, that you could see when you closed your eyes and sometimes even when your eyes were opened.

In 1970s Melbourne, 22-year-old Italian migrant Antonello is newly married and working as a rigger on the West Gate Bridge, a gleaming monument to a modern city. When the bridge collapses one October morning, killing 35 of his workmates, his world crashes down on him.

In 2009, Jo and her best friend, Ashleigh, are on the verge of finishing high school and flush with the possibilities for their future. But one terrible mistake sets Jo’s life on a radically different course.

Drawing on true events of Australia’s worst industrial accident — a tragedy that still scars the city — The Bridge is a profoundly moving novel that examines class, guilt, and moral culpability. Yet it shows that even the most harrowing of situations can give way to forgiveness and redemption. Ultimately, it is a testament to survival and the resilience of the human spirit.

Hadley, the rattlesnake-toting patriarch who took his comfort where he found it — in the Bible, the bottle or the bed... Minerva, the lusty, stubborn woman he loved, shepherding her young through the harsh realities of the way west and the terrifying passions in their own hearts... Will, the brawling, hard-drinking sinner who sought salvation in the arms of a savage... Bobbo and Gideon, boys at the start of a journey, blood-stained men at the end... Bonnie Sue, too young to love, too ripe not to; a child forced to womanhood in the wilderness... Annabel, the youngest, whose quiet courage was tested in an act of unspeakable savagery. The Chisholms — a family as raw and unyielding as the soil of Virginia they left behind; as wild and enduring as the dream they pursued across the American continent.

Anna is on her way home from work on a cold winter’s day when she sees a crowd queuing at a kiosk. Though a queue is not an unusual sight in a Russian city, this appears different. There’s a rumour that famous exiled composer Selinksy is returning to conduct his last symphony for one night only—and this kiosk is selling tickets.

The acquisition of tickets to this concert becomes an obsession in Anna’s small family. Her husband, a tuba player in a state band, sees the ticket as a way of embarking on an illicit affair. Their son thinks going to the concert will help him flee to the West on Selinksy’s coattails. And Anna? She secretly hopes the ticket will make her husband love her again.

The Concert Ticket is a heartbreaking novel about the secret, profound longings at the heart of a family struggling in a time of great repression.