Field Wars

In a stunning follow-up to her best-selling debut, Mrs. Kimble, Jennifer Haigh returns with Baker Towers, a compelling story of love and loss in a western Pennsylvania mining town in the years after World War II.

This is the true story of four brave women secretly sent into the darkness of Nazi-occupied France to carry out Winston Churchill’s plan to "set Europe ablaze." Caught in a web of deception surrounding the preparations for the D-Day invasion, their mission ended in betrayal and sacrifice. An engrossing history based on first-hand interviews with agents of the Special Operations Executive and revelations about the secret organization and the courageous women who served it.

1948: Change has come to every corner of the globe - and Rosie Stanton, returning home to Northern Queensland after serving the war effort in Brisbane, plans to rescue her family’s foundering sugarcane farm with her unstoppable can-do spirit. Coming up against her father’s old-world views, a farm worker undermining her success, and constant reminders of Rosie’s brothers lost in the war, Rosie realizes she wants more from life and love - but at what cost? Italian immigrant Tomas Conti arrives at a neighboring farm, and sparks fly as Rosie draws close to this enigmatic newcomer.

Former SAS soldier Jeff Bradley thought he had left warzones behind when he inherited a vineyard in rural New Zealand. But now his vineyard manager, Arben Shala, has gone missing in his native Kosovo. An enigmatic message tells Jeff that his friend is in grave danger.

England 1922. It’s been four years since Rudy’s brother Edgar went missing in war-torn France. Still deep in mourning and grappling with unanswered questions, Rudy and his mother struggle to move on. When the enigmatic Mariette arrives unexpectedly at the family’s manor claiming to be Edgar’s widow, and the mother of his child, Rudy urges her to stay, hoping she’ll shed light on the missing pieces.

Doctors at War is a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war’s absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war.

Ben Stuart felt the dual struggle in his early twenties of purposelessness and powerlessness. He wanted his life to have meaning, and he wanted to overcome his personal struggles, but the self-help books he read only left him feeling defeated and discouraged. In this six-session Bible study, Ben shares how this knowledge led him to develop a practical strategy to battle against the enemy and build the life that God intended him to have. He helps group members to likewise deconstruct their destructive thinking and construct their own lives of purpose.

In July 1883, just a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a group of editors at the Century magazine engaged in a lively argument: Which Civil War battle was the bloodiest battle of them all? One claimed it was Chickamauga, another Cold Harbor. The argument inspired a brainstorm: Why not let the magazine’s 125,000 readers in on the conversation by offering “a series of papers on some of the great battles of the war, to be written by officers in command on both sides.”

In the study of field fortifications in the Civil War that began with Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War, Hess turns to the 1864 Overland campaign to cover battles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. Drawing on meticulous research in primary sources and careful examination of trench remnants at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, North Anna, Cold Harbor, and Bermuda Hundred, Hess describes Union and Confederate earthworks and how Grant and Lee used them in this new era of field entrenchments.

For generations of Americans, the word Antietam - the name of a bucolic stream in western Maryland - held the same sense of horror and carnage that the date 9/11 does for Americans today. But Antietam eclipses even this modern tragedy as America's single bloodiest day, on which 22,000 men became casualties in a war to determine our nation's future.

England, 1065: The Saxon kingdom is under threat of invasion at both ends. From the north comes Harald Hardrada of Norway intent on pillage, while across the Channel, Duke William of Normandy is about to enforce his claim to the throne. Between the two lie the villages and townships defended only by part-time armies maintained by the Earls of Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria, barely united under King Harold Godwineson. It falls to brave and determined young men like Will Riveracre and Selwyn Astenmede to stand firm against whichever marauding invader reaches them first.

Chicago, 1950. Rosalind Porter has always defied expectations - in her work as a physicist on the Manhattan Project and in her passionate love affair with colleague Thomas Weaver. Five years after the end of both, her guilt over the bomb and her heartbreak over Weaver are intertwined. She desperately misses her work in the lab, yet has almost resigned herself to a more conventional life.

This is the final novel of the Saga of the New Gods. This trilogy will be followed by two additional trilogies set in the same world, as well as several stand-alone books, though you may see a familiar face here and there, now and then.

Originally written in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), the wartime predecessor to the CIA, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is a fascinating and often startling guide to subtle disruption during World War II. Designed to be used by ordinary citizens behind enemy lines, this manual offered clever, low-risk ways to undermine operations—from misfiling paperwork to tampering with machinery and stalling meetings.

On 25 October 1415, a trapped and vastly outnumbered force of exhausted and demoralized English archers and men-at-arms faced a colossal army of French knights on a desolate field in northern France. What took place that day became one of the greatest moments of the Hundred Years War and English history. Based on chronicles of the times, Agincourt 1415: Field of Blood is a dramatic minute-by-minute retelling of the battle as seen through the eyes of the commanders and soldiers on both sides.

The ISIS strategy is unchanged: to expand their bloody caliphate by means of conquest and slaughter. Yet the tide has begun to turn against the brutal regime. The Russians have arrived in force, along with their legions of aircraft and armor. In spite of this, the Mullahs ignore mounting losses and continue to send jihadi fighters to probe the Syria-Iraq border. Their intentions are clear and unequivocal. Conquer and kill.

Today, roses are a sign of love and luxury, but for over 30 years, they provided the symbols for two houses at war for control of England. Thousands of people died and many more were injured fighting beneath the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster, and the noble families ruling England tore each other apart in a struggle that was as bitter as it was bloody.

Joe runs into a hidden punji trap, and the poisoned stakes deal him a hammer blow. A dustoff back to Da Nang and a long stay in the hospital puts him out of action, and the only consolation is the pretty nurse who attends to his wounds. When he is released, his platoon is in the field, and they give him a temporary posting to another platoon about to fly out to the Laotian border to check out a rumored convoy of vital supplies, weapons, and ammo for the VC.

Albert Kesselring holds a strange place in the history of World War II. A commander in the Luftwaffe, he is remembered as much for the skill with which he oversaw the German armies as for his mastery of the air fleets. Called "Uncle Albert" by many of his men and "Smiling Albert" by the Allies, he was widely respected by men on both sides of the war and loved by many of his troops, yet he was responsible for massacres in occupied Italy for which he was condemned to death during the post-war trials.

During the Civil War, one of the tales that was often told among Confederate soldiers was that Joseph E. Johnston was a crack shot who was a better bird hunter than just about everyone else in the South. However, as the story went, Johnston would never take the shot when asked to, complaining that something was wrong with the situation that prevented him from being able to shoot the bird when it was time.