Historical Sagas

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams.

In April of 1846, 21-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of pioneers led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and 14 others set out for California on snowshoes and over the next 32 days endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory.

Lieutenant Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff has become keenly aware of this after deploying to the freezing eastern front. The bone-chilling weather makes every move a struggle, grinding even the Empire's proud army to a halt. And yet, winter is the time for the flowers of intrigue to blossom. When a supposed ally begins acting suspiciously and enemies begin to collude, a profusion of conflicting interests and various secret deals will summon a maelstrom of confusion no one can control.

883AD, Scandinavia. Harald Fairhair is King of Norway, and Bjorn Ironside King of Sweden. To the west, the Crippled King of Mann builds an army in thrall to Loki. He threatens to destroy the Viking world and set Midgard on the road to the Ragnarök, the end of days.

The Great Calamity has returned, destroying all in his wake. Reeling from the destruction of King's Point and the death of his uncle, Elyon Daecar makes at once for Varinar to discern the state of the city. What he finds gives him small cause for hope. Through the spreading darkness, thin shards of light remain. They must act quickly lest they close forever. Saska's time in Aram has run out. With the city safe from the coalition of Lords Krator and Kastor, she sets her sights on her journey north, bidding her dying grandmother farewell. She has no choice now but to embrace her fate.

Trudy, a college history professor, is collecting oral histories from World War II survivors (both German and Jewish). Her mother, Anna, refuses to talk to her, but Anna's story is revealed in flashback. She conducted an affair with a Jewish baker who was summarily killed. Afterward, Anna caught the eye of a high-ranking Nazi officer.

In The Way the Crow Flies, Ann-Marie MacDonald takes us back to the early 1960’s, a time of optimism infused with the excitement of the space race and overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War—a world filtered through the imagination of Madeleine McCarthy, a spirited nine-year-old. Unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in his own web of secrets, she at first welcomes her family’s posting to a sleepy air force base in southern Ontario.

After discovering six gold Roman coins buried in the mud of the Devil's Dyke, Barnabas Sackett enthusiastically invests in goods that he will offer for trade in America. But Sackett has a powerful enemy: Rupert Genester, nephew of an earl, wants him dead. A battlefield promise made to Sackett’s father threatens Genester’s inheritance. So on the eve of his departure for America, Sackett is attacked and thrown into the hold of a pirate ship.

Gondolin, beautiful but undiscoverable, is central to the enmity of two of the greatest powers in the world. Morgoth of the uttermost evil seeks in vain to discover the marvellously hidden city of his Elven enemies, while the gods in Valinor refuse to support Ulmo Lord of Waters' designs to protect it. Into this world comes Tuor, cousin of Túrin, and guided unseen by Ulmo he sets out on the fearful journey to Gondolin to warn them of their coming doom.

Every so often a love story so captures our hearts that it becomes more than a story - it becomes an experience to remember forever. The Notebook is such a book. It is a celebration of how passion can be ageless and timeless, a tale that moves us to laughter and tears and makes us believe in true love all over again.... At 31, Noah Calhoun, back in coastal North Carolina after World War II, is haunted by images of the girl he lost more than a decade earlier.

En l'an 997, à la fin du haut Moyen Âge, les Anglais font face à des attaques de Vikings qui menacent d'envahir le pays. En l'absence d'un État de droit, c'est le règne du chaos. Dans cette période tumultueuse, s'entrecroisent les destins de trois personnages. Le jeune Edgar, constructeur de bateaux, voit sa vie basculer quand sa maison est détruite au cours d'un raid viking. Ragna, jeune noble normande insoumise, épouse par amour l'Anglais Wilwulf, mais les coutumes de son pays d'adoption sont scandaleusement différentes des siennes.

Contrary to her dearest wish to find a safe place and stay there, Major Tanya von Degurechaff continues to wade through the fog of war with her troops on land, at sea, and in the air. After many battles with the increasingly numerous enemies of the Empire, a chance for a breakthrough finally appears. But when her comrades begin celebrating the glories they've reaped, savoring the sweet nectar of imminent triumph, Tanya alone is frozen in fear. Has the Empire decisively won the war, or is this nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory?

As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.

Kidnapped from the Earth People as a child, White Ash learns the way of the Sun People as she grows into a beautiful woman. But the disturbing dreams that made her an outcast in her old tribe are becoming stronger and they foretell a frightening future of bitter cold, war and famine. When a hostile tribe massacres her adopted family, White Ash is raped and left near death, but is miraculously saved by a brave shaman...and falls in love with him. Together they set out on a dangerous journey to steal a magical object - but they soon face a ruthless enemy who wants White Ash for his own.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler is five years old when his father disappears during Kristallnacht—the night his family loses everything. As her child’s safety becomes ever harder to guarantee, Samuel’s mother secures a spot for him on a Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to England. He boards alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

The high points in the story of Alaska since the American acquisition are brought vividly to life through more than 100 characters, real and fictional.

Sandra Dallas, best-selling author of The Persian Pickle Club, weaves an intricate and sophisticated tale in New Mercies. Nora Bondurant is divorced— unfathomable for a woman in 1933—and has inherited a house from a dead aunt she never even knew existed. But when she travels to Mississippi to claim her inheritance, she finds her eccentric neighbors would rather help her acquire a new husband than reveal the secrets surrounding her aunt’s death.

In Dead Man's Walk, Gus and Call are not yet 20, young men coming of age in the days when Texas was still an independent republic. Enlisting as Texas Rangers under a land pirate who wants to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans, Gus and Call experience their first great adventure in the barren great plains landscape, in which arbitrary violence is the rule -- whether from nature, or from the Indians whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico.<

The Great Extermination has begun. In the Capitol, Grand Inquisitor Omand Vokkan hatches a plot to kill every member of the untouchable caste in all of Lok, down to the last man, woman, and child. As a member of the Order of Inquisition, Vokkan has no official say in the creation of Law, but he has powerful allies willing to do his bidding. Through them, he has convinced the Judges that the genocide will be swift, complete, and without complication. Nothing is farther from the truth.