List

A stunning novel of post-war Paris that interweaves a coming-of-age story, a cross-cultural romance, and a portrait of the international youth at a definitive moment in contemporary history. Paris, 1947. The city, recovering from the Nazi occupation, suffers from an economy in shambles and an unraveled social fabric. Alongside the wary and war-weary population, American GIs and young people from France's colonies also pack the city. Cecile Rosenbaum, from a bourgeois Jewish family that has lost everything, meets Minette Traoré, a feisty, French-born girl of Senegalese descent, on the bus to a Communist Youth Conference. There, she also meets Sebastien Danxomè, an aspiring architecture student from West Africa, and romance blooms. Back in Paris, as these young internationals haunt the cafés and jazz clubs of the Latin Quarter, Cecile and Sebastien find their budding love muddied by confused loyalties and unyielding cultural traditions. When Mack Gray, a charming African American GI, sets his sights on Cecile, her complicated relationship with Sebastien, as well as her fierce dedication to her newfound political ideologies, are pushed to the brink. Nuanced, powerful, and sharply realized, The New Internationals chronicles the postwar awakening and the young women and men who rose up-and came together-in the beginnings of a vibrant political moment, trying to imagine a better world.

A glamorous queen, a volatile king, a gifted musician concealing a forbidden romance. Everyone knows Anne Boleyn's story. No one knows Mark Smeaton's. On May 17, 1536, a young court musician was executed, accused of adultery and treason with the queen. Most historians believe both he and Anne Boleyn were innocent -- victims of Henry VIII's rage. Mark Smeaton was a talented performer who rose from poverty to become a royal favorite. He played for the king in private and entertained at sumptuous feasts. He witnessed Anne Boleyn's astonishing rise and fall -- her reign of a thousand days. History tells us little about him, other than noting his confession and execution. The Queen's Musician imagines his story, as seen from his perspective and that of the young woman who loves him. It all takes place amid the spectacle and danger of the Tudor court.

The St. Louis World's Fair, 1904: A miniature city of palaces and pavilions that becomes a backdrop for romance, betrayal--and murder. Cousins Grace and Lillie have been best friends since birth, despite Grace's vastly inferior social status ever since her mother married for love instead of wealth. When Lillie invites Grace to the biggest event of the century--the legendary World's Fair, also known as 'The Ivory City'--Grace hopes her fortunes might be about to change. But when a member of their party is brutally killed at the fair,and suspicion falls on Lillie's brother Oliver, Grace must prove Oliver's innocence before her beloved cousins' family is ruined forever. Along the way, she'll discover that the city's wealthy elite--including Oliver's handsome but irritable friend Theodore--aren't quite who they appear to be. And amidst the glitz, glamor, and magic of the Ivory City lurks a danger that just may claim her life.

Benjamin Fletcher was good at surviving. He'd survived cancer at forty-seven, a motor bike accident at fifty-nine, a heart attack at sixty-one. Now, at sixty-seven, it seemed like the only demand life threw at him was to survive the consequences of the past. When Benjamin lands in 1960s Nigeria, hoping to explore his roots after the death of his half-Nigerian father, he falls in love with Margaret. As the two learn more about their respective histories, they realize their lineage is interwoven in the deepest of ways-their ancestors had met decades earlier, with tragic results. Unfolding over three distinct timelines spanning a century, This Kind of Trouble reveals the unsettling events that took place in a small Nigerian village in 1905 - the same events that will eventually tear Margaret and Benjamin apart 60 years later. When we meet them again in 2005, they have been estranged for decades, content to leave the heartbreaks of the past behind them. But when their grandson begins to show signs of what Margaret believes is the mental instability that has troubled her family for generations as a kind of curse, she decides the family must come together and confront the generational traumas that have shaped her and Benjamin both, and to reckon with transgressions both intimate and ancestral. Beautifully written, transporting, narratively ambitious, and featuring an unusual forbidden love story, This Kind of Trouble asks us to consider the ways we are all beholden to the past, and what we owe the future. With this debut novel, Tochi Eze announces herself as a major new literary voice in world literature."

Against the vividly drawn backdrop of Victorian London, amateur sleuth Charles Lenox must unlock a mystery concealed in the architecture of the city itself, in this new novel from acclaimed author Charles Finch. It's 1879, and Lenox is convalescing from the violent events of his last investigation. But a desperate letter from an old servant forces him to pick up the trail of a cold case: the murder of an apothecary seven years before, whose only clue is an odd emblem carved into the doorway of the building where the man was killed. When Lenox finds a similar mark at the site of another murder, he begins to piece together a hidden pattern which leads him into the corridors of Parliament, the slums of East London, and ultimately the very heart of the British upper class. At the same time, Lenox must contend with the complexities of his personal life: a surprising tension with his steadfast wife, Lady Jane, over her public support of the early movement for women's suffrage; the arrival of Angela Lenox, a mysterious young cousin from India, with an unexpected companion; the dizzying ascent of his brother, Sir Edmund Lenox, to one of the highest political posts in the land; the growing family of his young partners in detection, Polly and Dallington; and the return of the problems that have long bedeviled one of his closest friends, the dashing Scottish physician Thomas McConnell. Featuring a beloved cast of characters, a top-notch puzzle, and Finch's trademark humor and richness of historical detail, The Hidden City is a novel by a master at the top of his form.

December 1962: In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the village while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them. On the farm nearby lives Irene's mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer's wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget. When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet to be abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way--ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory--so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.