Barbara W. Tuchman—the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning classic The Guns of August—once again marshals her gift for character, history, and sparkling prose to compose an astonishing portrait of medieval Europe.   The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how *it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books  * “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal  * “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.” —Commentary* NOTE: This edition does not include color images.

Noah Gordon’s acclaimed trilogy, spanning one thousand years in the lives of one uncommonly gifted family In The Physician, an orphan in eleventh-century London, Robert Cole, becomes a fast-talking swindler. As he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but by claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. Cole’s journey and love for a woman who must struggle against her only rival—medicine—make The Physician a riveting modern classic. In Shaman, Dr. Robert Judson Cole, nineteenth-century descendent of the first Robert Cole, travels from his ravaged Scottish homeland, through the operating rooms of antebellum Boston, to the cabins of frontier Illinois. In the wilderness he befriends the starving remnants of the Sauk tribe, who have fled their reservation. In the process, he absorbs their culture and learns native remedies that enrich his classical medical education. He marries a remarkable settler woman he had saved from illness. The Cole family is drawn into the bloody vortex of the Civil War, and their determination to survive in the midst of wilderness and violence will stay with the reader long after the final page. In Matters of Choice, Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole is the latest first-born descendant of Dr. Robert Cole. Favored to be named associate chief of medicine at a Boston hospital, she is married to a surgeon and owns a trophy residence in Cambridge as well as a summer house. But everything melts away. Her gender and her work at an abortion clinic cost her the hospital appointment. Her marriage fails. Crushed, she goes to her farmhouse in western Massachusetts, thinking to sell it, and finds an unexpected life. How she continues to fight for every woman’s right to choose, while acknowledging her own ticking clock and maternal yearning, makes this prize-winning third story of the Cole trilogy relevant and unforgettable.

Nada is no stranger to protest. She is five years old when her French mother takes her to visit her Egyptian father, a political activist with a passing resemblance to President Nasser, in prison. When he returns home five years later, a changed man, their little family begins to fracture and eventually Nada’s mother moves back to Paris. Through her teenage years Nada is surrounded by the language of protest – ‘anarchism’, ‘Trotskyism’, ‘communism’ – and, one summer in Paris, she discovers the ’68 movement and her first love. And how to slam doors in anger. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Through student sit-ins, imprisonments, passionate arguments, accidental alliances, fallen friends, joys and regrets, Nada’s story grows into the story of Egypt’s many celebrated activists such as Arwa and Siham. Moving, uplifting and deeply human, Radwa Ashour’s masterpiece is the story of Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century and a paean to all those who choose a life of activism and quiet defiance.

Wilfred Davis, quiet, retired, respectable widower, is sitting and sobbing on a park bench. He has lost his daughter and any sense of purpose. A mysterious stranger passes him a handkerchief, and strikes up a conversation that leads to friendship and an unconventional new home for Wilfred. Mary Davis wants only four things out of life: a husband and three children, so at seventeen she runs away from school, her father and her home and moves to London to find them. Only a few months later Mary is engaged, but love and marriage promise to be very different from her childhood daydreams. For Mary and Wilfred, it seems Fate has taken a hand, or is there another kind of guiding spirit at play? Stella Gibbons' final novel, written in the 1970s but only discovered many years after her death, is published here for the first time.

In Alan Lightman's new book, a verse narrative, we meet a man who has lost his faith in all things following a mysterious personal tragedy. After decades of living "hung like a dried fly," emptied and haunted by his past, the narrator awakens one morning revitalized and begins a Dante-like journey to find something to believe in, first turning to the world of science and then to the world of philosophy, religion, and human life. As his personal story is slowly revealed, little by little, we confront the great questions of the cosmos and of the human heart, some questions with answers and others without.

ham (noun) [hæm] 1 the hind leg of a hog, salted, smoked, and cured 2 second son of Noah 3 somebody who performs in an exaggerated showy style -always hamming it up Just when you thought you knew everything about ham, you discover that ham is also: 4 a reason to laugh about everyday life, and 5 an irresistible collection of humorous essays from a man who was born to entertain us. In sixteen brilliantly observed true stories, Sam Harris emerges as a natural humorist in league with David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Carrie Fisher, and Steve Martin, but with a voice uniquely his own. Praised by the Chicago Sun-Times for his "manic, witty commentary," and with a storytelling talent the New York Times calls "New Yorker– worthy," he puts a comedic spin on full-disclosure episodes from his own colorful life. What better place to find painfully funny material than in growing up gay, gifted, and ambitious in...

Mark Fallon is an overworked detective investigating a spate of attacks at a string of high profile city centre nightclubs. Scott is a dejected 24 year old struggling to make ends meet working for his brother and supplementing his income with a small-scale drug dealing operation. Angela is an attractive 23 year old, raised by her father, a career criminal and small time drug dealer who supplies Scott with cannabis. This is a chilling tale spanning a few months in the lives of Scott and Angela, where realizations about the present combine with shocking revelations from the past leading to an apocalyptic climax where they no longer know whom they can trust.

The mother-daughter book club is back! This year the mothers have a big surprise in store for Emma, Jess, Cassidy, and Megan: They've invited snooty Becca Chadwick and her mother to join the book club! But there are bigger problems when Jess finds out that her family may have to give up Half Moon Farm. In a year filled with skating parties, a disastrous mother-daughter camping trip, and a high-stakes fashion show, the girls realize that it's only through working together -- Becca included -- that they can save Half Moon Farm. Acclaimed author Heather Vogel Frederick captures the magic of friendship and the scrapes along the way in this sequel to The Mother-Daughter Book Club, which will enchant daughters and mothers alike.

*Two strangers in Paris ... One passionate, earth-shattering kiss. * He was the artist upstairs with the tantalizing smile and laughing eyes. He was the devil inviting me to sin, seducing me to dance in the bright moonlight. He was desire and need. When he touched me, my body sang. My soul came alive. But I belonged to another man, and he didn't want to let me go.

Everyone in Kenton Hills knows that short-tempered, tongue-tied Bob Talbert wasn't the one responsible for the brutal crime that ended Josie Eddleman's life. Nevermind that he was the last one to see her alive. But in a town filled with the likes of an amoral tabloid reporter known only as The Captain, a district attorney who'll do anything for a confession, and Bob's parents, who care as little for Bob as they do for each other, guilt and innocence are little more than a matter of perspective. In a masterfully woven tapestry of multiple points of view, THE CRIMINAL explores the nature of guilt and responsibility in a psychological thriller of an entire town under the spell of an act of brutal violence. Jim Thompson unlike you're ever read him before.

A movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure Marlowe into the less than glamorous and more than a little dangerous world of Hollywood fame. Chandler's first foray into the industry that dominates the company town that is Los Angeles. "From the Trade Paperback edition."

Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.

With Summer Secrets Jane Green has reached an even deeper level of emotion that will stay with you long after you turn the last page... Living in London in her twenties, Cat had it all--a great job and wonderful friends. But with the good came the bad--a party every night, wreaking havoc, and blackouts. When she discovers the father she never knew she had, living in Nantucket, it sends her into a spiral, costing her the new family she had desperately craved. The drinking had always been a constant evil in Cat's life. Now in her late thirties, sober, divorced from the love of her life, and trying to make up for lost time with her teenage daughter, she's ready to make amends to those she has hurt. But facing the past and the unthinkable act she committed one summer night could change the course of her life forever.

In the heat of late afternoon, a young boy waits at the station for his father. A plume of steam, white against the purple-heathered hills, marks the train. Beyond, blooming along the shoreline, the flowers of high summer, as a tall-funnelled paddle steamer beats and froths down the wide Clyde estuary . . . A narrative in the great Cronin tradition, this is the stirring chronicle of Laurence Carroll as he grows from childhood to adult years in Scotland. The tale of his struggles - early illness, a widowed mother, poverty, the uncles who try to help him, and the women who have such an unhappy effect upon him, is told with warm humour and with that intense and sympathetic realism for which A J Cronin is known. In the magnificent narrative tradition of The Citadel, The Stars Look Down and Cronin's other classic novels, A Song of Sixpence is a great book by a much-loved author.

The Battle of Guadalcanal has long been heralded as a Marine victory. Now, with his powerful portrait of the Navy’s sacrifice, James D. Hornfischer tells for the first time the full story of the men who fought in destroyers, cruisers, and battleships in the narrow, deadly waters of “Ironbottom Sound.” Here, in stunning cinematic detail, are the seven major naval actions that began in August 1942, a time when the war seemed unwinnable and America fought on a shoestring, with the outcome always in doubt. Working from new interviews with survivors, unpublished eyewitness accounts, and newly available documents, Hornfischer paints a vivid picture of the officers and enlisted men who opposed the Japanese in America’s hour of need. The first major work on this subject in almost two decades, Neptune’s Inferno does what all great battle narratives do: It tells the gripping human stories behind the momentous events and critical decisions that altered the course of history and shaped so many lives.