It's Dublin, June 1995, the hottest summer since records began. But Billy Sweeney, a middle-aged salesman with a failed marriage, a faltering career and a tumbledown house, has more than weather on his mind. His youngest daughter lies in a coma in hospital following a mysterious attack on the petrol station where she worked. Devastated by the unfolding consequences of that hot, violent night, frustrated by officialdom and failed by the system, Billy finally tires of seeking legal justice. He decides to take the law into his own hands. . . Views: 1 158
In Bloody Crimes, James L. Swanson—the Edgar® Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt—brings to life two epic events of the Civil War era: the thrilling chase to apprehend Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the wake of the Lincoln assassination and the momentous 20 -day funeral that took Abraham Lincoln’s body home to Springfield. A true tale full of fascinating twists and turns, and lavishly illustrated with dozens of rare historical images—some never before seen—Bloody Crimes is a fascinating companion to Swanson’s Manhunt and a riveting true-crime thriller that will electrify civil war buffs, general readers, and everyone in between. Views: 1 121
The American Civil War is ending. Eighteen years after the famine ship Star of the Sea docked at New York, the daughter of two of her passengers sets out from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on a walk across a devastated America. Eliza Duane Mooney is searching for a young boy she has not seen in four years, one of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war. His fate has been mysterious and will prove extraordinary.
It's a walk that will have consequences for many seemingly unconnected survivors: a love-struck cartographer, a haunted Latina poetess, rebel guerrilla Cole McLaurenson, runaway slave Elizabeth Longstreet and the mercurial revolutionary James Con O'Keeffe, who commanded a brigade of Irish immigrants in the Union Army and is now Governor of a western wilderness where nothing is as it seems.
Redemption Falls is a tale of war and forgiveness, of strangers in a strange land, of love put to the ultimate test. Packed with music, balladry, poetry and storytelling, this is a riveting historical novel of urgent contemporary resonance, from the author of the internationally bestselling Star of the Sea. Views: 1 113
Edited by Joseph O'Connor (author of Star of the Sea and Ghost Light) New Irish Short Stories is a stunning collection from a fascinating variety of writers, both new and established. Featuring, among many others, William Trevor and Roddy Doyle, Rebecca Miller and Richard Ford, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Colm Toibin, it shows the short story to be a vibrant, thriving form and one that should continue to be celebrated and encouraged.
This collection follows the two acclaimed editions David Marcus edited for Faber in 2004-5 and 2006-7. Views: 1 048
This first volume of Shelby Foote’s classic narrative of the Civil War opens with Jefferson Davis’s farewell to the United States Senate and ends on the bloody battlefields of Antietam and Perryville, as the full, horrible scope of America’s great war becomes clear. Exhaustively researched and masterfully written, Foote’s epic account of the Civil War unfolds like a novel.
“A stunning book full of color, life, character and a new atmosphere of the Civil War, and at the same time a narrative of unflagging power. Eloquent proof that an historian should be a writer above all else.” —Burke Davis
“Anyone who wants to relive the Civil War . . . will go through this volume with pleasure. . . . Years from now, Foote’s monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review
“To read this great narrative is to love the nation. . . . Whitman, who ultimately knew and loved the bravery and frailty of the soldiers, observed that the real Civil War would never be written and perhaps should not be. For me, Shelby Foote has written it. . . . This work was done to last forever.” —James M. Cox, Southern Review
Views: 1 038
The classic account of the Allied invasion of Normandy.
The Longest Day is Cornelius Ryan's unsurpassed account of D-Day, a book that endures as a masterpiece of military history. In this compelling tale of courage and heroism, glory and tragedy, Ryan painstakingly recreates the fateful hours that preceded and followed the massive invasion of Normandy to retell the story of an epic battle that would turn the tide against world fascism and free Europe from the grip of Nazi Germany.
This book, first published in 1959, is a must for anyone who loves history, as well as for anyone who wants to better understand how free nations prevailed at a time when darkness enshrouded the earth. Views: 1 009
As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims’ point of view, sympathizing with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Nobel Laureate Imre Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality.
Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying on young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class.
Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A slim, explosive novel of justice railroaded by malevolence, Detective Story is a warning cry for our time. Views: 961
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. Views: 926
Shelby Foote's monumental historical trilogy, "The Civil War: A Narrative," is our window into the day-by-day unfolding of our nation's defining event. Now Foote reveals the deeper human truth behind the battles and speeches through the fiction he has chosen for this vivid, moving collection.
These ten stories of the Civil War give us the experience of joining a coachload of whores left on a siding during a battle in Virginia . . .marching into an old man's house to tell him it's about to be burned down . . .or seeing a childhood friend shot down at Chickamauga.
The result is history that lives again in our imagination, as the creative vision of these great writers touches our emotions and makes us witness to the human tragedy of this war, fought so bravely by those in blue and gray.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 908
This Civil War history traces two movements; one a desperate manhunt and the other, a stately, cross-country funereal process. In early April 1865, Confederate president Jefferson Davis received the telegram that he had been dreading: Robert E. Lee's armies could no longer hold back the Union attack. Left with no options, Davis packed quickly and fled Richmond on a midnight train. Now a wanted man, he began a desperate race south, attempting to outrun his pursuers. Just two weeks after that telegram, a cabal of Southern conspirators struck in Washington, killing President Abraham Lincoln. In an instant, Davis was sought not only as a traitor, but also as presumed presidential assassin. As Lincoln's funereal cortege moved slowly west to his final resting place, Northern cavalry tracked down the man they believed to be the plotter of their president's death. An unforgettable story, well-told by a respected historian. Views: 904
A decade in the writing, this is the final volume of what many critics have called “America’s Iliad.” Here Foote brings to life the military endgame, the surrender at Appomattox, and the tragic dénouement of the war—the assassination of President Lincoln.
“To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again.” —Newsweek
“In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail, in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything else on the subject. . . . Written in the tradition of the great historian-artists—Gibbon, Prescott, Napier, Freeman—it stands alongside the work of the best of them.” —The New Republic
“The most written-about war in history has, with this completion of Shelby Foote’s trilogy, been given the epic treatment it deserves.” —Providence Journal
Views: 890
Before Shelby Foote under took his epic history of the Civil War, he wrote this fictional chronicle -- "a landscape in narrative" -- of Jordan County, Mississippi, a place where the traumas of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are as tangible as rock formations. The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ineffectual fin-de-siecle aristocrat, and a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. In prose of almost Biblical gravity; and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives -- and sometimes warps them beyond repair -- Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of fiction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor but that is resolutely unique. Views: 792
Larvik is a sorcerer's apprentice with a problem: his former master has cursed him with a rotting disease and set him begging in the squalid streets of the capital. But a chance encounter with the queen's favorite spy has presented the beggar with a choice. Will he grasp redemption? Or will he settle for revenge?Larvik is a sorcerer's apprentice with a problem: his former master has cursed him with a rotting disease and set him begging in the squalid streets of the capital. But a chance encounter with the queen's favorite spy has presented the beggar with a choice. Will he grasp redemption? Or will he settle for revenge?"Beggar's Choice" is a short story set in the world of the Little Kingdoms. It is said that here women pay for magic with their bodies, but men pay for it with their souls. And while every power has a cost, there are always those who will pay, no matter the price. Views: 783
Martin is an ace zombie killer but his brother Walter is his complete opposite. They couldn't be any more different in their views on dealing with the dead but they do have two things in common: the struggle to survive, and a personal vendetta on a group of muggers.This zombie short is a spin-off stemming from the full length tale Guns, Booze & Zombies.Buddha is a genetically engineered super soldier in the midst of the apocalypse. Outfitted with natures most deadly and sophisticated weapons, he finds himself helping a young girl cope with the strange new world. Views: 771
It's Sam's thirteenth birthday and without any warning, his life,and what he believes life is, is going to change.It's a distant time in the future and life is being preserved in a Utopian-like environment designed to imitate what life was like.But through this Adorned reality, things are not what they seem.Sam upon reaching his thirteenth year, is released from his isolated chamber and granted access to this perfected reality.Embark with Sam and see how his life inside this Adorned reality is like, see through his eyes, see him grow, and throughout all these experiences, see his perspective mold itself to the man he will become. Views: 724
