World Fiction

Recruited as a codebreaker of enemy ciphers, ex-debutante Osla Kendall spends her days translating Axis military messages and her nights reading mystery novels. When Osla gets her hands on Agatha Christie's most recent work, N or M?, a mysterious signal within its pages catches her eye, and she and her eccentric book club get in touch with the famous but reclusive writer. Osla's outreach is a welcome distraction for Agatha, who feels restless and underestimated toiling away in a London pharmacy.

Best known for his glorious comic novels, Charles Portis was also a prolific essayist, travel writer, and newspaper reporter. Now, for the first time, these writings—journalism, short fiction, memoir, travel stories, and even a play—have been brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. The collection encompasses the breadth of Portis’s fifty-year writing career, covering topics as varied as road tripping in Baja, Elvis’s visits to his aging mother, and his own boyhood in Arkansas.

When a human skeleton is discovered on sacred Navajo land, the publicity surrounding the find sets in motion a widespread investigation and a series of attempted murders. After a Washington group hires Leaphorn to investigate the "fallen man's" past, he joins Chee in unraveling a deadly intrigue that finally involves players from both the FBI and a suspicious corporation.

After a devastating attack by a downed Japanese aircraft, Art Turner and the men of Bull Shark try to forget and relax in the rustic Western Australian port of Fremantle. Yet war is never far away, and the battle cry once more draws the submarine into danger. Uncle Charlie Lockwood has a special side mission for Art Turner. A British commando needs to get to Timor and reunite with the Australian guerrilla fighters he’s trained… and who he was forced to leave behind when the Japanese invaded.

In the six volumes of the Library of the World’s Best Mystery and Detective Stories, Julian Hawthorne presents us thrilling and mysterious short stories from all corners of the world. Some of the stories appeared in this 1907 collection for the first time translated into English, and many of them come from unexpected sources, such as the letters of Pliny the Younger, or a Tibetan manuscript. In the first volume, we find stories written by American authors.

In 1979, Vincent Bianco has just graduated high school. His only desire: collect a little beer money and enjoy his final summer before college. So he lands a job as a laborer on a construction crew. Working alongside two Vietnam vets, one suffering from PTSD, Vincent gets the education of a lifetime. Now forty years later, with his own son leaving for college, the lessons of that summer - Vincent’s last taste of innocence and first taste of real life - dramatically unfold in a novel about breaking away, shaping a life, and seeking one’s own destiny.

On vacation from London on the beautiful Italian coast, 28-year-old Elena Standish and her older sister Margot have finally been able to forget some of the lasting trauma of the Great War. Touring with her camera in hand, Elena has found new inspiration in the striking Italian landscape, and she's met an equally striking man named Ian. Not ready to part from one another, she and Ian share a train trip home to England. But a shocking murder disrupts their agenda, forcing Elena to personally deliver a message to Berlin that could change the fate of Europe.

Journalist Zoie Crawford had to leave New Orleans to finally make her own life. Her grandmother, Claudia, inspired her to follow her dreams - just as her mother, Rose, held on too tight. But with Claudia's passing, Zoie reluctantly returns home, where the past is written in the lonely corners of the bayou and the New South's supercharged corridors of power. And there she discovers a stunning, painstakingly kept secret - one that could skyrocket her career but destroy another woman's...and change both their vastly different lives for better or for much worse.

1942: a German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him.... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance.

Dr. Briana Ortiz’s life is seriously flatlining. Her divorce is just about finalized, her brother’s running out of time to find a kidney donor, and that promotion she wants? Oh, that’s probably going to the new man-doctor who’s already registering eighty-friggin’-seven on Briana’s “pain in my ass” scale. But just when all systems are set to hate, Dr. Jacob Maddox completely flips the game . . . by sending Briana a letter. And it’s a really good letter. Like the kind that proves that Jacob isn’t actually Satan.

Japan’s landed some heavy blows… but it’s time for the next round and this time… America is hitting first! At pearl harbor, the men and pilots of Enterprise stepped into a nightmare. At the Marshals, Wake and Marcus, they let the Japanese know that the U.S. was not afraid to fight. At Midway, they deflected a massive attack and altered the course of the war… and now it’s time to truly get some payback. The navy and Marines are going to do what Japan failed to do at Midway – break down the door and get their foot in Japanese territory.

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation - certain to become the definitive version - of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

Fleet of Worlds takes a closer look at Human-Puppeteer (Citizen) relations and the events leading up to Niven's first Ringworld novel. Kirsten Quinn-Kovacks is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a world, and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten's people came from.

In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. When his captors discover that he speaks several languages, he is put to work as a Tätowierer (German for tattooist), tasked with permanently marking his fellow prisoners. Imprisoned for more than two and a half years, Lale witnesses horrific atrocities and barbarism - but also incredible acts of bravery and compassion. Risking his own life, he uses his position to exchange jewels and money from murdered Jews for food to keep his fellow prisoners alive.

Walker's richly interwoven novel opens with the arrival of a mysterious package for a young American woman working in a London auction house. Brought by a British officer, it contains a 17,000-year-old fragment of a cave painting left to him by his father, a former World War II hero. The fragment, significant and stunning in itself, is also the key to the existence of an unknown cave that may be more important in the history of art and human creation than the world-famous one at Lascaux.

Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.

A heart-racing WWII historical fiction novel of love, betrayal, and the courage to resist in the darkest of times. Paris, 1942. In a city ruled by fear, French American medical student Océane Bell wants only to save lives—not risk her own. While training at the Sorbonne and tending to wounded civilians at Hôtel-Dieu, she tries to stay focused on healing, far from politics and war. But everything changes the day she meets Jean-Jacques Riveau—a charismatic artist turned resistance fighter. When the Gestapo arrests him, Océane is thrust into a world of espionage and peril. Desperate to ...

When a new dungeon is born, it wants nothing more than to have the most vicious monsters, the most cunning traps and the most shiny of loot. There is only one problem...but it's a rather big one. It finished its first floor years ago, but it still hasn't been visited by any adventurers! In order to find someone—or something—to explore its floors, or perhaps just to find someone to talk to, this dungeon will have to go way off script. But it soon discovers that going off script brings problems of its own, and that adventurers are not the only thing this world is missing.

Iran in 1576 is a place of peace, wealth, and dazzling beauty. But when the Shah dies without having named an heir, the court is thrown into tumult. Princess Pari, the Shah's daughter and closest adviser, knows more about the inner workings of the state than almost anyone, but the princess's maneuvers to instill order after her father's sudden death incite resentment and dissent. Pari and her trusted servant, a eunuch able to navigate the harem as well as the world beyond the palace walls, are in possession of an incredible tapestry....

Written at the turn of the 19th century, before "science fiction" existed as a genre, H.G. Wells' creation was a new departure in literature. The author's deep devotion to social reform led him to use the idea of an extraterrestrial invasion to theorize about a possible violent upheaval in society - instead of "Martians" think "Bolsheviks."