"August, 1943. Fourteen-year-old Massimo is all alone. Newly orphaned and fleeing from Rome after surviving the American bombing raid that killed his parents, Massimo is attacked by thugs and finds himself bloodied at the base of the Montecassino. It is there in the Benedictine abbey's shadow that a charismatic and cryptic man calling himself Pietro Houdini, the self-proclaimed 'Master Artist and confidante of the Vatican,' rescues Massimo and brings...

"On a sunny day in July 1815, thirty-eight-year-old Philippa, Lady McKinsey, takes her sixteen-year-old daughter, Emma, and her young niece and nephew, fifteen-year-old Arabella and thirteen-year-old Percy, on an outing to Richmond Park. But when Arabella and Percy go off to pick flowers, tragedy strikes. Shots echo across the park. Two young gentlemen investigate and find Lady McKinsey and her daughter dead. As the men gaze in horror at the strangely...

"Los Angeles, 1965. Tempers have boiled over in the Watts neighborhood, sparked by the traffic stop of two Black motorists, the Frye brothers, by the Highway Patrol. Freelance crime photographer Harry Ingram is on the scene, capturing images of the cops as they unleash batons, dogs, and water hoses on the predominantly Black crowd. When he snaps proof of an unarmed man being shot down by the LAPD, he winds up in the hospital, beaten, his camera confiscated....

"A large-hearted reimagining of beloved all-American legends, this epic debut novel brings men of myth Paul Bunyan and John Henry alive like never before, teaming up for an adventure quest with deeper interrogations of race, class, and industrialization. When we first meet Paul Bunyan-legendary larger-than-life lumberjack and classic figure from American mythology-he is still just a man, and one down on his luck. With a load of family debts on his...

"The absolute best book of the year." Denise McDonald

Her friends included Van Gogh, Degas, and Renoir. Paris celebrated her as a sought-after model, until she picked up the brush herself, at a time when art schools refused to accept female students.

By the time Suzanne Valadon was 15 years old, she'd been a horse walker, a milliner, a funeral wreath maker, and a circus acrobat, but

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"In 1857 a young midwife braves the perilous journey west from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory in this captivating epic from Sara Donati, the international bestselling author of Where the Light Enters. Carrie Ballentyne's life was upended in 1845 when she had to leave the only home she'd ever known in the mountains of upstate New York. With her are her widowed mother and younger brother Nathan, but the separation from Bonner, Ballentyne,...

"The paths of three young Black women in pre-Civil War Philadelphia unexpectedly--and dangerously--collide in this dramatic debut novel inspired by the explosive history of a city at war with itself. Philadelphia, 1837. When nineteen-year-old Charlotte escaped from the deteriorating White Oaks plantation four years ago, she'd expected freedom to look completely different from her former life as an enslaved housemaid. Instead, she's locked away playing...

"Texas good old boys Doolin and Tubbs take on a pair of copy-cat outlaws--and prove they're not getting older, they're getting deadlier--in their latest, greatest adventure form the bestselling Johnstones... Some say the Wild West is no country for old men. But apparently no one told Eli Doolin and Casey Tubbs. This rowdy pair of cowboys may be a bit long in the tooth but--thanks to the success of their new business venture, the D&T Cattle Company--they're...

A compelling, insightful look at the early years of Francis of Assisi, who abandoned a life of wealth and comfort to seek a spiritual union with the world.