"What if an empire of Jewish warriors that really existed in the Middle Ages had never fallen--and was the only thing standing between Hitler and his conquest of Russia? Eastern Europe, August 1942. The Khazar kaganate, an isolated nation of Turkic warrior Jews, lies between the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the Khazar Sea (the Caspian). It also happens to lie between a belligerent nation to the west that the Khazars call Germania--and a city the rest of the world calls Stalingrad. After years of Jewish refugees streaming across the border from Europa, fleeing the war, Germania launches its siege of Khazaria. Only Esther, the daughter of the nation's chief policy adviser, sees the ominous implications of Germania's disregard for Jewish lives. Only she realizes that this isn't just another war but an existential threat. After witnessing the enemy warplanes' first foray into sovereign Khazar territory, Esther knows she must fight for her country. But as the elder daughter in a traditional home, her urgent question is how. Before daybreak one fateful morning, she embarks on a perilous journey across the open steppe. She seeks a fabled village of Kabbalists who may hold the key to her destiny: their rumored ability to change her into a man so that she may convince her entire nation to join in the fight for its very existence against an enemy like none Khazaria has ever faced before. The Book of Esther is a profound saga of war, technology, mysticism, power, and faith. This novel--simultaneously a steampunk Joan of Arc and a genre-bending tale of a counterfactual Jewish state by a writer who invents worlds "out of Calvino or Borges" (The New Yorker)--is a stunning achievement. Reminiscent of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, The Book of Esther reaffirms Barton's place as one of her generation's most gifted storytellers"--

Since her girlhood, Prudence Winship has gazed across the tidal straits from her home in Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan and yearned to bridge the distance. Now, established as the owner of the enormously successful gin distillery she inherited from her father, she can begin to realize her dream. Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, this is the story of a determined and intelligent woman who is consumed by a vision of a bridge: a gargantuan construction of timber and masonry she devises to cross the East River in a single, magnificent span. With the help of the local surveyor, Benjamin Horsfield, and her sisters—the high-spirited, obstreperous Tem, who works with her in the distillery, and the silent, uncanny Pearl—she fires the imaginations of the people of Brooklyn and New York by promising them a bridge that will meet their most pressing practical needs while being one of the most ambitious public works ever attempted. Prue’s own life and the life of the bridge become inextricably bound together as the costs of the bridge, both financial and human, rise beyond her direst expectations. Brookland confirms Emily Barton’s reputation as one of the finest writers of her generation, whose work is ”blessedly post-ironic, engaging and heartfelt” (Thomas Pynchon).